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In my opinion the economics don't workout that well when you building a hosting service on top of k8s especially when you have to compete with amazon on prices.

In my opinion the economics don't workout that well when you building a hosting service on top of k8s especially when you have to compete with amazon on prices. It is tier that has the highest churn and lowest spending power that I feel they marketing too. Would love to hear some thought. May be I am missing something. On the tech side, IPAM can fail to assign IP in k8s. It could be of various reasons. What do you guys do in that case?

kolanos 3y ago
Which AWS services do you think are more cost effective? Cost is rarely the reason I've chosen AWS over another provider. But I don't think Render is competing with AWS head-on in regards to cost. They're very much trying to fill that Heroku niche of hosting providers geared towards developers who don't want to manage VMs let alone a k8s cluster. And as Heroku has proven, there is money to be made charging a premium for such convenience.
- pid-1 3y ago
  > And as Heroku has proven, there is money to be made charging a premium for such convenience Heroku proved you can get many people to use your service by offering free stuff. Maybe there was a reason they sold the business.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - throwkwknskkc 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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pid-1 3y ago
I tend to agree. Their computer service is 4x more expensive than Fargate, which is expensive already. Plus AWS has spot / reserved instances. You gotta really hate AWS's UX to use a service like that.
- debarshri 3y ago
  Large orgs. cut huge deals with AWS. AWS gives huge discounts too. Money > UX anyday.
- Sytten 3y ago
  We use render at Caido. <rant>I am pretty pissed off by their per user per team pricing that was introduced early this year. Specially since you still need to pay for multiple teams to get network segmentation between envs WTF</rant>. BUT on the compute, it is on par with fargate. I dont know how you arrived at 4x the cost but lets take 1 vcpu + 2GB ram. Render is 25$/month and fargate is 35.50$/month. For 2 vcpu and 4gb, render is at 85$/m and Fargate is 71.10$/m. For our business, I am considering migrating off render within the next year. Unsure where to yet, I would like to avoid using another PaaS but managing a k8s cluster doesnt appeal to me so still looking.
  - anurag 3y ago
    Network segmentation between projects/environments will land in the next year. Any chance you'd be up for a call so I understand the use case better? Email in profile.
    - Sytten 3y ago
      Landing network segmentation between env should have been done before introducing per user per team pricing.......... I feel like as a PaaS I should not have to explain this.
  - sungrokshim 3y ago
    Co-founder of Porter (https://porter.run https://porter.run) here - Porter brings that easy PaaS experience to a k8s cluster that's running in your own cloud account (and manages it for you so you don't have to). We specialize in serving the segment of users who don't want to manage devops fully in-house but are outgrowing their existing PaaS providers. We are offering a credit program for early stage startups that you can apply for here. Happy to fast track your application! https://porter.run/for-seed-stage-startups https://porter.run/for-seed-stage-startups
anurag 3y ago
(Render CEO) The economics are working out well so far and will only improve with scale. Our customers don't want to (or can't) build out large devops or platform engineering teams which cost millions of dollars every year. From that lens, we're not selling compute. We're selling product velocity and operational efficiency. You get the features and scale of K8s without needing to think about it. IPAM has not been an issue with how we use K8s.
- debarshri 3y ago
  Thank you for your response. That makes sense.
esher 3y ago
co-founder of fortrabbit here. We offer a PHP PaaS for 10y+ (on AWS). We started with a free tier (copying the Heroku model) and had to fight with 'free users' as well. The free tier created a lot of noise distracting us from our paying customers. Support requests from users with no interest ever upgrading, often beginners and noobs. Cat and mouse games with script kiddies trying to abuse the service. Fraud and phishing … Most free tier Apps are just tests, maybe there is an index file printing a hello world. Yet you need to keep some responsibility to keep that data around. After a while we changed it to free trial (try before buy). That works much better for us.
- debarshri 3y ago
  Congratulations on running it successfully for 10+ years. Could you share some light on the unit economics of your PaaS? I would assume the cost of acquisition is fair low now that you have a fix trial but how is the customer retention cost. I would assume theres huge amount of support cost as generally there always various edge cases that you wouldn't accommodate in your generic PaaS.

