4 ms·

I'm pretty happy with fly.io, except for one thing: I moved over two apps from Heroku, lured by the free tier. But you do have to enter your credit card details

by fhd2 4y ago

I'm pretty happy with fly.io, except for one thing: I moved over two apps from Heroku, lured by the free tier. But you do have to enter your credit card details whether or not you intend to pay. And then they do charge me a few bucks per month for an almost completely unused app. It's probably all in line with the ToS and everything, but I find it a bit shady that I have to investigate this, rather than having a free offering that doesn't suddenly charge me.

chubot 4y ago
Hm do they itemize the charges? what are they for?
- fhd2 4y ago
  CPU - I would assume it's not a mistake, maybe if I dig some more I can figure out how to keep within the allowance, but on Heroku I never had to deal with this kind of thing for free apps.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    I agree, as an individual user I much prefer to be locked in to a fixed rate. And not just for the free tier- I don't want surprises even if I'm already paying As a company with a cushion, hosting a profitable app, it might be worth doing the usage-based pricing to try and save some money. But the risk is just not worth it for smaller projects
selcuka 4y ago
It's not a free offering; there is a free allowance. If you exceed that you get charged: - Up to 3 shared-cpu-1x 256mb VMs - 3GB persistent volume storage (total) - 160GB outbound data transfer If you spin up, say, 4 VMs you will pay for it.
- fhd2 4y ago
  I probably have to fiddle with the settings to stay within 3 CPUs, but since it was heavily recommended as an alternative to Heroku's free tier, I'm a bit disappointed I have to. Maybe they never intended to be recommended for that, don't know.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    I haven't used it, but from what I know it's not a very good analogue to Heroku (other than being an easy-ish/dev-focused host). Their pricing model is pretty different
  - selcuka 4y ago
    True, Heroku allowed as many dynos as you want when their free tier existed, however, they had a limit of 1,000 hours per month. That pretty much meant you couldn't run more than 1 VM (~744 hours/month) for free. Fly.io is more generous as those 3 free VMs can be up and running all the time (but VMs have 256MB of RAM instead of 512).
  - nextaccountic 4y ago
    Right now the most generous free tier is from Oracle (24GB RAM machines feels unreal). But you can find other free tier offerings here: https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev
    - lbriner 4y ago
      I tried to look at OCI but was immediately bamboozled with a slow as heck web site (locations table took 15 seconds to load!), a tonne of management BS about "aligning strategic objectives to operational constraints in a dynamic environment" and then was expected to immediately book a call with a salesperson. No thanks Oracle even for 24GB free VMs!
      - gl-prod 4y ago
        Go to Oracle’s subreddit. It’s full of people whose free trial accounts were terminated.
IceDane 4y ago
OTOH they don't even charge you if your bill is less than $5/month. I've had an app do nothing for a few months now, and my bills are always just thrown away due them being under $5.
- krab 4y ago
  That's something I wonder about looking at AWS. My personal account has about $0.7 monthly spend. Doesn't it cost more to charge a credit card?
  - oneepic 4y ago
    A few months ago, I found out I had an AWS account from college that was racking up $0.50/month in charges. After 40 months, I finally got an email from AWS warning me to pay the $20 or they'd just close my account. I paid it, and closed my account, but I guess I could've just left if I wanted to.
    - krab 4y ago
      Good to know. I'm paying anyway because I have other accounts there with bigger charges and I actually want the service, including the small personal account (which really shows as a separate transaction on a bank statement).
    - albert_e 4y ago
      I am guessing that 50cents per month is a Route53 hosted zone from one of your experiments with hosting a website? You may want to check if you also have a domain name purcahed through route53 that is set for automatic renewal every 3 years or whatever
      - oneepic 4y ago
        That's a good point, and you're spot-on about the Route53 zone. I did close my AWS account already. I'm hoping it just kind of doesn't renew that domain name.
  - 4y ago
davedx 4y ago
Huh? I had a VM running and a postgres running without entering my credit card. I only needed it when I had to temporarily scale up the RAM on my VM
- pea 4y ago
  Same, then my coworker signed up and had to enter a credit card. No idea on the discrepancy!
mrkurt 4y ago
We don't suddenly charge people. We charge per VM you have running. Setting these up is intentionally manual. You can opt in to autoscaling, which will create new VMs for you, but you have to set that up after you've deployed your app. If you're getting charged you should run `fly apps list` and see if you have more than two apps running. One thing that trips people up is Postgres. Postgres is just another fly app. So if you moved two apps with DBs, you're probably running four total apps. We prompt you for database info when you do this, though, it's not done in the background. One problem we've come across is expectations from Heroku users. We are very different (like the Postgres thing, there's no shared tenant postgres). People expect us to be the same. We haven't figured out how to expose those differences to people in a way that sticks.
- LambdaComplex 4y ago
  > One thing that trips people up is Postgres. Postgres is just another fly app. Sounds like there may be room for improvement in your documentation.
  - unhammer 4y ago
    Perhaps because I'm not used to Heroku and such so I have different expectations, but I found it quite clear. There's a list as soon as you open the dashboard that looks like Apps ----------------------------------------- myappname shared-cpu-1x myappname-db 1GB shared-cpu-1x
  - biorach 4y ago
    https://fly.io/docs/postgres/ https://fly.io/docs/postgres/ Second paragraph
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

by fhd2 4y ago

chubot 4y ago

Hm do they itemize the charges? what are they for?

