We raised a bunch of money
fly.io
fly.io
Generally speaking (I'm not a fly.io customer) at this point that phrase WORRIES me as a customer of any service.
It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant flow of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for isn't a realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system or platform that is getting stretched larger and larger regardless of income and the more money they raise the harder the fall will be.
It's unfortunate but for me it's not a phrase I want to see. I want to hear how they are profitable based on their operations and paying customers or other non VC or IPO type income. That gives me confidence in their stability.
To be clear that's not a disagreement with the title or blog, seems like a fine article that is fairly up front, but it's hard for me to really see "we raised a bunch of money" as a positive from a customer perspective anymore.
This is where I always get burned. As they get larger and larger, and the product gets more complex, they see it as value that I'm not paying for, but I see it as negative value because I'm forced to deal with all the added complexity that I don't even want. Then, one day, they decide I shouldn't be "freeloading" on their super awesome platform and change pricing to something that isn't even close to reasonable for me.
It's like hiring someone to cut your grass and a few years later you go outside to find 3 guys on riding lawnmowers telling you that prices are going up because obviously you're not paying enough to cover the costs of the service you're getting. It's not my fault they scaled their business to accommodate customers with 10 acre lawns and assumed I needed the same level of service, but I'm the one left without lawn care.
Any time I read an announcement like this I refresh my knowledge of competitors and make a mental note that it might be time to switch soon.
> It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant flow of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for isn't a realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system or platform that is getting stretched larger and larger regardless of income and the more money they raise the harder the fall will be.
If you're an investor that's a valid concern. But as a user? I've been happy to have VC funding subsidize my food via Hello Fresh etc. whenever I'm inclined.
It's not the same though because you're the end consumer in that scenario and there's no downside to the business disappearing tomorrow.
Instead, imagine if you built a restaurant serving food you get from Hello Fresh. How do you price your meals to ensure you're covering the true cost of you inputs? Can you compete with the guy down the street that isn't smart enough to realize part of their supply chain is being subsidized in an unsustainable way? Probably not.
The whole setup simply makes for bad economics IMO. I'm glad people in tech are finally catching on that VC money is the equivalent of an unsustainable, hidden subsidy that's difficult (or impossible) to calculate.
Seems like a flawed business strategy. Ex: I currently use AWS, Linode, and Vultr for different regions and services for a single app. Avoiding vendor lock-in isn't trivial but is definitely something you can design for.
For anything I want to trust or rely on, or it is a nice n trivial task to switch I start to worry.
(not privy to inside information) As a customer that would be a catastrophic outcome. Reckon Fly.io could avoid the temptation better than most given the founding team has already had one exit (mongohq/compose.io) and might not feel the urge to sell out again.
"Yes John, I used to think that too...but you see, if we sell then we unlock more opportunities that will be quite...nourishing...for the business."
In other words, it's really easy to avoid temptation when it's not staring you in the face.
Solid prediction. It is more likely than unlikely that this will be the outcome. Once you raise VC funds the exit clock starts ticking.
When I see such a message from a service where I'm a customer, it removes worry.
- It validates the product.
- It tells me that they're more likely to succeed than their competitors.
- I'm confident they won't go away anytime soon.
- I expect them to improve their product faster.
> - I expect them to improve their product faster.
These are... very much not guaranteed in my experience. For a lot of these products, they may as well go away when they switch to a model that is 10x more expensive unless you gut features 3-4 years down the road, and it's not clear the improvements they make are to the benefit of existing customers vs chasing new ones.
To me that whole list is determined by actually turning a profit based on your operations, not some VC.
I want to see a clear sensible path to sustainable profitability for my core software vendors and I want to see some competition, not too much not too less, just enough.
Unfortunately, very very few companies fall in that narrow category
So true it hurts
I suspect that later starters like Fly, Cloudflare, etc with their approaches of (more or less) compute at edge with no concept of region etc will grow more and more to dominate the cloud space with AWS region-based approaches primarily relegated to "legacy applications" that are stuck there. It may take a generation or so to get there but more and more the next crop of startups, etc are building on things like Fly instead of AWS and friends.
When I think about it the region based approaches are more akin to "hosted elastic datacenter" than they are what could be described as a "true cloud" - where it's just everywhere and not even a consideration.
I've never seen anything even remotely hinting at region or geography in their product line other than geo-routing for load balancing products, headers with geo info for you to do something with, etc. They include the serving "POP" in headers for diagnostic purposes but other than that you have no idea.
Where do my Workers run? Don't know, don't care. They are substantially cheaper and offer better availability and response times than their region-based "cloud" competitors. Same for KV, D1, R2, and anything else they come up with as they move further and further in (out?).
