I was impressed by their pricing, how do they keep costs so low?
Serving 250k developers with one support engineer
11–20 of 86 posts
Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer
#12With bad documentation on buildpack, it's hard for me to go on with Railway. (For example, there's no sample or docs at all for how to build image with multiple buildpacks like in heroku).
And these days, good documentation is 1st criteria to trust a platform / framework / library.
Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer
#13With bad documentation on buildpack, it's hard for me to go on with Railway. (For example, there's no sample or docs at all for how to build image with multiple buildpacks like in heroku). And these days, good documentation is 1st criteria to trust a platform / framework / library.
Railway team member here:
So there is one but, if you can't find it, it's as good as there not being one!
It's currently located at https://nixpacks.com/docs/guides/configuring-builds#change-w...
Is there some place you'd expect it to be instead? All ears on feedback!
Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer
#14I was impressed by their pricing, how do they keep costs so low?
I have spent the last 10 minutes on their site and am unable to figure out what the pricing even is.
Going by the top of their pricing page (https://railway.app/pricing): $10/GB per month RAM & $20/vCPU per month is actually pretty expensive when compared to services like fly.io and even EC2/Azure.
Apart from that, what vCPUs are these exactly? What are the bandwidth costs? Custom domains? Certificates? Load balancing? Disks? Databases?
Clicking "Choose Plan" takes you to a login page, but then if you log in the pricing page disappears altogether.
Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer
#15Any SLAs worth mentioning? Did you ever struggle with them?
One thing that didn't make it into the article (I ramble and rant) is how I set it so at one point that Teams were entitled to a reply from me or the founder 24/7. This broke nearly instantly after 50 Teams.
At the moment we don't but I spoke to the fmr. Head of Support at Stripe and he told me we should think about our product coverage like an API, some parts of the product (builds for example) should be more critical on response times than others. My main goal this year is to publish an SLA table so that we can work with ever larger customers setting the right expectation.
Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer
#16What an impressive company. A good reminder that, even in a market with umpteen competitors, success comes down to execution. Hope they keep up the good work.
Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer
#17Can anyone comment on the security implications of using a service like this, render.com, fly.io, etc vs. rolling your own infra on AWS EC2 and friends?
Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer
#18Congratulations on achieving this milestone and probably keeping your customers very satisfied along the way, but I eagerly look forward to the future where everyone is so sick of virtual assistants, bots, and knowledge bases that a low ratio is what gets celebrated as a growth milestone rather than a high ratio. Automated triage is great for digital companies that want to scale cheaply, but not so great for the peop…
When I have a problem with a service my ultimate goal is to get it solved - as fast as possible.
If I can solve my problem though an automated support channel that’s actually better! Because I don’t need to wait for a human to do something. Computers don’t sleep, take lunch breaks, etc.
The problem with google/Facebook/etc isn’t that they don’t have human support. It’s that when your account gets locked out there’s no way of getting your problem solved. If a working useful automated support system existed few would complain.
Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer
#19Can anyone comment on the security implications of using a service like this, render.com, fly.io, etc vs. rolling your own infra on AWS EC2 and friends?
Is there something specific you've got in mind? There are a ton of "it depends" type questions in here, but generally speaking I'd argue that rolling your own infra has some parallels with rolling your own crypto. There are countless mistakes you can make when doing it yourself, and a reputable entity that's been doing it for a bit has probably already made those mistakes or, at least, considered them. Quadruply so if they've got certifications of any kind.
At scale, or with a seasoned ops team/team member, the scenario is a bit different, but if you're asking "is it more secure for a few full-stack developers hacking at a startup to roll their own infra or use something like fly.io" I feel preeetty comfortable saying the latter is going to be more secure.
Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer
#20Not sure this is something I’d be bragging about. What happens when you do eventually have a major outage and need to rapidly provide reassurance and tailored support to hundreds of people. Like when Atlassian deleted thousands of JIRA tickets by mistake and seemed completely unprepared to scale up their support.