Improved workflow and new role for pricing changes | Hacker News Reader

Improved workflow and new role for pricing changes

netlify.com

51 pointsSenHeng30 comments

Wow - these types of changes make it hard to justify using Netlify for static hosting if your contributing team will even possibly grow. Once you get more than 7 contributors for the codebase you have to switch to an enterprise plan ($$) is a scary cliff. What fundamentally changes in hosting costs when I get that extra team member? The pricing structure feels very illogical - are they really adding that much more value in hosting my site just because I have more contributors? Everyone knows exactly what this is - a desperate attempt for cash flow.

Many many SaaS products have a cliff, usually from "free" to "first cost" and that cliff can be pretty substantial.

But going straight from "free" to "enterprise" is steep even for a SaaS. Usually there's a "teams" level between.

Yeah, and they can be stupid expensive for small side projects with a handful of contributors. If you want a Netlify site with a background function that serves 10 visitors a day with 3 people occasionally logging in or pushing code, you pay $57/mo to execute $0.0001 worth of Lambda functions. Maybe it's worth it if things take off, but before then you're paying a lot for very little. So, you host on a DigitalOcean droplet or directly on AWS, and bear a migration cost if you were to choose Netlify as soon as things start growing.

If the value proposition isn't for you, then don't use it. You can't focus on a single feature while ignoring all the others. (ie - your 3 people team would pay $300/mo if you wanted SAML)

Vercel is a much better deal. Moved to there 3 years ago and never looked back

We are actively moving away from netlify for that reason- we have a mostly stable website that maybe sees 10 deploys a month, but usually from 10 different people. I just can’t justify an enterprise account for that.

Too bad, since I actually did like the workflow.

I think trying to justify their pricing on hosting alone misses their point. Nothing fundamentally changes in hosting, probably in any environment. However, the development workflow does change with extra team members. Netlify's tools for collaborating are fantastic. I think that's the value they're pricing.

I think the main issue I have is a lot of that workflow is no longer as differentiated as it was - definitely not to justify the premium they are asking. Cloudflare, AWS, and Azure now all have similar workflow offerings. I have choice now where I didn’t as much before, to where I’d be unwilling to swallow this premium. Maybe there’s value here I’m not seeing, but I’m not seeing it

> are they really adding that much more value in hosting my site just because I have more contributors

... Yes? Netlify removes a lot of DevOps overhead, and the more people you have working on a site the more DevOps overhead it's eliminating. Imagine, for example, you have non-developer contributors like technical writers or marketers. Netlify makes it easy for them to see local and branch previews that exactly mirror production.

I think this disconnect is from thinking of Netlify as just hosting. (And this is a perception they've been fighting for many years -- rather successfully.) When you realize they're a dev workflow and collaboration tool, this pricing starts to make more sense.

> a desperate attempt for cash flow

It's not an unreasonable thing to do in the current market.

I'm a netlify customer, and I disagree.

Before this pricing change, I paid them $99 a month + bandwidth + build minute overages, with the sort of tacit understanding that until and unless my users need to log in to the site, they aren't billable. After this pricing change, all my developers get a login that they don't need or use, and my baseline price goes from $99 to $693.

I technically gained functionality in that developers can now log in and see why their builds failed, but with the rare exception of something being broken in the netlify build image, there is zero utility in that. They can see any of the errors that would be failing the build by looking in their local developer console to see what the linter complains about.

Yes, preview and feature branches are handy, as is the ability to rollback to a previous commit's deployed state, but that feature doesn't scale with "number of team members who have access to the repository" nearly as linearly as the pricing model wants it to be.

Beyond that, I moved from the $20 a month plan to the $99 a month business plan because of the premium edge network before they imposed a $99 per month per team member pricing change (so really I went from $20 a month + overages to $700 a month plus overages) only to see that now they want me to upgrade to the $3,000 a month enterprise plan to get the edge performance I signed up for.

Vercel is tempting.

In addition to Vercel, I would also suggest considering Cloudflare Pages. Although Vercel’s platform is more mature, CFP is slightly more framework-agnostic while Vercel, understandably, is a bit tilted in favor of Next.js development. (Of course, if you’re already a Next.js shop, that may seal the deal in favor of Vercel.) Both offer the same high-quality CDN performance at all pricing tiers, including their free tiers.

I switched to Render because they have a similar pipeline with deploy previews. It was quick to do.

Netlify wanted to go from $120/mo to $2k/mo.

What's to stop you from not connecting git and have a CI pipeline that runs a deploy for you?

It also seems like an unconscious acknowledgement that their add-on services (form handling, post-processing, identity, analytics, auth, etc.) are woefully inadequate in some cases and uncompetitive in others. $20/mo for form handling beyond 100 submissions? Okay, maybe. But the feature set is so bare it's laughable. There's minimal to no customization for notification emails, no confirmation emails, and their post-processing for form detection will bring the speed of your build pipeline to its knees on any serious site. On one site turning off post-processing yielded a build time reduction of more than double the actual build time of the site.

