Hey! I think there multiple separate things folks are confused by or have questions about.
Let me see if I can clear some things up and reiterate some of what went into the Simplified billing email.
We previously had a hobby plan with no monthly minimum and some free allowances. People loved it but we suffered pretty greatly from abuse management. This is the Legacy Plan
Verbatim from our email:
Back in January we started charging $5/mo minimum for new Fly.io organizations. We didn’t really want to do that, but got ourselves a little stuck behind some billing system limitations (sidenote, founder-engineered billing systems are AMAZING).
We did this to limit the impact of abuse. When you give people access to compute, you attract a lot of snollygosters who use fraudulent credit cards to do bad stuff ™️ on the internet. Crypto miners, botnets, phishing sites (although – several fake Amazon.coms we’ve seen had fewer spam listings than the real Amazon.com), and so much more.
Cloud abuse is bad for our bottom line. It’s also bad for the environment (yes, we just made the case that abusive signups contribute to global warming). It’s also bad for y’all because it degrades the quality of the platform. You’d be surprised how this comes up. It didn’t surprise us that abuse can create capacity and noisy neighbor issues. But IP address reputation is a big f’n deal too.
Charging a credit card prevents most at-scale abuse. Abusive users are surprisingly loathe to pay even $5, and it’s really difficult to keep fraudulent credit cards working over time. And when we run charges, we get really interesting Stripe data about the trustworthiness of a charge that we can use to restrict the platform.
Now, we’ve talked mostly about the obviously bad kind of abuse. The abuse that isn’t even clever, just boring.
But there was another factor to our $5/mo plan. We offered a bunch of free usage to each organization. Some of you people are smart and motivated. At least one of you created several hundred organizations to run thousands of tiny, free VMs for fun.
We can’t necessarily afford to let people do that, but it is kinda cute and we’re really not upset.
Fast forward 5 months and we’re in a better spot. We have better abuse tools, we have a shiny new billing system that will let us create policies like “your first organization gets some free shit, but that’s it”.
The first improvement we’re excited to announce is that the $5 Hobby plan is no more. We’re replacing it with a very simple Pay As You Go plan. On this plan there’s no more upfront $5 charge and no minimum monthly commitment. You only pay for what you use. If you don’t use anything for a given month you pay $0. You still need a credit card on file to prevent abuse. But your card is only charged if you use the service.
Oh, and that free usage thing? Keep this on the down low, but we’re continuing to waive invoices on personal organizations that are less than $5. You’ll get an email when we do this. Don’t tell, though, that’s a thing we do because (a) it saves us a huge amount of support work and (b) really, we’d rather you be happy on the platform than pay us $3.
Going forward, all new organizations will be on the Pay As You Go plan by default. If you have an organization that you’d like to migrate to this plan, head over to the organizations page in the dashboard, click on the one you want, then click on “Choose Pay As You Go”.
We are working through some sweeping changes to the billing system. One big thing is that we are now accurately reporting your usage.
If you’re surprised by a couple cents change and would like us to take a close look at what might be going on, feel free to reach out to billing@fly.io and we can look closer at whether something is going on.