Render Raises $50M Series B | Hacker News Reader

Render Raises $50M Series B

render.com

97 pointscolesantiago71 comments

I knew when I got hit with the per seat pricing change a few months ago that there were preparing a raise and needed to get those numbers up. Good for them I guess.

Funny enough I had big VC call me for due diligence (because I posted a lot on their forums and they spotted my name) and I happily told them how pissed I was with that change and how I went from vocal evangelist for the platform to looking for an alternative.

That change really sat poorly with me as well. My brother and I have a small pet project that makes zero dollars but we would have had to pay $50/month just to allow him access to the project on Render.

Still not as _terrible_ as Vercel which straight up doesn't deploy if the user isn't a paid org member lol. Now that is shameful as shit!

But this pricing change from Render was bad yeah. :(

I mean I would have accepted it if they had network separation for various environments managed by the same team, but they DON'T (anyone telling you its fine to deploy staging in the same network as prod should be fired IMO). So you have to use different teams and pay X times the seat pricing which is ridiculous.

Network separation within the same team is on our near-term list.

Hi folks, I'm the founder and CEO at Render. With this raise, the company is doubling down on making the cloud delightful for growing software teams who don't want to think about infrastructure.

We're looking for great people to join our team! See render.com/careers for all open roles.

Congrats on the effort you and your company have been putting on Render.

Good luck

First off, congrats.

Second, have you guys had a chance to revise your hiring pipeline? When I spoke to your recruitment team a bit over a year ago they were asking for 8 straight hours on a zoom call as part of the software engineering interview. I had to drop out of the process because fitting that in was exceptionally difficult. (They did offer to split it into 5 and 3 but I still couldn't fit that in). They remarked they were looking to update that process a bit.

The above aside - I remember thinking everyone I spoke to there was pleasant and enjoyed working there. I was sad to have to drop out.

Best of luck moving forward.

> 8 straight hours on a zoom call

I know this is my entitled Big Tech worker bias, but... surely there should be a lunch break?

Not mentioned in the emails I had. They did suggest splitting it into 5 and 3 hour chunks but I couldn't fit it into my schedule (between work and my other half's health issues, I had to move around a lot due to several days of ER visits)

I lead the engineering team and we've reworked our interview process a lot in the last year - it's much shorter and can still be split into multiple days. In addition, we are very aware that everyone has different personal constraints and we do our best to accommodate them. Please just let us know and we can likely make it happen.

What exactly is going on where you need such long zoom meetings?

8 hours is insane, do you compensate people for this time?

Oh, I had to drop out of the process last year and have since found somewhere I'm actually really enjoying. I mostly wanted to follow up so if someone in my network asked me I could give them the most up to date information possible. I'd feel really bad if I was giving out of date information. I'm glad you've updated your process.

Thank you. I agree that ask was a bit much for a lot of candidates; we updated our engineering interviews to be shorter and more manageable a few months ago.

8 hours on a zoom call! That would be a hard pass for me.

Congrats on your funding round!

I was very impressed by render when I was investigating hosting platforms, but if I'm being honest I got scared away by the postgres pricing(free for only 90 days: https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases).

Question: After some more research, I noticed that even among competitors there aren't really any "always free" options(e.g. even AWS directly only offers 1 year free for RDS). What is it that makes free-tier postgres so uncompetitive in comparison to hosted compute? Is it because dedicated disk is more expensive than shared cores?

> even among competitors there aren't really any "always free" options

https://supabase.com/pricing (not affiliated, but a happy user)

Hi @anurag, congrats on this funding round!

I'd like to give it a shot but I often don't get past HR because I'm in (theoretical) CS and lack "real world experience". Which is lame because the stuff I've done from my trench is amazing (source: trust me, lol).

Anyway, I'm really good on the backend, creating high performance REST APIs, documenting them, etc... and know a great deal of postgres.

I also have a good intuition for what's going to stick or not in the field. I was doing AWS ~15 years ago, back when you had to use an ugly SOAP interface to get things done, but I saw the potential and created the first automated cluster of bioinformatic tools in there. Right now, I'm betting on Rust, WASM, V8 isolates, and everything that has to do w/ lightweight function execution.

If that sounds good for render's mission, I'll be glad to take part in it.

AWS had a SOAP API? What timeline are we in again?

Yup, it was a PITA to set up but, when you managed to, having a computer in the cloud that you just "created" with some code felt like magic.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/using...