One would expect with them having the ability to allocate supporting hardware dynamically and globally their cost basis is substantially better than having customer facing and controlled region-based resources that still need to be built out for product support (regardless of usage) AND maintain the excess capacity local to each region to be anywhere near "elastic".
The actual difference, at least how Cloudflare pushes it, is in the software; its a higher layer of abstraction; that customers get to stop thinking about regions and locations. Your software is global; its deployed everywhere; it runs everywhere.
This is ENTIRELY antithetical to everything on AWS except CloudFront, Route53, IAM(ish), maybe a couple other minor services. Every Single Thing Every Single AWS Customer configures beyond those global services forces you into a region. Want to deploy a lambda function? Which region would you like? Pricing and available products is different in every region. Fronting it with an API? Where would you like that API Gateway? We'll put CloudFront in front of it so its a bit faster for ya, its global(ish), don't worry.
In a no-true-scottsman true-edge world, this goes out the window. Cloudflare Workers is like this; D1 is kinda-ish-there-ish; R2 isn't. Here's the code; spider it across the world; automatically route clients to your closest PoP. No regions. No locations.
Its not obvious that AWS will ever make meaningful moves to a world like this, for a ton of reasons, but most meaningfully: it requires customer demand; but AWS's existing customers aren't demanding it, because AWS's customers are old CTOs worried about past quarters too much to think about the next one. The younger, smarter, potential customers who recognize how valuable this is aren't AWS's customers; so AWS never hears from them (which, by the way, should more generally concern Amazon's investors; their "relentless customer driven" approach to their products is great for a few decades, but its absolutely true that most of the time customers just want a faster horse, and you're not hearing from the people who aren't your customers because you've never solved their problems before). So, Amazon has dumped billions upon billions into their couple-dozen giga-regions; you cannot pivot that into hundreds upon hundreds of mini-regions like what Cloudflare (and to a lesser but still awesome degree Fly) has.
Vercel is the best case study on this. They are exploding in popularity. They don't run any of their own infra afaik, to be clear, but they whitelabel products from Cloudflare, Neon, and others; all Edge infra providers. No one on Vercel is cross-shopping AWS, and AWS has nothing that feels competitive to what Vercel offers. They can't compete.
The outcome, in maybe 10-20 years, of this landscape feels really obvious right now, but AWS's size and the insane scale of their investment into "how we did things in 2010" will turn them into the next IBM. Some would say they already are. There's nothing they can do about it. They're not making the right investments. Even if they wanted to, they can't at the necessary scale, because what they're doing is working right now and their existing customers keep forcing them to spend more money building more structures, more racks, more blades, all in Ashburn VA.
When state is introduced, then CAP/PACELC distributed systems issues arise, and figuring out approaches to deal with them are a must. Read fly’s Postgres docs, and regions come right back in.
Only the most trivial business systems can operate without any state.
If your application has any sort of shared, mutable state, you absolutely need to pick a region, or go really deep into the EC/consensus/clustering rabbit hole. With a dedicated region with 1 big DB, you can achieve latency figures (over the shared state) that would be infeasible with other schemes. Serializing transactions in a distributed manner is a circus compared to what Postgres has to do to achieve the same.
For better or worse, sticking a big SQL database in exactly one region will almost always be the best path for most forms of business. If latency/edge are still a concern at this point, that's when we maybe start talking about more specific geographies and standing up read replicas in those regions. In my experience, if you are peddling B2B webapps, no one will ever complain about east vs west coast latency unless you actually screwed something up in code.
I point to Cloudflare (what I'm most familiar with). Across their entire stack of compute, storage, db, etc product lines you won't see a hint of region anywhere. It just works, everywhere. Same with Fastly/Oracle (although they like Fly are quite a ways behind Cloudflare).
I suspect (hope) that as Fly matures their apparent true goal of edge and region-less applications will mature more. Their compromises on region awareness for DB has always struck me as a more of a resource restraint compromise on their part than end goal. As you say these challenges are hard (expensive).
But that's just not true. Tons of cloud services completely abstract the computer out of the picture. You are paying for capacity or throughput as an abstract unit of cost and the cloud configures as many computers as needed to run your request. You never interact with anything resembling a computer in this situation.
I'm currently at a startup that started on Aptible a few years ago because there was a lack of expertise in systems development. We're now in the process of migrating to AWS natively because of cost savings (it's why I was hired). Aptible is costing us 3-4x what native AWS will. Yes, we're incurring some operational overhead, but the automation and tooling for managing infra is reasonably mature (Terragrunt & Terraform aren't perfect, but they work well enough).
Ultimately, startups may start with higher-level cloud providers, but they'll eventually migrate to lower-level providers eventually. At the higher end of the growth curve, companies likely wind up getting back to on-prem in some way.
