Render raises $80M in Series C financing
render.com
render.com
At some point companies lose the ability to say, "We are X. It used to be that Y, which had issues of A, B, C. Instead, X does Z, so $USERS can now D, E, F." Where the letters are specific (not empty words like "innovative").
As they grow, these companies add additional products, which is one reason I think they lose this. That's okay! Add one or two sentences (max) that say, "Once we solved Z, we kept building to offer L, M, and N. We expanded from serving $USERS to supporting $EXPANDED_USERS who need O and P."
It's kind of wild how rare that clarity of communication is. Stripe still does a pretty good job despite the _huge_ range of products, complexity, customer profiles, abstractions, and interfaces.
You can definitely tell when companies are either parroting what they've read other splash pages say or are using LLMs to say a bunch of empty platitudes. Good writing is really fking hard.
Of course, if Render directly says, "We're going to be like Heroku before it went off the rails," that's not compelling to media or investors. So, instead, they've got to fluff it up a bit with marketing buzz. Throwing in some AI won't hurt, either.
It’s so, so, so important to repeat your message at every opportunity; particularly at moments, like fundraising announcements, where you’ll have access to new potential users (vs. something like a feature release where the readers are far more likely to be existing users.)
Additionally, another group of readers here would be potential hires. They probably want to know why you’re different!
If you add the same capabilities you end up becoming the cloud provider concept you wish to "disprove", and I would posit that feature creep reinforces the concept
A good number of companies out there move to google scale infrastructure and spin up whole devops teams when they would be fine without all that out of fear of having to move later. That later might never come.
AWS is too low level for me. Render helps us spin up new applications in a few clicks. Kind of like Vercel for backend.
Might just be a skill issue but I can definitely see the value from using the product.
We had good success with Lightsail; but then moved to Fly.io & the Cloudflare platform and spend ~zero time on sre & devops.
Their “you’re on your own” option is really nice though for cheap, non-mission-critical stuff, and you can even scale the compute to zero during inactivity and just pay the attached volume costs.
None of those integrated of course, but easier than going big cloud or self hosted
It might be hard to understand the value prop because it seems like a commodity… but that’s exactly the value prop: a commodity that works well, is priced right, and you don’t need to worry about using some weird toolset or rolling your own infrastructure.
The major cloud providers are quite intimidating to work with and frankly we have much bigger problems to spend our time on than (potentially) saving a couple grand a month. Heroku was nice but it’s been abandoned for years. Fly is a similar competitor but they seem to have monthly outages. We find Render simple, boring and dependable - for us that’s worth the premium they charge.
Before this I used Heroku. Heroku basically filled the same role but nowadays it's less flexible and after all the issues I couldn't wait to get away from them. Render feels like a better Heroku for my specific needs.
In 3-5 sentences, what specifically differentiates Render from, say, AWS Lambda?
For example, how much money would I save from making the switch?
My experience is that anything outside of the standard process for deploying apps is actively frowned upon by everyone except startups that need to move extremely quickly to create PoCs. So unless this platform is much much cheaper than the public clouds it seems like a limited market.
The Heroku platform has recently gone downhill. There’s a ton of downtime, minimal improvements, no communication via their status page, and incredibly bad support. They once shut off GitHub deploys for months with no explanation, because of a security incident they seemingly couldn’t fix… we had no way to deploy!
Heroku was amazing, but it’s dying rapidly. Render isn’t a huge departure from Heroku, but it’s solid and the team is very responsive.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/14/heroku-ceo-bob-wise-depart...
The crux of the issue was that he told me that he philosophically didn’t believe Heroku should put up status notifications about downtime or performance issues until AFTER they fully understood the problem and had a fix. (My theory was actually that no engineers worked there and they didn’t have on-call rotation anymore)
Congrats on the raise!
* Poor visibility into detailed metrics, especially when problems happened in the render load balancer / routing mesh. We had a specific issue where a small number of requests were failing somewhere in render's infrastructure before reaching our application, and at the time there was no visibility to allow customers to know about requests that timed out or failed within render's infrastructure rather than our application. We collaborated with your team to surface and replicate the issue, but it was frustrating. I had a very good set of conversations with a product manager on your team about what we needed and why it was important in early 2024.
* At the time, the hosted postgres implementation was immature. I think this is an area you've already improved dramatically.
* Maybe you could add support for something like AWS PrivateLink so customers can run parts of their workloads on AWS securely over a private network. This would be a neat way to allow customers to stay on Render longer as their needs grow.
Deep observability is critical for more complex environments, and things are improving dramatically on this front just as they have on Postgres.
We already support AWS PrivateLink! Reach out to support@render.com.
- Teams are still the only proper way to segment environments and access control. Yet you charge team member, I am still mad about that because even after 1+ year we need to use multiple teams.
- Metrics are still locked to your platform, I want to use my telemetry provider because you guys dont have alerts, dashboard creation, etc.
- Control over the subnets, we use tailscale to give access to private services right now its all 10.205.X.X and we dont control it
- Allow us to turn off cloudflare. You said during last outage that being reliant on cloudflare was an issue and we are yet 1+ later without progress.
I could go on. I do like the product and simplicity but it is lacking control when you actually outgrow the "get it out the door fast" phase. I am not even sure one could pass an ISO27001 by being on Render.
* Otel exports are in development and should be live in early access in a few weeks!
* Heard on subnet IPs
* There's ongoing work to remove a major Cloudflare dependency; it should also go live in a few weeks.
We'll keep polishing and pushing the envelope on control and flexibility. Thanks for being a vocal customer.
Couple of other things while I do have you:
- More control on the instance sizing similar to how you have us control of the postgres instances
- A proper write-only secrets system ala AWS Secret Manager. The current environment variables isn't passing an audit for sure if anybody on the team can log in and see them plaintext
Your support team is really good I do want to say, it is probably the one thing that kept me a customer.
- More granular secret access (and, in general, more granular RBAC) are on the list for 2025
- Render is now ISO 27001 certified [1], and we help you pass SOC 2/ISO 27001 audits.
Thanks for the support team shoutout!
[1] https://render.com/blog/render-iso-27001-and-document-center
Partnership with Neon would be great too, I run 6 dbs there for $69 with auto scaling (and scales to 0 too if needed for non-prod envs). Render would be 3-4x that price for those many dbs.
If I could make a suggestion - make it clear you are the founder of Render instead of using these parentheses “(Render founder)”!
I also have my object storage with Digital Ocean at the moment. Would love to have that all under one roof.
- Object storage
- Metrics (managed prometheus + grafana? or preferrably your own lightweight version, like your log system, which mostly gets the job done)
S3 backed object storage (too risky to use anything else or even learn anything else for it).
Congrats on the round!
Kamal really is fantastic, PaaS niceties w/o the PaaS tax.
just an UI??? for the most part like deploy postgress, deploy Go webserver etc like 80% of the work is SAME, they don't have moat
Render is an improvement on pricing from Heroku but is still massively more expensive than raw VPS instances such as the ones you can buy on digital ocean, and it’s much less flexible.
I'd rather hear that the company I use is profitable and sustainable.
There's something like 2 million software engineers in the entire USA. There's no way their penetration is significant (>25%) in the USA, so where are these developers coming in from? India, China, LATAM?
Very easy to launch any docker image, script, stack etc.
You can templatize any repo for a 1-button deploy with a render.yaml and a link in the readme. More products offering "self-hosted" should do this.
...I remember when they won TC Startup battlefield a couple of years back.