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Comment by jrudolph | Hacker News Reader

The appeal of a no-ops workflow for basic frontend apps is there. We’ve got a bunch of static docs sites built with vuepress and docusaurus that are a great fit for this. Not that we can’t whip up a CDN with terraform and a CI/CD pipeline with preview environments, but my team would rather spend its energy on our core product.

However we’ve been badly burned by vercel, netlify and render.com switching their pricing models to user based instead of infrastructure based pricing. We’re migrating to AWS amplify right now, which also happens to be wonderfully integrated into our wider IT landscape with an AWS landing zone, automated internal chargeback etc. It’s 90% the same for our use case and charges only for infra at standard AWS rates.

At this point I’m starting to wonder why it isn’t more popular.

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> At this point I’m starting to wonder why it isn’t more popular.

The last time I tried it, most of the "automagic" quickly turned into "do everything by hand if you don’t want to get burned, and oh, we say we handle this use case but, as obliquely mentioned in passing, you really shouldn’t use it. Also, we don’t see the point in having our CLI tool spit anything more than the most generic errors.

What? What do you mean access control? What is that?"

I ended up on Firebase.

And, on my current project, found a single-table DynamoDB to be more reliable and predictable.

But perhaps things have improved since then?

Amplify is the most vendor-specific locked in stack you could possibly choose.

If you don't want to be burned by vendors changing the pricing model on you, don't choose a proprietary stack to build on.

I’m pretty confident of all the players in that market AWS is the least likely to pull that move.

It's obviously a trade off. But we've been running a GitHub Action/Gitlab Job/pick-your-poison task, to just dump build output on an FTP server. It's just static websites, and it has never broken.

In my mind, this is so basic, that anyone (who is a developer), should be able to do it. But that's just my take.

I've been wondering what the limits of the user-based pricing actually are

If it's just the number of people who can go in the UI and press the button (when it automatically gets deployed from git anyway), or change env secrets, can't you just have a single admin account and call it "one user"? That could be a single actual person (how often do you change those things?) or could even be a single account shared by the whole team

What am I missing?

On netlify iirc pricing was for every git committer that was allowed to trigger a deploy.

Render.com was more lenient in a model like you describe but still we have different people manage different apps and it adds up.

Ouch. By git committer sounds brutal

It’s simple. It’s not more popular because of bad UX. I would not be surprised if the best customer that Vercel chasing is also a customer that can add these costs to their customer or take a hit on the margin.

Bad UX. Mediocre DX. Average documentation. Unreliable tools.

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