Would love to hear some thought. May be I am missing something.
On the tech side, IPAM can fail to assign IP in k8s. It could be of various reasons. What do you guys do in that case?
IPAM has not been an issue with how we use K8s.
But I don't think Render is competing with AWS head-on in regards to cost. They're very much trying to fill that Heroku niche of hosting providers geared towards developers who don't want to manage VMs let alone a k8s cluster. And as Heroku has proven, there is money to be made charging a premium for such convenience.
Heroku proved you can get many people to use your service by offering free stuff. Maybe there was a reason they sold the business.
Plus AWS has spot / reserved instances.
You gotta really hate AWS's UX to use a service like that.
<rant>I am pretty pissed off by their per user per team pricing that was introduced early this year. Specially since you still need to pay for multiple teams to get network segmentation between envs WTF</rant>.
BUT on the compute, it is on par with fargate. I dont know how you arrived at 4x the cost but lets take 1 vcpu + 2GB ram. Render is 25$/month and fargate is 35.50$/month. For 2 vcpu and 4gb, render is at 85$/m and Fargate is 71.10$/m.
For our business, I am considering migrating off render within the next year. Unsure where to yet, I would like to avoid using another PaaS but managing a k8s cluster doesnt appeal to me so still looking.
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We started with a free tier (copying the Heroku model) and had to fight with 'free users' as well.
The free tier created a lot of noise distracting us from our paying customers. Support requests from users with no interest ever upgrading, often beginners and noobs. Cat and mouse games with script kiddies trying to abuse the service. Fraud and phishing … Most free tier Apps are just tests, maybe there is an index file printing a hello world. Yet you need to keep some responsibility to keep that data around.
After a while we changed it to free trial (try before buy). That works much better for us.
Could you share some light on the unit economics of your PaaS?
I would assume the cost of acquisition is fair low now that you have a fix trial but how is the customer retention cost. I would assume theres huge amount of support cost as generally there always various edge cases that you wouldn't accommodate in your generic PaaS.