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What would this have costed had they used render or railway? Maybe, what, $200 a month? Vercel's pricing is so ridiculously convoluted that you can't even clea

What would this have costed had they used render or railway? Maybe, what, $200 a month? Vercel's pricing is so ridiculously convoluted that you can't even cleanly compare usage. With render/railway/(insert provider of choice) you can at least predict that you're your biggest cost is going to be egress. edit: I just saw that it gets 450m pageviews. I'm guessing on the upper end this costs ~$1k with railway + cloudflare?

doublesocket 8mo ago
Railway is getting so good I'm not sure what Vercel brings to the party anyway.
- js3642 8mo ago
  While I used to think Railway was an amazing service, I had a production workload get broken because they removed a feature without any depreciation period or warning. I now struggle to recommend it for anything more than a hobby project. Vercel has the benifit of being big enough they have to do things properly. For reference https://station.railway.com/questions/smtp-connection-failures-e3c635ac https://station.railway.com/questions/smtp-connection-failur...
  - dban 8mo ago
    SMTP is gated behind the $20/mo Pro plan to reduce spam on the internet. It sounds like you were running a production workload on the Hobby plan
    - throwaway290 8mo ago
      that's rich, from Railway employee. your company's mod in that thread said there was supposed to be no SMTP at all for any plan but it was enabled by a bug. then once you saw people were using it you decided to milk your bug via the most expensive payment plan. but that's your internal dealings. from your paying customers perspective, company had a change in the environment where something was working and now it's not. which could be even okay if it was a legit bug that was fixed, but what makes it worse is instead you said "just pay us 4x more and you get it back". for some users it probably just broke production, is there a more perfect time for blackmail right? don't try to paint it as altruistic attempt to reduce spam in the internet, this is sleazy af
  - everfrustrated 8mo ago
    You were too cheap to pay $20/mth for the Pro plan... That says a lot more about you than Railway.
    - butvacuum 8mo ago
      theres also a ton of smtp-> mailservice proxies.0
- suladead 8mo ago
  And their CEO doesn't post selfies with war criminals
  - nozzlegear 8mo ago
    OOTL, what is this a reference to?
    - bucklybuck 8mo ago
      https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vercel-ceo-takes-selfie-israel-182930862.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vercel-ceo-takes-selfie-israe...
    - input_sh 8mo ago
      His photo with a prime minister of a country with a famous arrest warrant in The Hague. You know, the same country whose former prime minister is this person: https://jmail.world/person/ehud-barak https://jmail.world/person/ehud-barak
- cmdtab 8mo ago
  I would stay away from any startup for production workload. Made the mistake. Never again. Fly, railway, render. Avoid. All have weird show stopper bugs for any reasonable scale and you will fight against the platform compared to using big cloud. And big cloud works better even in cases where PAAS is advertised as simpler (google cloud run and build is as easy to setup as railway but you have much more knobs to control traffic, routing, roll out etc)
  - direwolf20 8mo ago
    Jmail is itself an experiment, that doesn't need to be production quality.
ramoz 8mo ago
Why not bare-cloud? Esp with AI... in 10min or less an agent can deploy almost any stack to an optimal AWS setup for a fraction of the cost of any platform.
- butlike 8mo ago
  Try it out. Implementation is always harder than conjecture
  - ramoz 8mo ago
    I do. Every day, for at least 5 services.
    - codybontecou 8mo ago
      Are you able to bypass the aws web app entirely via the command line?
      - ramoz 8mo ago
        yea i mean i basically have claude code do everything with aws cli.
- forsakenharmony 8mo ago
  AWS is still expensive as fuck, just go for a VPS or dedicated server at that point
  - ramoz 8mo ago
    Every single mentioned service is either an AWS or GCP abstraction.
    - prodigycorp 8mo ago
      Wake me up when GCP allows you to spending limits
itsTyrion 8mo ago
if they had used hetzner Cloud servers, probably like 500 a month lol
- JasonADrury 8mo ago
  With cloudflare? Less than 100, easily.
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  500 at hetzner, they don't go up to that price, and even with their prices raised during the RAM shortage, for 500, you can still have 5 servers each with 4TB NVMe and 128GB RAM, and a Ryzen 9 7950X3D (16 cores). Seems like their setup price has gone up from 1 month to 2.5 months. Ouch. That'll be to cover the RAM price.
bastardoperator 8mo ago
The pricing is so bad I had to remove my CC details. One mistake and you wake up with a 50K bill for your personal project that was just you exploring.
anarticle 8mo ago
I don't think cost is the dominating concern here.