AWS does have local zones and has Lambda at Edge. I will be the first to admit though that the local zones are tied to regional zones and that some global services are tied to us-east-1 like IAM.
Passing HIPAA data through other countries when not needed to is generally frowned upon - data should be kept as local as reasonably possible. I haven’t worked with GDPR requirements but I have heard they are similar. AWS solved this problem well with regions. I’m curious what other providers that are “regionless” do to solve the compliance problem.
But it is rarely true for enterprise customers. They want the guarantees their data never leaves certain regions even in a request along with other security and compliance guarantees.
(The comment I'm responding to said something about people in glass houses not throwing stones, but was then edited).
I'm really concerned that Fly's employees like yourself think availability and service uptime isn't important. I think I'll be avoiding Fly on this alone.
Money doesn't contribute all that much to solving it though. It's usually time to make the early mistakes, continuous improvements, etc. But AWS had several decades to solve this, whereas fly clearly hasn't, so I'm not sure I'd count them out yet.
Their brand marketing is impeccable as a result. Every post on their blog comes through with this very clear, slightly snarky voice.
If you want to be a famous hacker, you must also be a slightly (industry) famous author.
Their tone of voice reminds me of early Slack before that became rote and boring.
Doing stuff isn't enough - you also need to communicate to the Earth that you have done stuff.
Snarky is passable in open source, a genius whose abrasive manner is the cost of the amazing product.
In a corpo it's sleazy
Was it just articles or more?
can you explain this part of the joke?
It's not intended to be taken literally (I assume).
Must be gerrymandering or something, maybe aided by voter suppression by English speakers against those in the county whose native language is x86-64.
https://www.loudoun.gov/177/Coat-of-Arms
"Where Tradition Meets Innovation" appears to be a branding push by the county dating to 2019 rather than an official motto. https://www.loudoun.gov/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/8563
Cheers, guys.
I've been at a bunch of companies with a bunch of raises. 100% of the time, the announcement was an excuse for press. If you can come up with any excuse to get an article published in a bunch of tech press (other than "CEO arrested for embezzlement + harassment at the same time"), you get a bunch of free advertising. Bonus points if your target customer tends to read tech press.
There's nothing wrong with that, to be clear! I'm just surprised they acknowledged mercenary reasons without mentioning what I've seen as the most common one.
If people started clicking more on tech stories that didn't have funding announcements, maybe the cycle would change... But it feels like we're in some kind of Prisoner's Dilemma game now. Those stories don't written, so they don't get the clicks, so they don't get written...
I'm somewhat sympathetic to both the press and the readers here - they want to report/read news. Events. "Company X continues to exist" isn't really news. And "Company X adds new feature Y" is rarely noteworthy news, no matter how big a deal it is in Company X. Sometimes new features are news if either the company is huge ("Amazon adds support for Foo to AWSBar") or it's strategically significant ("Company X adds feature Y, now putting it in direct competition with Company Z"), but I think those are the exceptions.
Just like press coverage is 3rd-party validation to potential customers that a company is actually worth considering.
Although I see your point about it just being to get the name of the company out there, that's definitely one mercenary motivation that the post maybe did not mention.
Cost to make article = $2000
Article gets 100,000 views
Fly.io converts 1% of views to paying customers
1,000 new customers.
Revenue per customer = $10 monthly
MRR goes up by $10,000
Obviously I am pulling these numbers out of my ass, but there a pretty direct path to value.
This is way more efficient than Google ads in a competitive space, I can only imagine hosting related ads are $3-5 per click...
Advertising a raise specifically is to get attention from customers and the industry as a legitimized successful operation.
It's less about "excuse for press" and more "controlling the narrative". Raising this amount will mean that other news outlets will pick up on it. Technically, as I recall, it's public information (I founded a company and this was all explained to me - but it was years ago).
So if you don't publish they will. You're much better off publishing first so that people read your post, not theirs.
TL;DR: It's an appendix slide in your first meeting deck, don't put it up front :)
So I guess 400 bank accounts would be enough?
I get how this looks profitable on paper, because Fly charges for compute, and hardware and bandwidth are cheap. But the real expense is r&d, marketing and SBC and those will rule out profitability at any scale. These are not one-time expenses. You have to keep spending forever or your customers will leave. We’ve seen this time and time again. Heroku isn’t the only example. It’s the tragedy of platform/infra startups.
Yes, it's true that if you become as big as AWS then economy of scale starts to work in your favor again. But that outcome is so unlikely it's not worth thinking about. The realistic best case outcome is that they become a mid-sized cloud provider, like Digital Ocean. And Digital Ocean, in business for 11 years and having raised 500m (pre IPO) is still losing money. Linode, after 20 years of struggle, ultimately gave up and sold for $900m last year. Even the best case outcome looks pretty bleak.
