With that said, this seems quite obvious - the type of customer that chooses Fly, seems like the last person to be spinning up dedicated GPU servers for extended periods of time. Seems much more likely they'll use something serverless which requires a ton of DX work to get right (personally I think Modal is killing it here). To compete, they would have needed to bet the company on it. It's way too competitive otherwise.
They're charging hyperscaler rates, and anyone willing to pay that much won't go with Fly.
For serverless usage they're only mildly overpriced compared to say Runpod, but I don't think of serverless as anything more than an onramp to renting dedicated machine, so it's not surprising to hear it's not taking off.
GPU workloads tend to have terrible cold-start performance by their nature, and without a lot of application specific optimizations it rarely ends up making financial sense to not take a cheaper continous option if you have an even mildly consistent workload. (and if you don't then you're not generating that much money for them)
My Fly machine loads from turned off to first inference complete in about 35 seconds.
If it’s already running, it’s 15 seconds to complete. I think that’s pretty decent.
And with the premium for per-second GPUs hovering around 2x that for hourly/monthly rentals, it gets even harder for products with scale to justify.
You'd want to have a lot of time where you're scaled to 0, but that in turn maps to a lot of cold starts.