So, egress from India is expensive across all infrastructure providers.
Is there a system problem that is the reason behind bandwidth being expensive by an order of magnitude?
We’re now charging $0.02 per GB for outbound data transfer from North America and Europe, and $0.04 per GB almost everywhere else.
When we launched Fly way back in March, we charged $0.085 per GB to send data out from North America and Europe, and $0.14 per GB for Asia Pacific. Our volume has increased dramatically and pushed our unit costs down, so we lowered our prices as of December 1st 2020. The net result is 75% cheaper bandwidth for apps running on Fly.io (Bandwidth is cheaper everywhere except India! Outbound traffic from India is $0.12 per GB. Very few apps on Fly.io send much traffic to India. This will hopefully change and bring the price down).
…set a blended price that fits most apps running on Fly.io, and decided to just eat the extra cost from outliers. If you want to exploit that, run an app in Sydney with a whole bunch of users in India. We’ll lose money on your app and you will win one round of capitalism.
Since we tend to favor transparency and predictability over “price that scales well”, we’ve ended up with pricing that will be too high for some customers. Which is fine, we’re growing, but we have a plan for that. If these bandwidth prices don’t work for your use case, and you can commit to a large amount of data transfer each month, we’ll lower these prices for everyone
Yeah, but India is still at 12 cents a gig.
$0.12 per GB sounds bit high and very likely pricing can be significantly cheaper. I don’t know of fly.io internal cost but I am from India and I speak to Indian operator on regular basis. Internal cost I guess would be similar in India Vs others and hence outside of that it’s mostly their transit bills.
One challenge which fly.io would get is the fact that there’s massive number of eyeballs behind two large telcos. They can get cheap private IX peering but that may not offload more than 7-10% of their bandwidth (or even less in Chennai) due to lack of telco routes over there. So almost all their traffic is hitting IP transit where the cost varies wildly depending on who you are buying from.