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Comment by chrisabrams | Hacker News Reader

> What will fly.io do? Probably what everyone else does, starts simple, becomes popular and then caves

No, mrkurt will not cave, I can guarantee you that. Fly will be a platform that says no to feature requests that don't make sense for their customer base.

I have no affiliation with Fly, other than I've used it on and off since the beginning of the platform's existence. They're a veteran team that knows how to build platforms. I definitely trust them to go in the right direction with their roadmap, and all my new projects go on Fly.

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> No, mrkurt will not cave, I can guarantee you that.

I concur.

Fly is not your typical startup with dreams of becoming the next big corp monster.

They are just a bunch of talented people with a vision having fun making cool stuff.

Not to break your rose-tinted glasses, I think fly.io is pretty cool too. But it's a for-profit company with outside investment, coming from investors who expect a return on their investment, one way or another, and they likely have some influence on how the company will act.

Same has been said for every company who taken outside investment ever. "But no, Heroku/Figma/GitHub/X are different, they really do care about their users and would never sell/go public/Y", and then a couple of years later we end up in the same position.

It might not even be up to the "bunch of talented people" in the end, what they have to do to survive or to grow. But grow they have to, unless investors are fine with getting their ROI over 10-50 years rather than 1-10 years. A growing usually comes with some pain.

This is a 10-50 year company. You're not wrong, though, we are either building something big or we're building something that will fail. Our bet is that a developer first public cloud is important and needs to exist.

Which means, there will be one of three outcomes:

1. We are correct, and manage to build the right thing. We'll get to work on this forever.

2. We are correct, but not the right group to build it. We fail.

3. We are incorrect, and the world doesn't need a public cloud for devs. We fail, and I become a carpenter.

We have the same incentives as our investors. That doesn't mean it'll work. It does mean that we all believe that we're building a product for developers.

We're pretty good at surviving, so far. And there are early signs that we're good at growing. There's reason to be hopeful. :)

Only issue stopping me from using Fly: bandwidth costs. I am spoiled by DigitalOcean's 1TB tier per droplet created (along with bandwidth pooling if you have more droplets).

That's true but Fly's PaaS is perhaps more comparable to DigitalOcean's App Platform (its PaaS). For that, DO include 100GB for free while Fly include 160GB. Beyond that, DO charge $0.10/GB while Fly charge $0.02-$0.12/GB. Cheaper bandwidth for Fly's Machines (more comparable to droplets, as far as I can see) would be neat though.

Yes I agree that Fly's PaaS is more comparable to DO's App Platform and definitely has better price model. However, I don't use DO's App Platform for exactly the same reasons as why I don't use Fly's PaaS. I like services which provide bandwidth for cheap (or even free — Cloudflare Images and Cloudflare R2 comes to mind). Ideally, I want to be charged only for features I use and not for egress which I have no control over. But I know that is not feasible from business point of view (unless you are Cloudflare).

It's OK that we're not a good fit for every user; in fact, you should be suspicious of providers that claim otherwise.

I adore fly.io and hope for 1), but

> We have the same incentives as our investors.

this is wrong, even if today it looks right because the different incentives result in the same concrete things.

You have a company; your goal is to make the company succeed. Investors have a portfolio; their goal is to make the portfolio succeed. Your company succeeding is only one aspect of their portfolio succeeding, and one whose importance and externalities can change drastically for reasons outside your control.

This is all true. But my goal is to make the portfolio succeed.

I've modified the first option

1.We are correct, and manage to build the right thing [developer first cloud]. We'll get to work on this *until we exhaust that market and are forced to grow beyond it"

That's a pretty big market. Heroku got to ~$500mm of revenue while they funneled their most valuable customers to AWS. Keeping those customers around (by, say, giving them lower level primitives) would have 10x'ed that, I bet.

That's a great point. I hope it's big enough for you to not reach its boundaries, because transitioning to a larger market will fundamentally alter the nature of the org. Speaking as customer of organizations that made the transition, and as someone who lived through one on the inside

> 1. We are correct, and manage to build the right thing. We'll get to work on this forever.

Maybe I'm too pessimistic, I apologize if that's the case. But I fail to see how the company could ever work on "the right thing" "forever" since there is outside investment in the company. Do these investor not want a return on their investment at one point? If it's in 1 year or 10, eventually they are gonna want you to either go public, or get bought by another company, both of which makes the mission goal change from "the right thing" to "the profitable thing" at that moment.

But again, maybe I'm just overly pessimistic based on bad experiences with VC funded companies.

Oh when I say "the right thing", it includes actually making money. We're not just building a dev focused cloud because it's fun (it is fun!). We think it's a good business with a very large market. An IPO would be fine!

> An IPO would be fine!

And now instead of venture capitalists you have Wall Street to answer to.

(Taking notes) If we IPO, we lose this message board argument. Got it!

Your snarky response actually proves my point. The responses from the individuals (including the CEO) are meaningless without action. The only action (beyond writing words) the company has undertaken is to take money from venture capitalists.

You should look at the Multi-region PostgreSQL feature they did, not their best work imo.

https://fly.io/docs/getting-started/multi-region-databases/

Hey! I love this feature. What don't you like?

That fly-replay header is legit one of the smartest pieces of infrastructure engineering designs I've encountered in years.

I was thinking about adopting this feature in the near future. Would love to know your reservations against it.

Have other people invested money in them? If that's the case, sooner or later they don't call the shots, but rather who owns the capital and wants it to grow.

I think if you look at the companies you like, you'll notice that it's not the investors who call the shots. There are a handful of very large, very profitable, developer focused companies that investors love because they remain developer focused.

There are also companies that never figured it out because "developer focused" is not the right business model for them. Those are, I think, the companies that make us all feel burned.

Heroku is one of those companies where "developer focus" is not the right business model. Salesforce has a model, it's working very well, Heroku's doesn't fit.

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