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Comment by fhd2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty happy with fly.io, except for one thing: I moved over two apps from Heroku, lured by the free tier. But you do have to enter your credit card details whether or not you intend to pay. And then they do charge me a few bucks per month for an almost completely unused app.

It's probably all in line with the ToS and everything, but I find it a bit shady that I have to investigate this, rather than having a free offering that doesn't suddenly charge me.

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It's not a free offering; there is a free allowance. If you exceed that you get charged:

- Up to 3 shared-cpu-1x 256mb VMs

- 3GB persistent volume storage (total)

- 160GB outbound data transfer

If you spin up, say, 4 VMs you will pay for it.

I probably have to fiddle with the settings to stay within 3 CPUs, but since it was heavily recommended as an alternative to Heroku's free tier, I'm a bit disappointed I have to. Maybe they never intended to be recommended for that, don't know.

I haven't used it, but from what I know it's not a very good analogue to Heroku (other than being an easy-ish/dev-focused host). Their pricing model is pretty different

True, Heroku allowed as many dynos as you want when their free tier existed, however, they had a limit of 1,000 hours per month. That pretty much meant you couldn't run more than 1 VM (~744 hours/month) for free. Fly.io is more generous as those 3 free VMs can be up and running all the time (but VMs have 256MB of RAM instead of 512).

Right now the most generous free tier is from Oracle (24GB RAM machines feels unreal). But you can find other free tier offerings here: https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev

I tried to look at OCI but was immediately bamboozled with a slow as heck web site (locations table took 15 seconds to load!), a tonne of management BS about "aligning strategic objectives to operational constraints in a dynamic environment" and then was expected to immediately book a call with a salesperson.

No thanks Oracle even for 24GB free VMs!

Go to Oracle’s subreddit. It’s full of people whose free trial accounts were terminated.

"zombiefied" would be better description. Account exists but you don't have permission to do anything and you don't even have permission(lol) to upgrade to paid account

And you don't even have access to your data to backup or migrate.

They will yeet your machines without any info tho. I had test (smallest in free tier) VM that just got destroyed one day.

But that is not all

My account is now "inactive", with no option to activate it and with no option to even pay and upgrade to paid tier.

The account is in some broken state where half of the dialogues produce dialogues like "Authorization failed or requested resource not found", like I had account with permissions denied to everything.

Even the "upgrade to paid tier" option gives

> You do not have access to perform this operation. Please contact your cloud account administrator for additional access.

Utter fucking disgrace

On top of what other people said: capacity for the free tier machines is very limited. I wanted one to fool around with and it took multiple weeks of trying daily at varying times before I was able to actually allocate a VM.

The free tier is 256mb per vm (up to 3 VMs). You can't use or increase VM's memory to 512 or you will be charged.

OTOH they don't even charge you if your bill is less than $5/month. I've had an app do nothing for a few months now, and my bills are always just thrown away due them being under $5.

That's something I wonder about looking at AWS. My personal account has about $0.7 monthly spend. Doesn't it cost more to charge a credit card?

A few months ago, I found out I had an AWS account from college that was racking up $0.50/month in charges. After 40 months, I finally got an email from AWS warning me to pay the $20 or they'd just close my account. I paid it, and closed my account, but I guess I could've just left if I wanted to.

Good to know. I'm paying anyway because I have other accounts there with bigger charges and I actually want the service, including the small personal account (which really shows as a separate transaction on a bank statement).

I am guessing that 50cents per month is a Route53 hosted zone from one of your experiments with hosting a website?

You may want to check if you also have a domain name purcahed through route53 that is set for automatic renewal every 3 years or whatever

That's a good point, and you're spot-on about the Route53 zone. I did close my AWS account already. I'm hoping it just kind of doesn't renew that domain name.

Yes. But building an exception into the billing system and possibly accumulating charges below $x over a longer period might just not be worth the effort.

AWS regularly cancels my invoices if they're under 1EUR, I assume precisely because it costs them more to do the transaction.

My concern (for non-paying or low-paying side projects) is not so much the difference between $5 and $10 for monthly hosting - that's like the difference between one or two cups of coffee - but what safeguards are in place to prevent me from inadvertently exceeding an expected amount due to a high traffic spike, misconfigured cloud function or whatever.

So I don't really care if one service costs x2 if the difference is between 5 and 10, but I care a lot if I could accidentally end up with a $2000 bill one day (and warnings don't count - not much good if I get a warning if I'm away from my laptop in a log cabin or something).

I guess that's the modus operandi of the Cloud providers - fake your concern by an useless warning and hope that no one will react before they'll rake up the bill.

That's why I stay away from e.g. AWS for side projects, too many histories of a stupid mistake that costed quite a bit of money when all that is needed is some breaker if usage is exceeded beyond a point.

We don't suddenly charge people. We charge per VM you have running. Setting these up is intentionally manual. You can opt in to autoscaling, which will create new VMs for you, but you have to set that up after you've deployed your app.

If you're getting charged you should run `fly apps list` and see if you have more than two apps running.

One thing that trips people up is Postgres. Postgres is just another fly app. So if you moved two apps with DBs, you're probably running four total apps. We prompt you for database info when you do this, though, it's not done in the background.

One problem we've come across is expectations from Heroku users. We are very different (like the Postgres thing, there's no shared tenant postgres). People expect us to be the same. We haven't figured out how to expose those differences to people in a way that sticks.

> One thing that trips people up is Postgres. Postgres is just another fly app.

Sounds like there may be room for improvement in your documentation.

Perhaps because I'm not used to Heroku and such so I have different expectations, but I found it quite clear. There's a list as soon as you open the dashboard that looks like

    Apps
    -----------------------------------------
     myappname                shared-cpu-1x
     myappname-db         1GB shared-cpu-1x

https://fly.io/docs/postgres/

Second paragraph

Huh? I had a VM running and a postgres running without entering my credit card. I only needed it when I had to temporarily scale up the RAM on my VM

Same, then my coworker signed up and had to enter a credit card. No idea on the discrepancy!

Hm do they itemize the charges? what are they for?

CPU - I would assume it's not a mistake, maybe if I dig some more I can figure out how to keep within the allowance, but on Heroku I never had to deal with this kind of thing for free apps.

I agree, as an individual user I much prefer to be locked in to a fixed rate. And not just for the free tier- I don't want surprises even if I'm already paying

As a company with a cushion, hosting a profitable app, it might be worth doing the usage-based pricing to try and save some money. But the risk is just not worth it for smaller projects

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