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Comment by sintaxi | Hacker News Reader

Hi, Brock from surge.sh here.

We are still figuring out our pricing. It kind of kills me to hear someone call surge too expensive. We worked hard to give surge a very legit free offering which is serving over 35k projects. Surge gives (currently) unlimited projects with custom domains. We charge $13/mo for that extra 1% which is custom SSL, basic auth, custom redirects.

Very open to suggestions if you have any. Would you prefer we have a small membership fee and open up all the features? What would you suggest is fair?

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It would be cool to see a $2/mo option for people that want to support the project (same features as the free tier).

$13/mo is pretty good for people with premium requirements (as you said, the 1%) in my opinion.

Though, I feel a psychological bias for paying upwards of 10 USD for services, since there are so many of them. I feel comfortable paying 9.77 USD for Netflix (India), but 12.6 USD tier just feels expensive.

We use surge.sh to host our production app for our customers, and have been very happy except for one bout of downtime which was very frustrating.

I have no objection to paying 13$/mo if surge would implement some premium redundancy features. Cloudflare already gives me the SSL I need, and 13$/mo for custom redirects isn't really worthwhile for me when I can just use hash-based history for our app.

Basically I think you guys have the pricing worked out incorrectly, at least for our use-case. Avoiding downtime is the #1 reason I would pay someone else to host something for me (because tbh I can just write an ansible script to deploy my code to nginx running on Digital Ocean if I wanted to maintain it myself).

It's too expensive when you have multiple small static websites. I could host several of those on one DO droplet for $10/month, but with surge it will cost me $40+/month for 3+ projects (I do want SSL for my custom domain).

> Would you prefer we have a small membership fee and open up all the features?

Yes.

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