Not to mention the fact that by foregoing any concept of a server and forcing everything into some flavor of lambda they've created a scenario where every framework with any such functionality requires open source shepherding to function on their platform[0]. At best they've diluted their initial mission and at worst they've created an unmanageable mess. They can't even make Next.js work on their platform without causing what should issue 404s to return 500s instead[1]. The SEO implications for that are a potential death sentence and that issue has now been open for five months.

I was very optimistic about Netlify at the outset, and it worked great and still continues to work great for our test cases where we've deployed individual LPs. Where the pain seems to start is anything above a thousand pages or more, which is also coincidentally where the stakes start to get higher. I don't know how they could expect anyone at an enterprise or growing business to seriously scrutinize this platform and view it as ideal with that in mind.

[0]: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-plugin-nextjs [1]: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-plugin-nextjs/issues/1179

I left Netlify 2 months ago to go to Cloudflare pages, main reason to move was Netlify reliability issues, 500 errors, 15-30 sec response times ... Timeouts, several times per week, and everyday some weeks ... For static sites. Now with Cloudflare pages we got a nearly perfect uptime and latency according to our monitoring system. Also pricing is much lower with Cloudflare pages. Sorry if this sounds like an ad ... I just wanted to share my own story.

Useful to hear these reports. It's hard to find trustable solid metrics on uptime and latency of web services prior to running your own tests. Usually it's a process of asking friends / getting bit yourself.

I've seen some (spotty) perf tracking resources out there for could VM instance performance and Wordpress hosts, but not something covering cloud function response time / cold starts / uptime, or something comprehensive for cloud data stores.

Anyone know of such a thing? Like a "Consumer Reports / Wirecutter for web dev services"

The price changes here are worrying - I just started planning on how I'd like to switch our frontend applications to be hosted on Netlify and now the pricing is changing from under me.

I can understand charging for developers who trigger deploys; but the whole "teams with more than 7 members must upgrade to enterprise" seems ludicrous. When did 7 people become an enterprise? The last thing I want is to get a 10x bill because an intern triggered a build in my 8 man "enterprise".

I think it’s likely that they just figured out how much revenue/profit they wanted, and then applied the math to their customer base and calculated 7 as the magical number.

So if person X creates a Netlify site and connects it to a GitHub repo for deploys, and person Y commits to the repo, you to pay Netlify for 2 users?

And the only alternative to stay in the free tier is you have to say person Y isn't a Netlify user, meaning the build will only get triggered when person X triggers the build manually?

One suspects the money folks who approved these changes are the same who keep all of Netlify’s tiers other than the very most expensive one on a six-POP CDN for the whole world --- unlike Netlify’s competitors, each of which provides the same CDN for all its tiers. Have never understood the logic behind this on Netlify’s part, since The Power Of The Brand™ can take it only so far in an increasingly competitive marketplace. And doing this particular pricing structure change at this time, when companies are hurrying to cut costs ahead of what appears almost certain to be a slowdown, is equally weird IMHO.

8 people, at 19 per month, amounts to 8x19x12 = +-1800 a year. adding an 8th person would skyrocket that, if we take the next step up (business) at 99/m, to 8x99x12 = +- 9500 per year.

And that's not even the "enterprise" pricing.

That must be one hell of an improved workflow to increase the price with, probably at least, 400%.

Unless I'm reading my invoice incorrectly, your formula is off

The business plan is not (99/m * 12), it is (99 + (99/m * 12)), so more like $10,700 than $9500

Congrats to the Netlify team! Sounds like changing the customer mix will help them focus on more advanced features rather than needing to supporting the most basic of sites and hobbyists.

It's unfortunate if you're in a business where this pricing is actually expensive, but it seems like it is time for the non-business users to restart the cycle by moving onto the next startup's offering.

I wonder who’s idea it was to charge more based on information that Netlify finds by reading your git commits. Glad I switched to Render.

Render just happens to be on their Series A. What's the difference?

Finally a valid use case for git-blame-someone-else

https://github.com/jayphelps/git-blame-someone-else

I know we like to use new terms to pretend there is innovation but Netlify is a CDN and Render is a shared VM host.

Unless you only host static content, isn’t Render vastly more capabale/different anyway?

https://render.com/docs/static-sites

I'm going to look at Render, but Netlify is more than just a CDN. Having an integrated CI/deployment pipeline is one of the features I've come to use a lot; an engineer can now open a PR and get an autogenerated staging link that be reviewed before going to prod.

That said, if Render supports the same workflows I'll be seriously looking at moving.

Render supports all of these workflows.

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