Render's second engineer (who's still here and doing really well) had no prior professional experience in software and was entirely self-taught. I encourage you to apply!

Am I reading that right that the healthcare benefit only covers a single _dependent_?

From the careers page:

> 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and all your dependents. FSAs available too.

Do you have thoughts on the Heroku->Render dynamic? Is there a name for it? I've seen it enough now to recognize a solid pattern for a successful business:

1. Company starts to do X, makes it a wonderful experience

2. Users love it, it's successful

3. Company stop treating users well

4. New company steps into make X a wonderful experience again, with the advantage that the market is pre-validated.

How much of an advantage is it to know that users want what you're creating? Do you have any tips, like ways to reassure people you won't follow the same dynamic as the original company?

That's an interesting thought. Any company that raises money from VCs will ultimately either fail or end up publicly traded (via IPO or acquisition), and at that point it's just a matter of time before they start squeezing their users.

I wonder what the ideal time is in a company's arc to start their eventual replacement. Render just raised a series B which probably means they're still many years away from step 3, so it's probably too early. But maybe when they're raising a series C or D, it's time to start thinking about making their replacement.

I feel like Stripe is entering that territory right now. Not that they're worse than alternatives, but they no longer have that "wonderful experience" magic because they've started to turn on the maximize shareholder value engine.

I generally agree with your comment, but isn't there an exception for companies that do well enough early enough to let the founders keep control with supervoting stock? Then the founders can do whatever they want... which might be make short term money but doesn't have to be.

A subtle distinction is that it's not Heroku treating users poorly — it's Salesforce, and it's not the same people who were at the company even just ~2 years ago.

With Render, I'd rather show than tell. As an interesting data point, we've now existed as an independent entity longer than Heroku did, and we're truly just getting started.

Definitely. I'm not actually looking for reassurance myself (I've already switched).

I was more asking about the tactics of the situation since it seems really different than the modal "would anyone even want this?" startup. It does seem like "show don't tell" is a good move.

As far as suggestions go, I moved from Heroku to Render but I'm again looking for an alternative. There was something that Heroku had that I'm strongly missing in Render: shared credits, for projects that have low usage.

I have _many_ tiny-usage projects, I'll say "10" but really many more. The thing is, even if you put their usage (resources, network, disk, etc) together it's still a "small" project equivalent, something that could run (capacity-wise) on a single VPS easily for $20-30/month. But the way Render is structured, even if I get 10 requests/month on each of them, I need to pay that per project. Which adds up quickly when you have many small projects as a hobby.

So I'm wondering if something like what Heroku had where there's a shared pool of 2000 credits that I can use among my projects as they get used by people, and when one of them becomes more popular then I can "upgrade" it to have a proper full-instance for each of its parts while keeping the rest of them in the pool.

If I wasn't so bad at devops, here the equivalent is I'd rent a mid-size VPS and have one folder/project, and I would be able to have them all hosted in that server with a lot of capacity to spare for $20-30/total. The way I have it now, if I wanted to host the same thing with Render, it'd be $250+/month only for my active projects. Heck, I think even my Raspberry Pi would be able to run all of these projects of mine properly (again, capacity-wise, I def love Render for its easiness of use).

I had the exact same problem with Render, but I wouldn't expect them to handle this situation because I'm guessing it's kind of an edge case? I ended up using a DigitalOcean Droplet + CapRover to do this, and then wrote a giant article detailing all my steps in case that's useful: https://alldjango.com/articles/serve-multiple-django-sites-f....

I don't think that's an edge case. I'm addicted to creating new side projects and I think there's more of 'us'. These projects usually don't get any traction but I like that they work, they are there, accessible globally.

I'm hosting a few using portainer and cloudflared on Synology NAS. This way everything is free, I have unlimited HDD and 10GB RAM. I keep running into some small issues and the CPU is terrible, but it works. :) Most of the time... Which is enough for me.

https://github.com/tomwojcik/homeserver-traefik-portainer

You just need to create a stack (in portainer) that has access to the git repo and select the compose file. That's more or less it.

Yep, same situation. Looked into render. I liked what I saw (and spun up a trial). But it was going to be expensive for a bunch of low usage projects.

I ultimately went with a large-ish droplet from DO with dokku installed. It’s been great, for the many small sites use case. It doesn’t scale, but that’s fine. When projects get traction the intention is to move them.

