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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#261

Post by Zetice »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #251
tptacek wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair. I stand by my point though that the culture has significantly changed since 2012 - you of all people know that. Just go back and look a decade ago at when people would post “hey we raise all this money” posts. A full half of the comments would be like “nobody cares that you raise money are you actually doing something important?” or similar. Tbh I think it was a healthier perspective, and we need to bring more…

I joined in '09 and I think I've changed pretty substantially, so the idea that this or any website would lock-in to a particular viewpoint isn't realistic IMO.

And you're being awfully reasonable now, once we've gotten past the bombastic opening claim. I think part of what makes HN great is that at least sometimes we can skip that opening wild claim.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#262

Post by berkle4455 »

danenania wrote: post #249
berkle4455 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they they'll need to increase, fly.io is already rather expensive as far as cloud offerings go today: shared 8 vCPU / 16GB VPS is $85/mo at fly, Hetzner is $16/mo for the same.

Is fly vs Hetzner really apples to apples though? A more apt comparison would be to AWS, GCP, and Azure no?

How isn’t? You’re paying for a VM with access to a slice of resources. Yes fly.io offers some clever deployment and routing, but it’s still your code running on a VM.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#263

Post by coder9874 »

cj wrote: post #185
kunalgupta wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So like which products do you use, then?

A lot of companies are bootstrapped or "seed-strapped". My company raised a $1.2m seed after doing a startup accelerator in 2015, used it to get to profitability, and we've been growing 40% YoY for a very long time without any additional outside capital. It's also a huge selling point to prospective employees while interviewing candidates: "Unlike many other startups, we haven't raised lots of money, we're profitable…

This is an entirely valid model, and many startups would be better served by following it. Still, the whole point of (larger) VC funding rounds is facilitate rapid growth, far more than 40% year over year. There's no contradiction between embracing bootstrapping/seedstrapping where it works, and VC funding for the cases with hyper-growth potential.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#264

Post by tlogan »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #45

Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for cu…

It is true but that is life.

Consider this perspective: Users of Fly.io are essentially getting a loan from venture capitalists. However, just like any loan, it has to be repaid eventually. Thus, it's prudent not to take on an excessively large commitment.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#265

Post by tptacek »

comice wrote: post #256
tptacek wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get that there's a whole section of this post headlined "Why We Raised A Bunch Of Money", right?

yes and I reread it a few times in case I was missing something. I even turned my adblocker off in case it was removing the section that answers OP's questions but it didn't appear. It's obviously perfectly fine if you don't want to or can't answer those questions and nobody is owed answers to them. Just, you're known for a straight talking style so the omission is conspicuous.

I honestly don't know what it is you're looking to hear. We said what we're using the money for: hardware, rolling out more regions, and a bunch more support and infra engineers.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#266

Post by unshavedyak »

mrkurt wrote: post #143
unshavedyak wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm looking to deploy a $5/m DigitalOcean server (single binary) to run a simple HTTP[s] server, with persistent sqlite/fs and backed up via braindead rsync to my local system. Is fly competitive with this? These sorts of calculations are always awkward for me with PaaS providers. I know what i'm getting with $5/m with DO, but with PaaS it often feels abstracted and sneaky. Heroku in my very, very old memory was a co…

A 1GB Fly machine is ~$5.70/mo (we charge by the second, some months are better than others). Persistent volumes are $0.15/gb each. Not too far off, depending on how much data you have. However the platform has different tradeoffs than a single DigitalOcean VM. You'll get better uptime percentages on a single DO VM than you will on a single VM Fly app. You may not notice, but it's statistically true.

Does Fly handle price caps? Ie to setup pricing to replicate ~$5/m behavior. Helping to ensure i can't use up all my ~$5/m budget in a few days of traffic, but i also can't go over some specified cap.

If so i'll probably give it a try!

edit: Regardless, going to give it a try. I was totally set on just using DO because i wanted something dumb and simple. This sounds like it might offer me that, plus not having to manage the OS. I really, really like that if i can keep pricing similar.

Bandwidth costs might become a concern, but i can always migrate to DO/etc if needed. Hopefully not, hah.

edit2: Looks like Fly has pre-paid billing[1], though i'm unclear if i can replicate the functionality i'm asking about. In this case i'd need a prepaid limit and a subscription to fill pre-paid with $N once a month.

Prepaid by itself is at least something, if nothing else exists. Just super annoying if you forget to add money.

[1]: https://community.fly.io/t/can-i-set-a-billing-limit-per-mon...

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#267

Post by scarface_74 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #208
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #45

Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for cu…

They are a web hosting company, like AWS (etc.), so at least you can shift your stuff to somewhere else if it gets too pricey. The "etc." is basically thousands of other companies.

Only said by someone who hasn’t done large scale migrations. It’s never that easy. It’s always disruptive.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#268

Post by dathinab »

flagged24 wrote: post #174
berkle4455 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they they'll need to increase, fly.io is already rather expensive as far as cloud offerings go today: shared 8 vCPU / 16GB VPS is $85/mo at fly, Hetzner is $16/mo for the same.

It's worse. For a 16 vCPU + 32GB RAM + 20TB traffic (fly.io has max 8 vCPU) I would pay around $750 on fly.io instead of €30 on Hetzner. People are willing to pay a lot for I guess an easy deploy story ?

Developer time is pretty costy and if you can save a lot of dev time a noticeable higher running cost can be well worth it for some companies (like smaller companies, startups which have still a fluent changing business model etc.).

Through also it's not a fair compression because for the kind of services where being close to the edge and redundant over many places matters Hetzner isn't even an option. AWS maybe, but AWS is also pain in my experience.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#269

Post by danieljacksonno »

kart23 wrote: post #223

https://fly.io/docs/postgres/getting-started/what-you-should... > If you want a fully managed database solution for your Fly Apps, there are many great options, including: Fly looks great, but you definitely need to get on this. a company that just raised 100m shouldn't be recommending it's direct competitors.

What? Of course they should. It shows they care about their customers, and that they are confident in their use case and honest when they say what they are a good fit for or not

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#270

Post by tlogan »

cphajduk wrote: post #211
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #45

Will you be publishing a follow up blog post about how you’re increasing API user fees once you’ve monopolized your particular market? Or how about how you’ll be increasing margins for investors in 5 years as you prepare for your IPO? Why won’t you suffer the fate of every single other tech company that raises a shit load of money which is completely and irrevocably selling out any pretense of being beneficial for cu…

I would partially disagree. I think your statements are true, but only for companies that raise investments on the promise of scaling to greater profitability, but ultimately fail to deliver. If the founders delude themselves or are overly optimistic, the only recourse they have to investors is to gouge the customer. Raising the 'right' amount should be the goal. Not 'as much as possible'

> Raising the 'right' amount should be the goal. > Not 'as much as possible'

Money is like sex - only too much is enough.

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