kolanos 3y ago

Which AWS services do you think are more cost effective? Cost is rarely the reason I've chosen AWS over another provider. But I don't think Render is competing with AWS head-on in regards to cost. They're very much trying to fill that Heroku niche of hosting providers geared towards developers who don't want to manage VMs let alone a k8s cluster. And as Heroku has proven, there is money to be made charging a premium for such convenience.

pid-1 3y ago
> And as Heroku has proven, there is money to be made charging a premium for such convenience Heroku proved you can get many people to use your service by offering free stuff. Maybe there was a reason they sold the business.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- throwkwknskkc 3y ago
  [dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

pid-1 3y ago

I tend to agree. Their computer service is 4x more expensive than Fargate, which is expensive already. Plus AWS has spot / reserved instances. You gotta really hate AWS's UX to use a service like that.

debarshri 3y ago
Large orgs. cut huge deals with AWS. AWS gives huge discounts too. Money > UX anyday.
Sytten 3y ago
We use render at Caido. <rant>I am pretty pissed off by their per user per team pricing that was introduced early this year. Specially since you still need to pay for multiple teams to get network segmentation between envs WTF</rant>. BUT on the compute, it is on par with fargate. I dont know how you arrived at 4x the cost but lets take 1 vcpu + 2GB ram. Render is 25$/month and fargate is 35.50$/month. For 2 vcpu and 4gb, render is at 85$/m and Fargate is 71.10$/m. For our business, I am considering migrating off render within the next year. Unsure where to yet, I would like to avoid using another PaaS but managing a k8s cluster doesnt appeal to me so still looking.
- anurag 3y ago
  Network segmentation between projects/environments will land in the next year. Any chance you'd be up for a call so I understand the use case better? Email in profile.
  - Sytten 3y ago
    Landing network segmentation between env should have been done before introducing per user per team pricing.......... I feel like as a PaaS I should not have to explain this.
- sungrokshim 3y ago
  Co-founder of Porter (https://porter.run https://porter.run) here - Porter brings that easy PaaS experience to a k8s cluster that's running in your own cloud account (and manages it for you so you don't have to). We specialize in serving the segment of users who don't want to manage devops fully in-house but are outgrowing their existing PaaS providers. We are offering a credit program for early stage startups that you can apply for here. Happy to fast track your application! https://porter.run/for-seed-stage-startups https://porter.run/for-seed-stage-startups

anurag 3y ago

(Render CEO) The economics are working out well so far and will only improve with scale. Our customers don't want to (or can't) build out large devops or platform engineering teams which cost millions of dollars every year. From that lens, we're not selling compute. We're selling product velocity and operational efficiency. You get the features and scale of K8s without needing to think about it. IPAM has not been an issue with how we use K8s.

debarshri 3y ago
Thank you for your response. That makes sense.

esher 3y ago

co-founder of fortrabbit here. We offer a PHP PaaS for 10y+ (on AWS). We started with a free tier (copying the Heroku model) and had to fight with 'free users' as well. The free tier created a lot of noise distracting us from our paying customers. Support requests from users with no interest ever upgrading, often beginners and noobs. Cat and mouse games with script kiddies trying to abuse the service. Fraud and phishing … Most free tier Apps are just tests, maybe there is an index file printing a hello world. Yet you need to keep some responsibility to keep that data around. After a while we changed it to free trial (try before buy). That works much better for us.

debarshri 3y ago
Congratulations on running it successfully for 10+ years. Could you share some light on the unit economics of your PaaS? I would assume the cost of acquisition is fair low now that you have a fix trial but how is the customer retention cost. I would assume theres huge amount of support cost as generally there always various edge cases that you wouldn't accommodate in your generic PaaS.