doublesocket 8mo ago

Railway is getting so good I'm not sure what Vercel brings to the party anyway.

js3642 8mo ago
While I used to think Railway was an amazing service, I had a production workload get broken because they removed a feature without any depreciation period or warning. I now struggle to recommend it for anything more than a hobby project. Vercel has the benifit of being big enough they have to do things properly. For reference https://station.railway.com/questions/smtp-connection-failures-e3c635ac https://station.railway.com/questions/smtp-connection-failur...
- dban 8mo ago
  SMTP is gated behind the $20/mo Pro plan to reduce spam on the internet. It sounds like you were running a production workload on the Hobby plan
  - throwaway290 8mo ago
    that's rich, from Railway employee. your company's mod in that thread said there was supposed to be no SMTP at all for any plan but it was enabled by a bug. then once you saw people were using it you decided to milk your bug via the most expensive payment plan. but that's your internal dealings. from your paying customers perspective, company had a change in the environment where something was working and now it's not. which could be even okay if it was a legit bug that was fixed, but what makes it worse is instead you said "just pay us 4x more and you get it back". for some users it probably just broke production, is there a more perfect time for blackmail right? don't try to paint it as altruistic attempt to reduce spam in the internet, this is sleazy af
- everfrustrated 8mo ago
  You were too cheap to pay $20/mth for the Pro plan... That says a lot more about you than Railway.
  - butvacuum 8mo ago
    theres also a ton of smtp-> mailservice proxies.0
suladead 8mo ago
And their CEO doesn't post selfies with war criminals
- nozzlegear 8mo ago
  OOTL, what is this a reference to?
  - bucklybuck 8mo ago
    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vercel-ceo-takes-selfie-israel-182930862.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vercel-ceo-takes-selfie-israe...
  - input_sh 8mo ago
    His photo with a prime minister of a country with a famous arrest warrant in The Hague. You know, the same country whose former prime minister is this person: https://jmail.world/person/ehud-barak https://jmail.world/person/ehud-barak
cmdtab 8mo ago
I would stay away from any startup for production workload. Made the mistake. Never again. Fly, railway, render. Avoid. All have weird show stopper bugs for any reasonable scale and you will fight against the platform compared to using big cloud. And big cloud works better even in cases where PAAS is advertised as simpler (google cloud run and build is as easy to setup as railway but you have much more knobs to control traffic, routing, roll out etc)
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  Jmail is itself an experiment, that doesn't need to be production quality.

ramoz 8mo ago

Why not bare-cloud? Esp with AI... in 10min or less an agent can deploy almost any stack to an optimal AWS setup for a fraction of the cost of any platform.

butlike 8mo ago
Try it out. Implementation is always harder than conjecture
- ramoz 8mo ago
  I do. Every day, for at least 5 services.
  - codybontecou 8mo ago
    Are you able to bypass the aws web app entirely via the command line?
    - ramoz 8mo ago
      yea i mean i basically have claude code do everything with aws cli.
forsakenharmony 8mo ago
AWS is still expensive as fuck, just go for a VPS or dedicated server at that point
- ramoz 8mo ago
  Every single mentioned service is either an AWS or GCP abstraction.
  - prodigycorp 8mo ago
    Wake me up when GCP allows you to spending limits

itsTyrion 8mo ago

if they had used hetzner Cloud servers, probably like 500 a month lol

JasonADrury 8mo ago
With cloudflare? Less than 100, easily.
direwolf20 8mo ago
500 at hetzner, they don't go up to that price, and even with their prices raised during the RAM shortage, for 500, you can still have 5 servers each with 4TB NVMe and 128GB RAM, and a Ryzen 9 7950X3D (16 cores). Seems like their setup price has gone up from 1 month to 2.5 months. Ouch. That'll be to cover the RAM price.

bastardoperator 8mo ago

The pricing is so bad I had to remove my CC details. One mistake and you wake up with a 50K bill for your personal project that was just you exploring.

anarticle 8mo ago

I don't think cost is the dominating concern here.