I've been building a little hobby-ish project recently to serve a gaming community I'm in (Splatoon) and I've been using fly.io for it. Being able to run it in multiple regions is useful for this in my opinion because the Splatoon community isn't just concentrated in one place, it's all over. If I hosted in the US then players from Japan would suffer and vice versa.
Even if this little project doesn't go anywhere, I still see it as a (probably) rather useful experience for someday when I'm like, out of school and stuff.
It's really neat to learn about I think. Right now I have it running in the Eastern US, Amsterdam, and Tokyo for about $10/month.
... except "once it scales", you realise that you're paying through the nose for cloud services "because growth", so you end up looking at on-prem again, and finally decide it's better value?
Sell spades during a gold rush.
Playful jab on Cloudflare and Deno. Would be interesting if Fly took up hosting "WASM containers" in addition to Docker containers.
I think, the jab on Cloudflare was the "get a salesperson to call" part.
Afaiu they're asserting their next goal is to make edge-ify-ing Rails+PG apps trivial / a "two hour problem".
That's pretty bold...historically that's required very app/framework/domain-specific concerns/coupling around "what's the best way (if possible) to shard this domain model", and solving it as PaaS/IaaS basically means writing/running a distributed CloudSQL / Aurora.
Which I guess if it's "just" running an Aurora clone/neon seamlessly in their stack, that seems doable/achievable + very worthwhile as a value-add/product.
Can they build enough features to make fly.io a serious option for companies? I just can't see myself using it or pushing for it at any of the companies I've worked for unless it's a <5 person team with no need to scale in sight.
We have good unit economics. The riskiest, most terrifying thing we've done is start with our own hardware.
For dev focused infrastructure, what we need to do is attract a lot of devs, get them to take us to work, and then help their employers build better stuff over a long period of time. This takes _forever_ because companies-with-procurement-processes are designed to not buy critical infrastructure from startups.
It's working for us so far, even if it's not for you yet.
> there's a market price for this stuff and we don't have pricing power.
> We couldn't raise prices for VMs even if we wanted to
> the profitability path for us is reasonably simple: have good unit margins
How do these square up? How can you reliably maintain good margins if your competitors set your prices? And your competitors have the scale to, for instance, design and manufacture their own hardware rather than buying off-the-shelf chips.
I would think the key would be not to accept being a commodity whose prices can be directly compared with other hosters.
I have no doubt that fly.io is a market leader right now just judging just by optics, but I think it is hard to maintain that lead in this segment just as I think it may be difficult to go upmarket with this type of product.
Those things are so slow (for reasons which escape my small brain).
I get that this doesn't push your app servers to the edge, but even if you did that you still pay the latency cost of hitting your database in the bunker in Virginia. For many (most?) apps this seems worse as you are making many round trips to the db for a single web request. I would rather pay the latency cost on the web request, and have fast access to the database from the app server.
Seems like fly's target audience is mostly static content?
I personally believe that could be true, but their investors going to find out ;)
But is there a limit to how boring you can go? Can you truly, fully abstract over distributed systems stuff like eventual consistency and its basically random effects on UX in certain usage edge cases?
Or do you think 'boring' will have to meet you in the middle with frameworks and developer mindset also shifting over time to a more edge-first world?
[1] - https://fly.io/blog/docker-without-docker/ [2] - https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchest...
I also liked Heroku, so it's sad to see their status now.
Is fly competitive with this? These sorts of calculations are always awkward for me with PaaS providers. I know what i'm getting with $5/m with DO, but with PaaS it often feels abstracted and sneaky. Heroku in my very, very old memory was a continual set of asterisks.. but i'm probably being unfair and PTSD'y.
Think i should give Fly a look? I at least find their SQLite features super interesting
Persistent volumes are $0.15/gb each.
Not too far off, depending on how much data you have. However the platform has different tradeoffs than a single DigitalOcean VM. You'll get better uptime percentages on a single DO VM than you will on a single VM Fly app. You may not notice, but it's statistically true.
If so i'll probably give it a try!
edit: Regardless, going to give it a try. I was totally set on just using DO because i wanted something dumb and simple. This sounds like it might offer me that, plus not having to manage the OS. I really, really like that if i can keep pricing similar.
Bandwidth costs might become a concern, but i can always migrate to DO/etc if needed. Hopefully not, hah.
edit2: Looks like Fly has pre-paid billing[1], though i'm unclear if i can replicate the functionality i'm asking about. In this case i'd need a prepaid limit and a subscription to fill pre-paid with $N once a month.
