The $5 Plan | Hacker News Reader

The $5 Plan

blog.railway.app

72 pointsdban32 comments

> Our pricing is confusing. Our free tier is even more confusing with execution hours. We initially offered carte blanche free compute, then added "verification" to curb abuse. This was further confusing, and to boot, abusers would end up gaming the system anyways!

From what I've noticed, Fly.io handles abuse in a different way.

- Require Credit Card on sign-ups.

- Always meter bandwidth (but 5x less than Railway: 0.02/GB after 160GB vs 0.10/GB).

- If Fly.io catches you running a VPN/Proxy, no free bandwidth for you; $10/mo minimum: https://community.fly.io/t/4896

- If everything's a-okay, no charges if monthly use is less than $5: https://community.fly.io/t/11133/7

Fly use to not require a credit card and could use the free tier. I setup a few instances just to trial about a year ago, about 6 months ago these instances started costing about $12 per month, I just logged in the other day to discover this. I feel now if I wanted to use their services they would back bill me for these test accounts I wasn’t using. Feel they could have notified me when they started charging so I could have shutdown the accounts.

The $5 plan sounds good and affordable, but I think the VPS comparison is disingenuous because you can typically put a lot of things on a $5-10 dollar VPS. I pay $20/mo and have something like 30 low-usage apps running on a single server. With Railway that would cost me $150.

I must be misunderstanding the pricing (talk about confusing) or the value proposition.

The way I understand it those $5 give you all the management features and $5 worth of compute.

But compute costs $10 GB/month for RAM and $20 per vCPU/month.

So in comparison to a VPS this costs $30 for a full-time 1vCPU/1GB machine, ignoring network egress.

At least as a VPS replacement this really doesn’t seem worth it. For that money I can get a 12 vCPU / 24 GB machine with my current provider, which includes 80TB traffic.

What if Hetzner would do the same? Post a new subscription plan on HN, wouldn't that be nothing else but an ad?

It's more of a blog post explaining the thinking behind the change, right?

Or, looking at it from the other side, most posts here are advertising in one way or another.

Yes, but if Hetzner made a blog post on how they were going to stop randomly shutting down customer's services, terminating accounts, and actually providing customer support that would be novel.

It's not just a new plan, it's the cancellation of a previous one. Such changes get posted on HN often because seem interested in talking about them.

> We’re also going to start charging for network egress at $0.10 / GB. The financial impact on most users will be negligible, but this will let us disincentivize certain kinds of abuse (torrent aggregators sapping bandwidth, which can result in latency spikes).

Railway is far from alone in doing this, but I really find it frustrating how much most hosts overcharge for bandwidth. $100/TB of egress basically kills any P2P video chat apps (even if they rely on WebRTC and only need TURN), screen-sharing, and many other classes of interesting services one could build. It's considerably more expensive than what I paid serving audio files from a WordPress site over a decade ago, despite bandwidth being much cheaper in 2023 and media files of all sorts being larger.

i too would like to find a service where I could host ~500GB of files and cheaply send random subsets of them (~.5GB each session) to random users all over the world without it becoming >90% of the service's costs

i'm starting to think the few years of really cheap/free egress rates were actually an accounting mistake, and the true cost of moving those bits is finally becoming apparent to datacenter accountants

but i may be naive.

You should look at Hetzner [0]. They offer unmetered bandwidth on their dedicated servers with a 1Gbps uplink (I personally run a Tor relay on one averaging a sustained 15+Mbps over the past year), idem for their "Storage Share" offering, and 20TB/month at 1Gbps on their cloud VMs.

I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy customer.

[0] https://www.hetzner.com/

> If it’s a VPS, you’ve gotta wire it up with Dokku/k3s/etc. If it’s a server, it’s $6-10 per service.

Really? Am I the only one who uses docker swarm and puts multiple services onto a single vps as resources allow?

Anyway, I’m glad to see the free tier go away. It attracts the wrong crowd.

Haven't heard anyone mention docker swarm for a while. I've had some thoughts about giving it a shot.

Is it easy to get started with?

Yes, if you're familiar with docker compose and the compose file specification, adding docker swarm to the mix is very simple. You're basically swapping out the docker host with the swarm manager node. If you're genuinely only operating with a single host I don't think you even need swarm though, and regular compose mode is just fine.

https://dockerswarm.rocks/ has some docs to get you oriented.

The only part that irks me is the disingenuous headline. Why corporate-speak when the actual article is straight up and honest?

The title should be along the lines of "We're removing our free plan" - anything else is deceitful.

I see the head line and think that for 5$, you won’t be able to plan much of a rail network, er just making an infrastructure plan wont be possible. Perhaps pay some transit blogger for a Crayon?

Or phrased a different way: who or what is a railway and why should I care that they pay 5$ for their plan.

Movieplan but for railway journeys was my hot take.

If someone pitches this idea to a VC I get 10% (and I will need to make an early exit).

10% of $0 is $0. You'll need to put in some (any?) work before your 10% is worth anything.

How much more work could possibly be required than writting the headline of the pitch? Moviepass raised ~$70mil, and peaked out around $300mil and trains are way cooler than cinemas so seed round should be around a B.

I mean it's easy to armchair wantrepreneur, but if you've never done bizdev you'd be surprised at how much work actually goes into it. it's not rocket science, nor is it back breaking, but its still involved.

Same here, I thought it was some game at first, but then I still don't know what this railway does

I really enjoyed using Railway so far for my simple use case (a rarely-used PostGIS database) and was amazed by how few credits my usage cost - comfortably keeping me in the free tier.

I'm not mad about having to pay at all. But ... 5$/month for something that used to be cents in credits feels steep.

At that point, for my use case, it probably makes sense to rent a VPS and run the server on there.

I really liked the whole "scale to 0" aspect Railway used to provide.

Unrelated to the article - it looks like railway offers a more managed, less complex end-to-end cloud hosting solution than the likes of AWS or Azure?

My teammate and I work on EdgeNode, which is similar to railway but for edge deployments. https://edgenode.com/

Another shared hosting service with some preloaded software. $5 a month is comparable to DreamHost, HostGator, etc. That's nice, but not novel.

I am owner of a service in the same space (10y+). The whack a mole game is definitely a thing - specifically attracting phishing and 'students'. We have been following development of the first PaaS, specifically free tier offerings with Heroku being the role model constantly trying new counter measurements against abuse.

I thought this is a train ticket comparison site started charging a subscription.

Reading the article assuming that context was a very weird experience.

Maybe the authors should put a note at the top, that this has nothing to do with trains.

One of the reasons they mention is that "our pricing is confusing".

I didn't see it before, but it's definitely confusing now. The stuff under "Pricing" broadly makes sense, but leaves me wondering about managed database pricing, and then the "usage based pricing" further down says "pick a plan" (I assume from the first section) but then has its own pricing that is significantly higher than "pricing" above, so I'm not really sure how they combine.

https://railway.app/pricing

That’s understandable unfortunately

$5? That's as good as free!

Why is the domain a .app? Isn’t that usually for when the main product is a mobile app?

Not at all. You get web apps, services for providing them etc.

As far as I'm aware ICANN/Google (owners) put no restrictions on use case.

There is a restriction requiring TLS.

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