Due to my habit of purchasing things with credit cards, I have never noticed my fly.io bill. Today I noticed it and was surprised by the price.
At first fly.io was free, but later it seemed to be changed to paid, but I remember the price was very cheap.
I am a foreigner and use fly.io to deploy my web application side project. This is just for displaying my work for job applications, and there will be almost no traffic.
Just that, but the monthly cost is as high as more than 50 to 60 US dollars? This is ridiculous
A few months passed and suddenly I had to pay hundreds of dollars just for a side project.
I don’t know if my deployment process has repeatedly deployed to some side projects, but those are all failures, or do I need to be charged even for applications that failed to be deployed?
Is this price reasonable?
Can someone tell me? I don’t know much about this, I’m just a hobbyist learning to program
I feel very bad now, like I met a bandit
updated:
I’m relieved to have received an official reply that my money will be refunded.
That sounds odd but it’s impossible to say for sure without knowing exactly what has been used.
Your invoice should give a detailed breakdown of why you have been billed that 60 USD. How much was spent on machines, how much on bandwidth, on IPv4s, and so on …
You are right in that the “free” Hobby plan has been modified for new (ish) users to be more like a free trial, however if you have been a user for a while I’d assume you are on the “Legacy Hobby” plan. For more on what’s changed, check this section of the docs:
So … if that’s the case, usage under $5 was essentially waived. However it sounds like you are now well over $5 in monthly costs, and so that would no longer apply.
If your monthly invoice is not clear about why that is, you could try to email billing@fly.io and see if they can explain anything further.
As you say, it looks like most of the billed usage was indeed down to that volume SSD, and RAM.
For example the default volume size is 3GB:
… but can be up to 500GB.
The free trial/allowance for a small side project includes 3GB of SSD volume storage and so if you just deploy one side project and stick to that limit, sure enough it would be free. However you can create a volume that’s bigger. Or create multiple volumes. Either would exceed the 3GB allowance, and so would be billed.
From your numbers it is hard to say how the usage is divided between apps (for example 100 volumes of 1GB each would cost the same as 1 volume of 100GB as they are billed GB/hr).
So all I can say is if you haven’t actually used what the invoice says you have and you think it’s wrong, that would be one for billing@fly.io to investigate.
(Also … you might want to redact your email address from that image. Up to you)
Thanks for the reminder, I’ve blacked out the email and I have sent a letter to billing@fly.io and hope to get a reasonable reply. Thank you for your opinion.
hi @plaisir963
As greg mentioned, feel free to contact billing@fly for details.
But regarding volumes, you’re always charged for them as long as you haven’t deleted them, even if the app isn’t running. If you delete the app, then the volumes get deleted too.
Volume storage can add up quickly if you’re using a database. For example, if you create a “Production” Postgres app, you’ll have 3 volumes of either 40GB or 80GB (and also extra RAM). You would need to delete the volumes or the app itself to avoid charges for that 120-240GB of storage, even if it’s not being filled/used.