Prepaid by itself is at least something, if nothing else exists. Just super annoying if you forget to add money.
[1]: https://community.fly.io/t/can-i-set-a-billing-limit-per-mon...
Under $5/month you pay nothing at the moment.
https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/
You need to look at the following for pricing:
- Compute
- Volumes (attached SSD, one per compute instance) - $0.15/GB/month.
- Bandwidth - if you go over 160GB you have to pay per GB.
Gut feel, ~$5/month should be fine for a small project as long as you’re not storing loads of data or doing something that requires lots of bandwidth.
If your project is used irregularly and HTTP based, you can also scale compute down to 0 machines. It’ll boot up again when you get a HTTP request. In my experience it took ~3s or so to boot up a NestJS app on a small VM, totally acceptable for a dev environment.
I’d say if static pricing is important to you stick with DO.
Amen to that.
Nice to see somebody who has raised a ton of money, and yet is still being smart with it.
But I suppose the difficult question is, "Why shouldn't Fly's potential customers also run their own hardware?"
You can only build so many company margins on top of capital expenditures.
What does this new round mean for Fly's long term independence?
We're to the point where we're making $10-25mm capital expenditures in one go. And we have to to optimize our own costs. Optimizing our own costs means long term independence.
What I think I've learned about VCs is: the trick to long term independence is to find investors who already value the sales mechanism. Bottoms up, dev focused "sales" is something investors like, now (this was not true in 2012).
Kudos to these companies, the VCs, and the beta testers.
Or at least make it friendly to Dark Reader (a well known browser extension for sites that don't implement a dark mode). Currently all your code blocks are black rectangles under it (easy to turn the offending style off using dev tools).
I wrote a simple library to deploy with docker compose that includes logging, metrics, and a few other utils. https://lostdock.com
In any case, congrats to their team and VCs on the round!
Further, there are features that aren't really tenable unless you get lag under control (somehow, either by eliminating it or by taming it with cashing, prediction, and interpolation). Game servers are everyone's canonical example here, but really any kind of real-time feature fits the bill. Now, most CRUD applications don't have real-time features, so this might not be a big motivator. But one subtle bet we're making is that more apps would do interesting real-time things if it that latency problem was easy to solve.
The big problem you have if you're working on these problems is that it's very difficult to fit into this kind of latency budget if all your stuff is hosted in Loudoun County, because the speed of light is eating most (all?) of that 100ms.
That's the logic of wanting to get deployed in multiple cities simultaneously. There's more than one way to do it! We're just one possible solution.
Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for customers and employees (primarily) in the extreme long term?
My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding. Hopefully others adopt this heuristic because by raising tons of money, so you are explicitly creating an adversarial relationship between the customers/users and your investors so everyone but your founding team and investors in the long term is worse off.
Edit: I’ve been a HN power user since 2012 - don’t ask me why I’m here.
If it costs $40 to acquire a new customer, and you expect a customer to stick around for long enough to spend $90 then it's totally worth doing that, but you need $40 now to make 90$ over some period of time.
That being said, there's certainly many businesses that raised too much money based on bullshit, had the founders take money off the top, and then have to drastically change to become sustainable, especially in the ZIRP era. But I don't see that happening here.
No, it's not. It's emotionally manipulative propaganda that is thinly-veiled political ranting, and so is your comment, and neither belong on HN. Stick to interesting, intellectually stimulating discussion, please.
I don't think you can build an interesting public cloud without raising money, unfortunately. At least, not without jumping back in time 25 years and starting then.
Just because a startup might raise prices in the future shouldn't stop you from using their products - with a caveat, that is, how easy it is to shift to another operator. I haven't used fly.io personally, so I don't know about that - could you elaborate on shifting to another provider just in case?
Only if your condition is that you want to do it in the next 3 years.
Given 15, I imagine quite a lot is possible.
Do you provide a seamless offboarding experience?
Or do you lock in customers?
They literally run physical servers all over the world (at least, that's my understanding from their website). I've got to imagine then that this business has huge capital costs, and it's nearly impossible to grow a very capital intensive business without outside capital.
I don't disagree with your main point. Everyone has seen "enshittification" eventually take over all tech startups as they switch the focus from satisfying users to satisfying investors. But I just don't see how you build a business that requires running servers all over the world without a lot of capital.
I genuinely struggle to understand how Fly.io managed (manages) to have this much physical server presence to date, having raised only ~$16M prior to this round. Hire a dozen engineers and that money starts to go fast. The regions page [1] shows 34 cities largely across 4 continents, but technically across 6 if you count the 1 region each in Africa and Australia.
Maybe they have managed to get inside other existing cloud's data centers and it's not literally their own physical hardware, or behind-the-scenes they are leasing collocated servers, etc.