fhd2 4y ago
CPU - I would assume it's not a mistake, maybe if I dig some more I can figure out how to keep within the allowance, but on Heroku I never had to deal with this kind of thing for free apps.
- brundolf 4y ago
  I agree, as an individual user I much prefer to be locked in to a fixed rate. And not just for the free tier- I don't want surprises even if I'm already paying As a company with a cushion, hosting a profitable app, it might be worth doing the usage-based pricing to try and save some money. But the risk is just not worth it for smaller projects

selcuka 4y ago

It's not a free offering; there is a free allowance. If you exceed that you get charged: - Up to 3 shared-cpu-1x 256mb VMs - 3GB persistent volume storage (total) - 160GB outbound data transfer If you spin up, say, 4 VMs you will pay for it.

fhd2 4y ago
I probably have to fiddle with the settings to stay within 3 CPUs, but since it was heavily recommended as an alternative to Heroku's free tier, I'm a bit disappointed I have to. Maybe they never intended to be recommended for that, don't know.
- brundolf 4y ago
  I haven't used it, but from what I know it's not a very good analogue to Heroku (other than being an easy-ish/dev-focused host). Their pricing model is pretty different
- selcuka 4y ago
  True, Heroku allowed as many dynos as you want when their free tier existed, however, they had a limit of 1,000 hours per month. That pretty much meant you couldn't run more than 1 VM (~744 hours/month) for free. Fly.io is more generous as those 3 free VMs can be up and running all the time (but VMs have 256MB of RAM instead of 512).
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  Right now the most generous free tier is from Oracle (24GB RAM machines feels unreal). But you can find other free tier offerings here: https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev
  - lbriner 4y ago
    I tried to look at OCI but was immediately bamboozled with a slow as heck web site (locations table took 15 seconds to load!), a tonne of management BS about "aligning strategic objectives to operational constraints in a dynamic environment" and then was expected to immediately book a call with a salesperson. No thanks Oracle even for 24GB free VMs!
    - gl-prod 4y ago
      Go to Oracle’s subreddit. It’s full of people whose free trial accounts were terminated.

IceDane 4y ago

OTOH they don't even charge you if your bill is less than $5/month. I've had an app do nothing for a few months now, and my bills are always just thrown away due them being under $5.

krab 4y ago
That's something I wonder about looking at AWS. My personal account has about $0.7 monthly spend. Doesn't it cost more to charge a credit card?
- oneepic 4y ago
  A few months ago, I found out I had an AWS account from college that was racking up $0.50/month in charges. After 40 months, I finally got an email from AWS warning me to pay the $20 or they'd just close my account. I paid it, and closed my account, but I guess I could've just left if I wanted to.
  - krab 4y ago
    Good to know. I'm paying anyway because I have other accounts there with bigger charges and I actually want the service, including the small personal account (which really shows as a separate transaction on a bank statement).
  - albert_e 4y ago
    I am guessing that 50cents per month is a Route53 hosted zone from one of your experiments with hosting a website? You may want to check if you also have a domain name purcahed through route53 that is set for automatic renewal every 3 years or whatever
    - oneepic 4y ago
      That's a good point, and you're spot-on about the Route53 zone. I did close my AWS account already. I'm hoping it just kind of doesn't renew that domain name.
- 4y ago

davedx 4y ago

Huh? I had a VM running and a postgres running without entering my credit card. I only needed it when I had to temporarily scale up the RAM on my VM

pea 4y ago
Same, then my coworker signed up and had to enter a credit card. No idea on the discrepancy!

mrkurt 4y ago

We don't suddenly charge people. We charge per VM you have running. Setting these up is intentionally manual. You can opt in to autoscaling, which will create new VMs for you, but you have to set that up after you've deployed your app. If you're getting charged you should run `fly apps list` and see if you have more than two apps running. One thing that trips people up is Postgres. Postgres is just another fly app. So if you moved two apps with DBs, you're probably running four total apps. We prompt you for database info when you do this, though, it's not done in the background. One problem we've come across is expectations from Heroku users. We are very different (like the Postgres thing, there's no shared tenant postgres). People expect us to be the same. We haven't figured out how to expose those differences to people in a way that sticks.

LambdaComplex 4y ago
> One thing that trips people up is Postgres. Postgres is just another fly app. Sounds like there may be room for improvement in your documentation.
- unhammer 4y ago
  Perhaps because I'm not used to Heroku and such so I have different expectations, but I found it quite clear. There's a list as soon as you open the dashboard that looks like Apps ----------------------------------------- myappname shared-cpu-1x myappname-db 1GB shared-cpu-1x
- biorach 4y ago
  https://fly.io/docs/postgres/ https://fly.io/docs/postgres/ Second paragraph
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]