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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

Wow, their pricing looks almost too good to be true? I think everything I've ever done with Heroku can be done for free on here, if I'm reading this right

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> "Wow, their pricing looks almost too good to be true?"

Yes, and that's exactly how Heroku started too. You bait as many people as possible as early as possible, often by giving subsidies, free stuff and extreme price cuts that make you stand out. Don't forget to give away silly swag and free stickers at random "cloud conventions". None of that is sustainable in the long run (because you're bleeding cash), but your goal is to grow a large user base and get the word-of-mouth out there quickly. Once you have amassed a large population of users you start tightening the lock-in across the entire platform, and slowly raising prices across the board. Or, you keep raising money from VCs to cover up the losses with the promise of being profitable one day. Rinse and repeat.

This is the story of pretty much every cloud provider out there. The cloud is just someone else's computer.

I've since learned that it was in fact too good to be true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31358251

The real pricing, at least for the low-end plans I was interested in, is the same as Heroku's (which is fine by me!), but I'm turned off by the way it was marketed

That's one of many things that lead me to build https://acrobox.io. Abstracting Docker out of it for a bit more of a Heroku-like experience is on the horizon. I think it is well positioned between something like Dokku and Render but I'd be happy to hear what you think.

If you need a free PostgreSQL db (well, paid for by the VCs), use supabase.

https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases

> free databases are deleted [after 90 + 14 days]

> (unless they are upgraded to a paid plan)

https://supabase.com/pricing

> Free projects are paused after 1 week of inactivity.

Ahh, I didn't click the button to see the details which include the fact that the $0 PostgreSQL is only free for 90 days

That feels sneaky and I'm a bit turned off by it

That said, their $0 web service plan seems to have no time limit and no shutoffs; possibly equivalent to Heroku's $7 plan, which is all I've ever used

(Render employee) Our free tier is actually quite constrained (e.g. your apps go to sleep if they're not getting traffic, builds are slower, etc). But if it works for you, great!

Do they? (genuinely asking)

I was expecting that because that's what Heroku does, but I don't see anything about it on the pricing page (even in the fine print). So either it's a great deal, or highly deceptive marketing

Edit: Argh, you have to click a [?] and then click through to another page where they explain that. I think they've lost my business; that's sketchy as hell.

If that had just been up-front on the main pricing page I would have become a (small) paying customer, buying the $7 plan and moving off of Heroku. But now Render has lost my trust, so I've deleted my account.

This wasn't meant to be sneaky! We're iterating on the design of the page and this is good feedback. We'll make it clearer.

If you're taking feedback, the PostgreSQL listing also felt somewhat deceptive; you see $0 in huge text, but it's not until you expand the details and read the fine print that you see "$0 for first 90 days". That similarly felt like a bait-and-switch, though at least that one didn't require me to go to a totally different page to get the full story.

IMO, all the limitations of each one of these $0 plans should be up-front on the big, main card. You have some limitations listed there - "100 GB/month bandwidth included", "SSD disks for $0.25/GB per month", "1 GB SSD storage included", etc - which implies to the reader that those are all of the limitations. But then, the most important limitation in each case gets buried. That's what feels intentionally deceptive.

Re: Postgres, what we actually want is to offer perpetually free Postgres where multiple free customers can use the same underlying instance to make the economics work. The 90-day limit is a stopgap to make sure we're not bleeding money from thousands of tiny, barely used PG instances.

Your point around the limitations is well articulated and valid. The last thing we want is to be deceptive, even unintentionally.

Thanks, I appreciate your openness to feedback

As a quick fix, we updated our pricing page to directly link to the limits on free services and databases: https://render.com/pricing

As an utter n00b in modern web (all ends, front and back) development, what does it even mean that "static" sites are free, but so is also running Postgres?

If I have a "static" site, then I can't have any backend code that talks to the database, is that it? So the actual web pages can't use client-side Javascript to customize page content by talking to a backend, that talks to a database?

that is correct. though it looks like you can have some backend services for free at render as well (although it comes with limitations). so if you don't mind slow first load you could have a proper dynamic app within the free tier.

The static site doesn’t cost anything. If it talks to a Postgres database hosted on Render, then you’ll pay for that PG db, but not for the static site itself.

As an example, I am currently hosting four sites on Render.

Two are Rails sites with databases, Redis, BG workers, etc. I pay a decent amount for those, albeit quite a bit less than Heroku.

Meanwhile, two others are static sites generated with Jekyll(?) that are pure content and require no DB. I add new content locally, push to GitHub, and deploy to Render automatically through a GH action. I pay $0/month for these two sites.

Each is a separate piece, it's not either-or. A "static site" means render.com would be serving up just static files to users, but those can include client-side JS files. Now, those files wouldn't have a server to talk to (unless they're talking to third-party APIs), but you could then set up a service and/or database alongside them. Pricing is different for each of those, but it looks like base-tier web services are also free.

Hope that helps

I wonder where one-button database upgrades are on their roadmap. Currently still a manual process [0], and that's something I want from hosted datastores as a baseline these days.

[0]: https://render.com/docs/databases#database-versions--upgrade...

That seems pretty darn straighforward to me. (I am a heroku user, and not a render user).

For comparison, here's the heroku instructions -- still requires some downtime.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/upgrading-heroku-postg...

I guess you have to manually enter a few more commands for render... if that's really a big deal to people, I would think render should notice and replace it with one command that does those few for you, cause that doesn't seem so hard, does it?

Much less easy than GCP/AWS, which is more my standard for that bit.

State is the hard part to manage compared to stateless web tiers and what not, so that’s a big value prop

Too good to be true? A simple non-free Redis server starts off at a 800% premium over DO.

I believe there are some time-based limitations to their free tier. Which seems not-unreasonable. They’re a startup and have to pay for their compute resources like anyone else.

But it’s definitely enough to kick the tires and see if it fits your needs.

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