I would love some insight here if one of the founders in the thread sees this.
That's the promise of pay-per-minute (or even second) cloud computing, right? You don't spend what you don't need _right now_.
But Fly.io makes a good point about reaching critical mass to discuss better prices from their vendors. I can totally understand that.
> There are customers who are comfortable engaging with tiny Fly.io, and others who are comfortable engaging with the Fly.io that raised an additional $70MM led by EQT ventures
There's the other kind of customer who sees that "$70MM led by EQT ventures" is a liability and will inevitably screw over their customers at a later date.
It's a given you realize how antagonistic you're being here, so I guess my only other question is why seek attention like this?
I like the Fly.io folks! But asking questions should never be off the table; how else would you be curious?
[1] https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
(it is unfortunate that something with so much value and enjoyment like HN is a product of an investment firm, but a component of life is compromise; enjoy it like you would a public good while it lasts)
Why do missionaries go where no one believes their religion already? The idea that you must already be a believer in some community to participate in the community makes little sense and certainly isn't a good way to make progress.
> I guess my only other question is why seek attention like this?
Would you also characterize your own reply as mere attention seeking?
I don’t think anyone wants HN to become an echo chamber that believes VC funding is the solution to all problems.
My hot take is that these platforms are relying on an influx of new developers who need a friction free way to build and deploy applications to learn and showcase while selling to companies that don’t have time or budget to create a full dev team and CI/CD environment, creating both sides of supply and demand. Pricing is engineered in a way such that it gets very expensive the moment before companies notice how much cost it incurs but the cost to switch aways is much higher.
I agree with the heuristic of avoiding VC-backed products, it fosters incentives that often leave otherwise loyal customers holding the bag for a product who price does not match the service provided. It is for this reason I consider high vendor-lock-in products rather insidious.
First, businesses aren't in the business of leaving money on the table. That is fine for a non-profit, but ultimately they need to weigh money making with customer satisfaction and growth. It's crazy to think a business should not optimize here.
Second, you're conflating venture-funded consumer businesses with B2B businesses. Consumer businesses with venture funding are typically going to fuel growth/momentum by doing things which don't scale. But eventually push comes to shove. B2B business models are usually more transparent about what is a promotion and what is not. Consumer businesses don't always know how the business model is going to play out to even offer that transparency.
Third, if your business model is advertising and data is your moat, then when you give away your data via API to promote distribution, yes you run into an issue later on when you need to advertise or you have underinvested somewhere (in Reddit's case it was mobile). For Reddit or Twitter, these mobile apps were profiting off their users/data while taking on none of the costs (infrastructure, moderation, etc.), and limiting their means of monetizing themselves. You don't need an investor to tell you that isn't in your long term interest.
Nothing is forever. Five years is a long time. People need motivation. Enjoy and make use of things while they last. Nobody owes you anything.
But you have options.
You can have a business genius build a company that delivers great product forever without grinding employees into the dust, burning up founders and still outmaneuvering competitors.
You can have no product or a company going under because founders have stretched them thin, burned out and went broke ruining their lives pursuing a good idea that morphed into a sunken cost.
Or you can crazy pricing models justified by the desire to live like a VC LP while shipping a 3rd party API-dependent cute app. But without VC!
Or you can have a VC-subsidized business that ships a product at ridiculously low prices, locks you in for some 3-5 years and then goes ballistic and becomes unusable. But it’s been five years of a very good run, FIVE YEARS. And then the next will come to take their place.
Reading how five years is a short timeline for a low-cost-high-value product is wild. Now that’s some entitlement.
Say Fly will eventually get acquired or IPO, their founders will justify it that they could use that money to work on Fly's mission statement or if they've had their fill of servers go on to build further startups in Fusion, AI, or Space Technologies or even give to charity (take your pick).
When they do get acquired/IPO the natural bureaucracy of large organisations and shift in incentives will set in (we've been here before with Heroku/Salesforce and SendGrid/Twilio...) and they'll become slow, more risk-averse, and ultimately less innovative catering for enterprise and other large businesses (where the easy corporate money is at) instead of scrappy startups and curious hackers.
This is where Fly 2.0 comes in 5 years down the line reaching No. 1 on Hacker New, where utilising the latest technology they'll create a completely new and innovative solution that will solve the current problem even better than now and they'll start by catering for startups and hackers until they themselves get acquired/IPO.
This doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad thing - founders get a chance to cash out, consumers get cycles of new innovation.
in this model speculative capital is only required in the very early stages. a company either reaches a symbiotic relation with its clients or not. the burden is primarily on intrinsic aspects of what the startup venture delivers and how much this resonates in its sector.
the VC model is basically turbo-charging this process. though it is risk capital and not lending, it creates an implicit, arbitrarily sized liability that need not have much to do with the underlying value proposition. it removes the organic cashlow constraint via a faustian bargain.
the "beauty" of it is that you can't have both models in the same economy. the set of ideas that are ripe for exploration at an given era are what they are. if some people pursue them while being on steroids this means there is no room for people to explore them in a less toxic way
To be fair, the fate of most of them is actually to fail. Hence this amplified effect of why VCs need such a standout massive return to make the fund model work.
That said, while it seems like it to us normal folk, in the grand scheme of VC, $25M is not really "a bunch of money". In 2021, a16z led or co-lead $3.2B [1] in funding rounds. I can't find a publicly available stat for how many rounds that entailed, but napkin math says 100–300. Of course the distribution is not linear, but if we take the 200 investments midpoint, that's a $16M check on average.
The additional $70M here follow-on is the real story. It looks like they are not giving it a label, though Crunchbase lists the $25M from a16z a year ago as Series B, so I'm inclined to call this new round the Series C.
> My new heuristic is that I avoid every single company that raises venture funding.
IMO tech, startups at least, are not long-minded like this in general. Companies regularly come and go in 6–24 months. Good luck convincing the current and next waves of CTOs of not using venture-backed tech [that saves them tons of time for great prices right now]. And then portcos also often make deals with other portcos... the cycle feeds itslef in more ways than one.
It's like trying to change the color of the ocean with one single cup of red dye. At the end of the day, this is just a rounding error.
But also, Big Tech will end up acquiring many of the standouts a la Firebase or Heroku. Resisting the model won't upend or stop it.
[1]: https://news.crunchbase.com/liquidity/under-the-hood-a-decad...
I mean... raising prices ≠ "selling out any pretense..."
You're upset that a growing business lowers prices to grow faster? Ok, but maybe relax a little. You're upset that advertising-based businesses eventually shut down the ad-free clients that use the API? Ok, but maybe relax a little.
A business grows with low prices and loses some customers not willing to pay when they put up prices that reflect longer term sustainability. That happens, why does it have to be a moral outrage?
Yeah, if you're using a VC-backed startup expect the cheap services to get pulled back on when they hit IPO time.
"Growth" is the focus now, until the business dies (by acquisition, IPO or bankrupcy, all of which are bad for users).
What about posting on a forum owned and operated by a venture firm?
Do you use Google? Slack? Facebook? The list of venture backed tech firms is endless.
I don't even disagree with the general sentiment...but your resolution seems particularly short-sighted.
Not a convincing list of companies there...
How can you monopolize this market? There is no moat here at all. There are already trillion dollar companies competing here. They are selling a commodity.
Raising the 'right' amount should be the goal. Not 'as much as possible'
Money is like sex - only too much is enough.
The "etc." is basically thousands of other companies.
Pretty safe bet that they'll stay cheap for a long time because of that.
Because outside of tech innovation, cost is still a mayor selling point.
Consider this perspective: Users of Fly.io are essentially getting a loan from venture capitalists. However, just like any loan, it has to be repaid eventually. Thus, it's prudent not to take on an excessively large commitment.
Fly.io are doing great I think and that they might one day charge more I’m not that upset by it at all. If fly.io can make money at a higher price that means they are adding more value.
I hasten to add you appear to be hanging out on a forum focused on VC funded startups.
There are so many forums you could go to, but you specifically select this one when you fundamentally dislike the premise? Why? It's just baffling behavior.
Companies raise money now to generate cash flows in the future from a wildly risky innovation. Assuming the thesis is correct, the company will then to pay it back to investors (VCs and their investors including Endowment Funds), but also employee and taxes.
As companies grow, they pay more taxes, and this will let government spend in things like education, infrastructure, social security.
It's either this or socialism.
"Capitalism: The worst economic system, except for all the others"
you're basically going to be prevented from using anything that isn't an established enterprise(which are also beholden to shareholders) or consumer apps. You can't bootstrap anything that requires significant R&D or infrastructure unless the founder is already rich
This post seems to be referencing the Reddit API situation. The solution is to not make your company reliant on a single API , pretty sure with Fly you can deploy Docker containers so you could always switch easily if they tried to price gouge. If something is a critical component of your business you should always plan to be able to switch providers in a hurry for any number of reasons
This is going to sound wild, but believe it or not it takes quite a bit of capital to reserve capacity in data centers ALL OVER THE WORLD in order to, like, deliver on your core value prop of enabling deploying normal apps AT THE EDGE. This used to just be called making a capital investment (because it takes a lot of upfront capital), but then it became en vogue to whine about venture capital.
