We’re happy to announce that new organisations will be placed on our new Pay As You Go plan! On this plan you’ll pay only for what you use, with no minimum commitment. We heard from a number of you that our pricing is confusing, so we’re hoping to address that, at least in part, with this simpler plan.
If you have an existing organisation that you’d like to migrate to this plan, head to https://fly.io/plans/ORGANISATION_SLUG and click on “Choose Pay As You Go”.
If you can’t see the Pay As You Go plan on that page, it’s because your organisation hasn’t yet been migrated to our new billing system. Bear with us, we’re working to migrate everyone over as quickly as we can! If you can’t wait, you can create a new (PAYG) organisation and migrate your apps to it using flyctl apps move APP_NAME --org TARGET_ORG.
@Mrka We’re looking into how we might be able to offer configurable spending alerts, but limits (e.g. something like “we shut down your machines once limit is reached”) are not really on our radar, at least in the near term.
@jrobeson The PAYG plan itself is $0/month. You’ll pay for usage at the rates mentioned on our pricing page. I’ll flag for you that the only usage you don’t have strict control over is bandwidth. Other than bandwidth, you can entirely predict what your maximum monthly spend will be for the resources you’re using (I say “maximum” because e.g. stopped machines are cheaper than started machines).
One can make a mistake and get a high billing, for example, forgetting to shut down or auto stop an GPU machine. About the bandwidth, one can receive an attack, lost the control as there is reports of huge bills for Vercel customers and others.
In DigitalOcean or Vult for example you pay the credits with debit or credit card in advance and if the credit expires the services stops after some time. You can set an auto refill. Even in Azure you can set spending limits per subscription account.
I just wanted to say that I absolutely liked the simple email about it. Just text that’s easy to read and insightful too. No images or unnecessary noise/bs. Just text. Please keep this style of communication!
Hi. I’m in the Hobby Legacy Plan, and I have just one app that is always offline, I have it just in case. I received your email and I want to know if my organization is going to be migrated to the PAYG Plan automatically. Reading the pricing page it says that “PAYG has no free allowances”, does that means that if I get migrated I will be charged for this app? I’d like to know so I can delete it prior to that.
Is that not what “purchased credits” are? I was under the impression that if you purchase $25 of credits, and then those credits run out, that you stop all machines. Is that not how it works?
Hi @Darrem, we’re not forcibly moving anyone off their plan.
You might be referring to “…the $5 Hobby plan is no more” from the announcement email?
What we mean by this is that you won’t be able to move onto the $5 Hobby plan from another one anymore. If you were already on it, you’re still on it and we’re not migrating you in any way. In your case, you’re on an even older plan (Legacy Hobby), and you’re totally allowed to stay on that one too.
If you did decide to migrate, you would be charged for any usage, including anything that was previously within the free allowances offered on other plans. To be totally honest, if you’ve got a Legacy Hobby org, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to change plans unless you’re upgrading for email support.
We don’t stop machines when the balance is consumed, because credits aren’t “live consumed”. That is to say we don’t actually draw down from the credit balance as usage is accrued, we do it all in one go at the end of the billing period.
I somehow misunderstood the email as “all the hobby plans will be migrated to this new plan”. I’ll blame English not being my first language. Thank you so much, have a good day.
What happens if someone without access to a credit card purchases $25 in credits and accidentally leaves a bunch of expensive machines running forever?
Essentially, they’ll rack up a big bill. In cases like this, we suggest people email billing@fly.io, as we are open to discussing forgiving the invoice.
Perhaps more to your point - there’s no way we can guarantee a user will be able to pay their bill at the end of the month. Even in the situation you’re describing, someone with $25 of credits might end the month with a $30 bill, they just forgot to top up their credits to account for increased usage.
The fundamental idea behind requiring CC details or a purchase of credits is that fraudsters/abusers don’t like to have to do either of those things. Yes, there are non-abusive users who also don’t want to do those things. Unfortunately, we don’t have an efficacious alternative, and until we do, we basically just have to accept that we’re turning some genuine users away. Simply put, the abuse we get without these checks is an existential risk.