Which one has, and is now on AWS. But if we’d been on render I wouldn’t have moved it. I’d just spin up its own db and scale up the processes.

This sounds exactly like what I should do, the thing is I'm already working fulltime and just have time/energy to maintain those projects, maybe move one over from Heroku to Render (low-friction) over some weekend.

To do a bigger migration such as that I'd need a few days of solid personal work to learn how to do everything, I'll try to do it over the summer holidays, thanks!

FWIW Render is moving most of their infrastructure from GCP to AWS https://twitter.com/anuraggoel/status/1670863526272077825

We left AWS for a similar reason and more. The grass always looks greener on the other side, especially when you are mad.

Hard to blame them. Google shutting down Domains, instead of rolling it into Cloud Domains, seems like a harbinger of what they’re planning for Cloud. Why offload it when they have a natural product to put it under, unless they’re also planning to shut down that product?

(Render CEO) We're going to be hybrid and multi-cloud for the foreseeable future. We're reducing our reliance on GCP for some things, but I don't expect us to ever be AWS-only.

Hey Anurag! Thanks for answering our questions here. Just curious, why do most of the new PaaSs (including Render apparently) go for GCP and AWS, instead of a cheaper option like Hetzner? It seems everyday I read another blog post of how switching away from the Big 3 Clouds (or DO) results in massive savings for some company.

Larger platforms have more underlying primitives platforms like Render can use (instances types, networking options, data storage options, regions, etc).

A PaaS (depending on scope) can easily be the most complicated thing to build in the cloud, so the more building blocks you have, the better.

When I hear about a raise, especially this large, my initial thoughts are, "great! they must be doing something right", then I remember all those startups that raised mega rounds and ended up selling me as a customer down the river, either by the way of selling to someone like Google and writing an "amazing journey" blog post or just lock me in and jack up prices (I'm looking at you Customer.io).

That's why I always look for profitable companies that have built a business around solid foundations rather than raising external capital in round B, C, D all the way to Z.

If you want to see how those companies *really* were doing, look at their stock prices after they go public. Very few go up or even stay flat. Most of them crash right after the stock handcuffs come off and the investors have passed the bucket to the general public. I even have an anti-portfolio of public companies with investors who wouldn't shut up for a minute about how amazing they are doing, when they were private companies. All of them have done considerably worse than the market average or any basket of tech companies, even excluding the big five.

Raising during this downturn time on a business that is not AI nor crypto is fairly amazing though.

Have used Render for a few months to run some heavy worker scripts I wanted to place quickly -- it's a solid service but some of the UX is a bit rough and nearest DC to UK is Frankfurt although that turned out to not be an issue

There is a lot they are getting right

I don't understand how any of these cloud wrapper companies will make their VC money back. Doesn't Vercel only have ~$25 million in ARR yet is somehow valued at $2.5 billion [0]?

If a company is using Vercel to start up, they're pretty good for what you get, but eventually AWS (which Vercel wraps) will win out in pricing, even counting hiring devops/cloud/backend engineers.

[0] https://getlatka.com/companies/vercel

A way out for them would be to run their own infrastructure down the line which would allow them to pocket the (insane) margins the cloud providers currently make.

latka is crap seo bloatsite. google should ban them.

rauchg disclosed their revenue trends recently https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1667995063216148480 i learned later that this interview was done in nov 2022

Looks like I can't see the tweet? Also, this lines up with Latka's figures as well, $24 million in 2022, and even with $50 million in 2023, that's still quite low for a $2.5 billion valuation, and that's if they don't raise further, thereby increasing their valuation.

I migrated from Heroku to Render for a small Django project of mine: https://pinnacleclimb.com/

Some things I like about Render vs Heroku since switching:

  - Building the container from the Dockerfile in my repo seems to be a lot faster because it keeps all of the image layers cached.
  - I can control the external IPs that have access to my postgres database. I usually keep them all off and only let the webapp access it internally, and then whitelist an IP as needed.
  - Env groups are nice - if I want to start another service I can have it use all the same environment variables vs trying to keep them in sync myself.

