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Improved workflow and new role for pricing changes

netlify.com

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Re: Improved workflow and new role for pricing changes

#21

Post by babyyoda »

antm wrote: post #16
babyyoda wrote: post #3

Wow - these types of changes make it hard to justify using Netlify for static hosting if your contributing team will even possibly grow. Once you get more than 7 contributors for the codebase you have to switch to an enterprise plan ($$) is a scary cliff. What fundamentally changes in hosting costs when I get that extra team member? The pricing structure feels very illogical - are they really adding that much more va…

I think trying to justify their pricing on hosting alone misses their point. Nothing fundamentally changes in hosting, probably in any environment. However, the development workflow does change with extra team members. Netlify's tools for collaborating are fantastic. I think that's the value they're pricing.

I think the main issue I have is a lot of that workflow is no longer as differentiated as it was - definitely not to justify the premium they are asking. Cloudflare, AWS, and Azure now all have similar workflow offerings. I have choice now where I didn’t as much before, to where I’d be unwilling to swallow this premium. Maybe there’s value here I’m not seeing, but I’m not seeing it

Re: Improved workflow and new role for pricing changes

#22

Post by CSSer »

babyyoda wrote: post #3

Wow - these types of changes make it hard to justify using Netlify for static hosting if your contributing team will even possibly grow. Once you get more than 7 contributors for the codebase you have to switch to an enterprise plan ($$) is a scary cliff. What fundamentally changes in hosting costs when I get that extra team member? The pricing structure feels very illogical - are they really adding that much more va…

It also seems like an unconscious acknowledgement that their add-on services (form handling, post-processing, identity, analytics, auth, etc.) are woefully inadequate in some cases and uncompetitive in others. $20/mo for form handling beyond 100 submissions? Okay, maybe. But the feature set is so bare it's laughable. There's minimal to no customization for notification emails, no confirmation emails, and their post-processing for form detection will bring the speed of your build pipeline to its knees on any serious site. On one site turning off post-processing yielded a build time reduction of more than double the actual build time of the site.

Not to mention the fact that by foregoing any concept of a server and forcing everything into some flavor of lambda they've created a scenario where every framework with any such functionality requires open source shepherding to function on their platform[0]. At best they've diluted their initial mission and at worst they've created an unmanageable mess. They can't even make Next.js work on their platform without causing what should issue 404s to return 500s instead[1]. The SEO implications for that are a potential death sentence and that issue has now been open for five months.

I was very optimistic about Netlify at the outset, and it worked great and still continues to work great for our test cases where we've deployed individual LPs. Where the pain seems to start is anything above a thousand pages or more, which is also coincidentally where the stakes start to get higher. I don't know how they could expect anyone at an enterprise or growing business to seriously scrutinize this platform and view it as ideal with that in mind.

[0]: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-plugin-nextjs [1]: https://github.com/netlify/netlify-plugin-nextjs/issues/1179

Re: Improved workflow and new role for pricing changes

#23

Post by bmelton »

gk1 wrote: post #17
babyyoda wrote: post #3

Wow - these types of changes make it hard to justify using Netlify for static hosting if your contributing team will even possibly grow. Once you get more than 7 contributors for the codebase you have to switch to an enterprise plan ($$) is a scary cliff. What fundamentally changes in hosting costs when I get that extra team member? The pricing structure feels very illogical - are they really adding that much more va…

> are they really adding that much more value in hosting my site just because I have more contributors ... Yes? Netlify removes a lot of DevOps overhead, and the more people you have working on a site the more DevOps overhead it's eliminating. Imagine, for example, you have non-developer contributors like technical writers or marketers. Netlify makes it easy for them to see local and branch previews that exactly mirr…

I'm a netlify customer, and I disagree.

Before this pricing change, I paid them $99 a month + bandwidth + build minute overages, with the sort of tacit understanding that until and unless my users need to log in to the site, they aren't billable. After this pricing change, all my developers get a login that they don't need or use, and my baseline price goes from $99 to $693.

I technically gained functionality in that developers can now log in and see why their builds failed, but with the rare exception of something being broken in the netlify build image, there is zero utility in that. They can see any of the errors that would be failing the build by looking in their local developer console to see what the linter complains about.

Yes, preview and feature branches are handy, as is the ability to rollback to a previous commit's deployed state, but that feature doesn't scale with "number of team members who have access to the repository" nearly as linearly as the pricing model wants it to be.

Beyond that, I moved from the $20 a month plan to the $99 a month business plan because of the premium edge network before they imposed a $99 per month per team member pricing change (so really I went from $20 a month + overages to $700 a month plus overages) only to see that now they want me to upgrade to the $3,000 a month enterprise plan to get the edge performance I signed up for.

Vercel is tempting.

