I mean, following AWS or GCP pricing when you don’t have their reliability and durability is still insane.
At that price point you might as well use Vultr/DO which does not charge this pricing and instead only charges compute/LB/storage used.
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We’re growing like crazy. So fast, in fact, that giving so much away is actually threatening to our future.
The things you’re unhappy about cost us money, and what we’ve learned is that the developers (like several people in here) who are most likely to help us cross the chasm from “highly funded startup” to “long term, enduring business” are not necessarily the same folks looking for as cheap of infrastructure as they can possibly get.
Stopped instances cost us money, thus we are charging for them. We’re doing a lot of work to make Machine Creates really fast, however, so you’ll need stopped Machines less often.
We shipped FKS for larger customers who need Kubernetes. It’s not designed for people who want Kubernetes for cheap. There are plenty of places you can get cheap Kubernetes, but no other companies get you Kubernetes on Fly.
Free allowances only work when they select for people who have a good chance of converting to paying users down the road. What we found is that when people sign up with the expectation of “free”, they are unlikely to ever become paid customers (either individually or at their workplace). When people sign up and understand that the service costs money, then we waive invoices we think aren’t worth collecting, we create a much happier match.
I don’t know if that’s what you were hoping for from a state of Fly update. The state of Fly is that we have learned who our target customers are and we’re optimizing the product (including billing) to make them happy and make us an enduring business.
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Thanks for the update, that makes sense. As for me, my expectations for the State of Fly is for Fly to explain why the price increase was happening. I don’t think it was transparent in the original post. If you stated that you were growing like crazy and needed to ensure Fly’s financial sustainability, then it would have eased my/others’ concerns.
Glad to see that Fly is growing 
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Yeah that makes sense, I feel like this stuff is obvious, but I know not everyone understands it the same way. In general, we don’t want to raise prices. Sometimes we’re gonna have to, usually because we’re spending so much money we can’t afford to keep it up. But we really don’t want to.
Note that the new Reservation Blocks give everyone an option for CHEAPER instances in every region: Reservation Blocks: 40% discount on Machines when you're ready to commit
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It may feel obvious to you & everyone at Fly b/c they have that context; for peasants like me on the outside, it wasn’t obvious.
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Hey @shugel, we’ve just shipped this. Charges you see for CPU/RAM are now based on the list pricing (i.e. prices as of Nov 1st) and there are two lines at the bottom showing “discount” as of today (i.e. the total difference between charges as they’ll be on Nov 1st and charges as they are in the current month).
Example from one of my orgs (excuse the strange reservations):
Alt:
| … | … |
| Subtotal | $156.34 |
| Hobby Plan Included Usage: Jul 2024 - Aug 2024 | -$5.00 |
| Machines Reservation $1/month: Shared (den) Jul 2024 - Jul 2025 | -$1.00 |
| Machines Reservation $6/month: Shared (cdg) Jul 2024 - Jul 2025 | -$6.00 |
| Region-specific CPU Discount | -$9.81 |
| Region-specific RAM Discount | -$18.94 |
| Amount Due | $115.57 |
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This is really helpful, thank you! I’m also relieved that there’s only a 3.5 % increase coming down the turnpike for my region mix, which I’ll easily be able to offset with reservation blocks anyway.
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Thank you for your response. Good to know that Fly is growing so fast. Honestly, for some, there’s this virus called enshittification that has been spreading to a lot of smaller companies lately, and the pattern exhibited by Fly recently is worrying, to say the least. And the phrase optimizing the product is scary. I probably jumped the gun a bit too early at this point, but who knows.
A couple of comments for your message:
Definitely something I would wait for. Maybe couple it with auto destroy machines?
Well, of course… I have made my point about this one above so… yeah. But I am surprised that the larger customer wouldn’t just… go to Vultr/DO or something - even the finance guy at my company cannot fathom approving this price for a non-AWS/GCP/Azure Kubernetes offering.
And I don’t understand why you would restrict your own product’s target market like that. Wouldn’t it be better if FKS is finally a Kubernetes-for-all offering? Kubernetes training and such.
That’s a first I’ve heard about it, because -
Free plans are marketing, not that people on free plans will convert to paid plans en masse, but that people who will start out on paid plans hear about the product because of how many people are using the free plan. The blog posts, the twitter posts, the conversations over drinks.
But I know it’s a case-by-case basis so that’s fine.