A couple of years ago they had some multi-hour outages but things have been pretty stable since, a couple of the multi-minute outages were on me as I was upgrading the database or messing around with some configs. https://status.pinnacleclimb.com/

One thing I'd love in the future is some sort of postgres upgrade button. They handle minor version updates but to do a major version I need to put the app in maintenance mode, dump, restore, and swap to the new DB. It would be amazing if that could be automated with something like pglogical.

huge congrats to the Render team! especially raising a big round at a time when many VC insiders are saying things like the "series B and above market is closed".

I particularly remember the mad flurry by "cloud distro" startups to capitalize on Heroku essentially shutting down their free tier last year. It's an infrequent thing but I think having a playbook for how to respond when a major competitor churns up their own users on a silver platter is super helpful for future reference.

anything you'd call out as particularly helpful to you in the "post heroku wars" period? looking for specific principles i can extrapolate to other similar situations

I'm loving this post Heroku era of cloud. So exciting!

i mean its also particularly churny. there's no "one standard way to do things" anymore. every framework/open source app launch now has to include instructions for like 4 different deploy targets because people can barely even standardize on helm charts much less how to orchestrate containers without k8s/docker compose (every newroku startup seems to want to reinvent the docker compose file, render included)

not complaining, innovation is good etc, but it doesnt come with out its costs to DX

no magic sauce; the most helpful thing was just staying up despite the massive influx of users and getting even better at fighting platform abuse. This may be very specific to what we do as a cloud provider.

It seems quite interesting.

I would have definitely proposed it to my company, but unfortunately the per-seat pricing is a no-go for us. We are having flexible teams, and we often change people per project or hire from contractors so the user management can quickly become a mess on per-seat projects.

We will end-up creating some shared accounts to save on costs, and it will become messy to manage, some people will be denied access,... so unfortunately we will need to pass.

Power Render user for 18 months now. We are a fan. Congrats Anurag and team.

When I first saw this on twitter, I thought Render was a cloud GPU company.

There is a token named Render token for distributed rendering, created by the GPU rendering company OTOY. As far as I know they had the name first?

What's the meaning behind the name "Render"? I've a background in graphics tech so to me render is rendering pixels, something that Render does not do.

verb: (1) Provide or give (a service, help, etc.); (2) Cause to be or become; make.

A company can “render a service” to someone. It’s not commonly used in English anymore but it’s definitely valid.

Anyone have a sense of their revenue/valuation? Would be interesting to get a calibration as we've seen relatively fewer raises lately.

I was always of the impression that this is an extremely crowded space.

What does Render bring to the table that's new?

This feels like an extremely _sparse_ space as a user. There was Heroku, which was the undisputed hero when launched and for many years, until they got acquired and things started going down and down. Then currently AFAIK there's Fly and Render, and very few alternatives.

AWS/GCS is not in the same space, they are a lot lower level. For someone like me I'd hate having to move to AWS/GCS, I just want to code my project locally, git push and it's live, no fumble with devops stuff. Also Firebase etc is a bit too high level for what I like, I still like to build the project locally and have it run on my computer fully.

> until they got acquired and things started going down and down.

In Heroku's defense, much of what we know and love them for was started before Salesforce acquired them, but then was accelerated and launched while under Salesforce. They just got very stagnant after a while and focused more on Salesforce integrations and that lately.

It's not crowded at all. There's four big kahunas I see competing:

- Render

- Railway

- Northflank

- Fly

From easiest to hardest, in the sense of Heroku like to AWS like, I would scale them like so:

    Heroku------------------------------AWS
    Render     Railway    Northflank    Fly

Render is definitely the easiest, most friendly and predictable of the four.

Like the text based diagram, clever! I'd place Cloud 66 in the middle.

I'm a fan of render. As easy to set up as Heroku. Runs distributed Elixir like a charm.

Is Netlify not in there somewhere? I guess I'm not sure what Netlify is focused on.

I don't consider them or vercel part of this type of hosting. Those two are strictly javascript/node, or so it appears to me.

I don't see how you would host a Phoenix project in Vercel.

I loved tender initially, but the recent price increase pushed me to move away from it. I think the platform is good, but prices are steep.

Does anyone use Render at scale? I image the bills are hefty.

I'd rather stay with Supabase+Hugging Face API endpoints or just straight up raw dog it with DO/Lambda/Banana.dev

It looks economical to raw dog it with banana.dev: $.00207968/second for a 40GB A100.

>delightful

Im seeing a lot of startups using this word, why?? It sounds silly, like you're selling me a childrens toy? You're not delightful, its not a 50's musical number.

Its just the word dejour.

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