You may want your hosting provider to be capital poor and running a razor thin balance sheet on the brink of insolvency (aka bootstrapped) but I don't. Or you might want to lease your own space in a colo and rack your own servers and hire your own remote hands and your own sysadmins and dev ops with 24/7 coverage so if you have a hardware failure you can deal with it asap but I don't. Not having to do all that shit takes...capital.
Where would you have them fetch said necessary capital if not from venture capital firms?
Honestly, do you even know what you're bitching about? A theoretical monopolistic reality that a. does not exist and b. would not exist if fly did not theoretically create a product so good it made all their competitors irrelevant (note: this is not a monopoly, it's market dominance; they are very different)?
And honestly, if they're still around in 5 years, they probably should raise prices so they can continue to be around. Fly is literally orders of magnitude cheaper than running on AWS, and orders of magnitude easier.
Take your aimless cope elsewhere.
Throwing shade at cloudflare edge workers?
I could definitely see a really interesting future for Fly where you're building tech to actively follow users between towers to provide the lowest possible latency to apps.
Here's what everyone actually wanted to talk about: Trust.
Here's what we missed: ...
I love Fly.io, used it for side projects and I was very pleased with the UX and the free tier.
The blog post is funny but the style is a bit excruciating to read.
Nevertheless, I'm excited for them and continue to cheer them on until they mature.
I hacked together a prototype using free tiers and easy-to-access sandbox environments and guess what, we're gonna transition to the paid tier after getting some feedback on the MVP. At this point, it doesn't matter if a competitor's sales person can give us a better deal "because it's the end of the quarter" merely due to the fact that the code has already been written.
You probably would have to handle a lot of the logic by yourself for privacy and security reason, but I think this is a nice primitive to start from.
Out of curiosity, how _does_ fly.io see itself in relation to Heroku?
We're not Heroku. We _like_ how amazingly easy it is to get an app up and running on Heroku. But most of us were interested in flexing the underlying infrastructure to build new types of apps. So Heroku felt very constrained.
We see ourselves as, like, a good RPG. Quick to get going, rewarding and replayable when you go deep.
Their managed Postgres got an unfair advantage early on by being the default. With a new rails app you were just given a Heroku Postgres database. Heroku's Postgres offering was over 5 years ahead of RDS Postgres and a large part of the reason Amazon added support for Postgres for years they fought it, but eventually had to give into the constant customer request. Unfortunately that innovation of Postgres has stalled out a bit over time due to Salesforce starvation.
I do admit for what people think of as PaaS the Postgres revenue is significant, the part people would probably be surprised about is how much revenue the add-ons marketplace constitutes.
Interestingly New Relic got the same privileged experience in the early days and it resulted in the same type of revenue and mass adoption for New Relic.
EDIT: Oh, and they often add valuable info to what they posted, too.
> The kind of platform company we want to be hasn’t changed since 2020. Our features are all generally a command or two in flyctl, and they work for any app that can packaged in a container.
can be packaged
even though there’s a reason (or three) behind the style of the post, including the use of transparency, it is refreshing.
while Fly.io deploys compute instances to more regions and also has a database?
asking because I've been content with Vercel and Netlify's CDN for frontend assets and simply stopped doing system design around relational storage, when I want to stay on a free tier.
Heroku has been handicapped for nearly half a decade, there are a lot of people that already know of alternatives and have changed their system design to accommodate the alternatives. How does Fly.io fit in with Vercel, or Netlify? As opposed to people keeping their Heroku apps on life support
> If you want a fully managed database solution for your Fly Apps, there are many great options, including:
Fly looks great, but you definitely need to get on this. a company that just raised 100m shouldn't be recommending it's direct competitors.
And they completely avoid discussing it again in this article.
It would be nice if I could know what their product is for because it doesn't seem to be the apps I work on.
:eyes emoji: fly ppl please do this
That's a lot of cash to go toward 14 jobs https://fly.io/jobs/.
"$70MM led by EQT Ventures." That's awesome, but what are you giving away for this? Are founders selling their shares? Where is the beef? $70M can be everything and nothing at the same time.
"There are customers who are comfortable engaging with tiny Fly.io, and others who are comfortable engaging with the Fly.io that raised an additional $70M led by EQT ventures." I'm pretty sure that your enterprise customers are already wowed by a 25M infusion by AtoZ. So again, where is the beef, especially after stating: "Why do startups write announcements like these? We went back and forth on it. There are lots of reasons, most of them dumb."
I can keep going with more examples. But the headlines says it all. The 70M clickbait 'we raised a bunch of money" - wow, so chill, bruv.
Spinning up VMs. It's not difficult to do this on AWS or GCP.
Doron, CEO of Control Plane Corporation.