Re: Improved workflow and new role for pricing changes

#24

Post by bmelton »

doxick wrote: post #10

8 people, at 19 per month, amounts to 8x19x12 = +-1800 a year. adding an 8th person would skyrocket that, if we take the next step up (business) at 99/m, to 8x99x12 = +- 9500 per year. And that's not even the "enterprise" pricing. That must be one hell of an improved workflow to increase the price with, probably at least, 400%.

Unless I'm reading my invoice incorrectly, your formula is off

The business plan is not (99/m * 12), it is (99 + (99/m * 12)), so more like $10,700 than $9500

Re: Improved workflow and new role for pricing changes

#25

Post by js4ever »

I left Netlify 2 months ago to go to Cloudflare pages, main reason to move was Netlify reliability issues, 500 errors, 15-30 sec response times ... Timeouts, several times per week, and everyday some weeks ... For static sites. Now with Cloudflare pages we got a nearly perfect uptime and latency according to our monitoring system. Also pricing is much lower with Cloudflare pages. Sorry if this sounds like an ad ... I just wanted to share my own story.

Re: Improved workflow and new role for pricing changes

#26

Post by brycewray »

bmelton wrote: post #23
gk1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are they really adding that much more value in hosting my site just because I have more contributors ... Yes? Netlify removes a lot of DevOps overhead, and the more people you have working on a site the more DevOps overhead it's eliminating. Imagine, for example, you have non-developer contributors like technical writers or marketers. Netlify makes it easy for them to see local and branch previews that exactly mirr…

I'm a netlify customer, and I disagree. Before this pricing change, I paid them $99 a month + bandwidth + build minute overages, with the sort of tacit understanding that until and unless my users need to log in to the site, they aren't billable. After this pricing change, all my developers get a login that they don't need or use, and my baseline price goes from $99 to $693. I technically gained functionality in that…

In addition to Vercel, I would also suggest considering Cloudflare Pages. Although Vercel’s platform is more mature, CFP is slightly more framework-agnostic while Vercel, understandably, is a bit tilted in favor of Next.js development. (Of course, if you’re already a Next.js shop, that may seal the deal in favor of Vercel.) Both offer the same high-quality CDN performance at all pricing tiers, including their free tiers.

Re: Improved workflow and new role for pricing changes

#27

Post by seanwilson »

So if person X creates a Netlify site and connects it to a GitHub repo for deploys, and person Y commits to the repo, you to pay Netlify for 2 users?

And the only alternative to stay in the free tier is you have to say person Y isn't a Netlify user, meaning the build will only get triggered when person X triggers the build manually?

Re: Improved workflow and new role for pricing changes

#28

Post by anurag »

nemothekid wrote: post #14
datalopers wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know we like to use new terms to pretend there is innovation but Netlify is a CDN and Render is a shared VM host. Unless you only host static content, isn’t Render vastly more capabale/different anyway?

I'm going to look at Render, but Netlify is more than just a CDN. Having an integrated CI/deployment pipeline is one of the features I've come to use a lot; an engineer can now open a PR and get an autogenerated staging link that be reviewed before going to prod. That said, if Render supports the same workflows I'll be seriously looking at moving.

Render supports all of these workflows.

Re: Improved workflow and new role for pricing changes

#29

Post by bcjordan »

js4ever wrote: post #25

I left Netlify 2 months ago to go to Cloudflare pages, main reason to move was Netlify reliability issues, 500 errors, 15-30 sec response times ... Timeouts, several times per week, and everyday some weeks ... For static sites. Now with Cloudflare pages we got a nearly perfect uptime and latency according to our monitoring system. Also pricing is much lower with Cloudflare pages. Sorry if this sounds like an ad ... I…

Useful to hear these reports. It's hard to find trustable solid metrics on uptime and latency of web services prior to running your own tests. Usually it's a process of asking friends / getting bit yourself.

I've seen some (spotty) perf tracking resources out there for could VM instance performance and Wordpress hosts, but not something covering cloud function response time / cold starts / uptime, or something comprehensive for cloud data stores.

Anyone know of such a thing? Like a "Consumer Reports / Wirecutter for web dev services"

Re: Improved workflow and new role for pricing changes

#30

Post by foxbarrington »

bmelton wrote: post #23
gk1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are they really adding that much more value in hosting my site just because I have more contributors ... Yes? Netlify removes a lot of DevOps overhead, and the more people you have working on a site the more DevOps overhead it's eliminating. Imagine, for example, you have non-developer contributors like technical writers or marketers. Netlify makes it easy for them to see local and branch previews that exactly mirr…

I'm a netlify customer, and I disagree. Before this pricing change, I paid them $99 a month + bandwidth + build minute overages, with the sort of tacit understanding that until and unless my users need to log in to the site, they aren't billable. After this pricing change, all my developers get a login that they don't need or use, and my baseline price goes from $99 to $693. I technically gained functionality in that…

I switched to Render because they have a similar pipeline with deploy previews. It was quick to do.

Netlify wanted to go from $120/mo to $2k/mo.

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