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Comment by dmw_ng | Hacker News Reader

If you haven't tried Fly yet, where have you been?

- Anycast IPv4 to VMs hosted near the edge

- Raw TCP/UDP servers or external HTTP/HTTPS termination

- $.02/GB egress, no per-request pricing

You can build almost anything with this model (VoIP, video, gaming, Heroku-like, App Engine-like, Lambda-like, ..), and the bandwidth pricing is astounding. Fly have an obviously bright future, they aren't even on the same page as existing CDNs.

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Is $.02/GB egress supposed to be astounding in a positive way? That's still highway robbery compared to what you get on DigitalOcean, OVH, Hetzner Cloud... literally any provider that's not AWS or GCP.

Maybe some folks have millions of VC money to blow, but I would never build a VoIP or gaming (= bandwidth intensive) app on this.

$0.02/GB is higher than we want to charge, but we have to pay the same rates you do at most providers. It's a little unfair to call it "highway robbery", though, we have to price things so we can stay alive.

We're pushing that price down pretty regularly, you can read some details about it here:

https://fly.io/blog/we-cut-bandwidth-prices-go-nuts/

Thanks, this is hilarious

> Inflicting that complexity on you all would help with margin control, but ugh. What we've done instead is set a blended price that fits most apps running on Fly.io, and decided to just eat the extra cost from outliers. If you want to exploit that, run an app in Sydney with a whole bunch of users in India. We'll lose money on your app and you will win one round of capitalism.

These are very different kinds of bandwidth. The only provider above to offer anycast IP (AFAIK) is AWS Global Accelerator.. it's $.015/gb on top of the regular $.09ish/gb EC2 egress charge. GCE offer anycast load balancing but it is (AFAIK) HTTP only and even pricier than AWS.

With Fly you're getting the raw magic behind Lambda@Edge, CloudFlare Workers and every anycast DNS and edge reverse proxy service in existence, with a large chunk of compute, RAM and local storage to build out whatever exact combination of CloudFront or whatever else you like thrown in as part of the deal. Also if you want to skimp on backends, it's still possible to use their HTTPS termination (ala GCE) to reduce handshake latency without rearchitecting everything

I can't quite figure it if you pay the bandwidth for where your servers are, or where the people are (the first would make the most sense to me) and Indian trafic is very expensive by their measure.

But do not that you get a lot of free bandwidth to play with.

https://fly.io/blog/we-cut-bandwidth-prices-go-nuts/

Nice, but still one worry: A bug, or an attacker, sends outbound traffic through the roof, and newbie's fun experiment ends in a huge bill. More than one such story on HN recently (AWS).

Skimming the pricing docs just now, I don't see protection against bandwidth overage:

https://fly.io/docs/about/

https://community.fly.io/t/can-i-set-a-billing-limit-per-mon...

We waive invoices when there's a mistake like this (we racked up a $20k Google bill a few years ago, we get it).

We also work hard to keep bandwidth costs down. At $0.02/GB, even 2.5TB of traffic is ~$50. Which is why it's easy to forgive invoices.

Is this more like a Lambda alternative or can you run long running processes? If so, how much disk space comes with a plan since I don't seem to be able to find that info.

These are long running processes. They have 5gb of temporary disk space. You can attach persistent volumes as well.

Wow. That summarises the benefits well. I shall have a look!

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