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We raised a bunch of money

fly.io

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Re: We raised a bunch of money

#421

Post by quickthrower2 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #267
quickthrower2 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but if you are a startup and your bill went from $10,000/m (say this is comparable to AWS) to $100,000/m because the fly investors said so, you would probably move? Or go bust? Either way it is not good game theoretically for the vendor to do that.

And if they did they also wont get the enterprise customers who are considering conservative alternatives.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#422

Post by bob1029 »

swyx wrote: post #419
bob1029 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When state is introduced Only the most trivial business systems can operate without any state. If your application has any sort of shared, mutable state, you absolutely need to pick a region, or go really deep into the EC/consensus/clustering rabbit hole. With a dedicated region with 1 big DB, you can achieve latency figures (over the shared state) that would be infeasible with other schemes. Serializing transactio…

im relatively well read on databases and couldnt figure out - what is the EC in your comment? EC2?

eventual consistency

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#423

Post by belfalas »

ignoramous wrote: post #353
maliker wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a couple more years of good service until they get acquired. They're leaps and bounds better than the container services on AWS and Azure, solidly better than the GCP one. Seems like they could sell to get their exits before too long. Although I would be very happy if they had the pain tolerance to continue as their own company.

> Probably a couple more years of good service until they get acquired. (not privy to inside information) As a customer that would be a catastrophic outcome. Reckon Fly.io could avoid the temptation better than most given the founding team has already had one exit (mongohq/compose.io) and might not feel the urge to sell out again.

> Reckon Fly.io could avoid the temptation better than most given the founding team has already had one exit (mongohq/compose.io) and might not feel the urge to sell out again.

"Yes John, I used to think that too...but you see, if we sell then we unlock more opportunities that will be quite...nourishing...for the business."

In other words, it's really easy to avoid temptation when it's not staring you in the face.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#424

Post by belfalas »

maliker wrote: post #352
duxup wrote: post #228

"We raised a bunch of money" Generally speaking (I'm not a fly.io customer) at this point that phrase WORRIES me as a customer of any service. It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant flow of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for isn't a realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system or platform that is getting stretched larger and larger regardless of income and the more m…

Probably a couple more years of good service until they get acquired. They're leaps and bounds better than the container services on AWS and Azure, solidly better than the GCP one. Seems like they could sell to get their exits before too long. Although I would be very happy if they had the pain tolerance to continue as their own company.

> Probably a couple more years of good service until they get acquired.

Solid prediction. It is more likely than unlikely that this will be the outcome. Once you raise VC funds the exit clock starts ticking.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#425

Post by duxup »

hanspeter wrote: post #405
duxup wrote: post #228

"We raised a bunch of money" Generally speaking (I'm not a fly.io customer) at this point that phrase WORRIES me as a customer of any service. It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant flow of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for isn't a realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system or platform that is getting stretched larger and larger regardless of income and the more m…

That's interesting. When I see such a message from a service where I'm a customer, it removes worry. - It validates the product. - It tells me that they're more likely to succeed than their competitors. - I'm confident they won't go away anytime soon. - I expect them to improve their product faster.

Gotta say I'm a little surprised, VC deciding to give money to me doesn't indicate any of that.

To me that whole list is determined by actually turning a profit based on your operations, not some VC.

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#426

Post by hooch »

SantaCruz11 wrote: post #333
styren wrote: post #83

I'm really struggling to understand fly.io's path to profitability considering the relatively low margins for SMB/hobby clouds. They could have the whole world on their free tier but what happens when it's time for EQT to cash out? Can they build enough features to make fly.io a serious option for companies? I just can't see myself using it or pushing for it at any of the companies I've worked for unless it's a <5 pe…

If this market was profitable, why Salesforce removed free tier Heroku?

Eliminating all the policing work to prevent malicious actors exploiting the free tier must be a pretty good reason?

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#427

Post by halter73 »

unshavedyak wrote: post #266
mrkurt wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

They claimed they did support price caps the HN launch thread referenced in this new press release. They got a lot of praise for it in the comments back then.

> Max monthly spend: unexpected traffic spikes happen, and the thought of spending an unbounded amount of money in a month is really uncomfortable. You can configure fly.io apps with a max monthly budget, we'll suspend them when they hit that budget, and then re-enable them at the beginning of the next month.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#428

Post by ignoramous »

jeremy_k wrote: post #95
sneak wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of the raise is directly attributable to the fact that their early staff has at least two excellent writers on it? Their brand marketing is impeccable as a result. Every post on their blog comes through with this very clear, slightly snarky voice. If you want to be a famous hacker, you must also be a slightly (industry) famous author.

I've thought a lot about this too. Their blog posts are consistently interesting and well written. I wonder how much of their success is related to the product marketing as well?

You'd hope they also write good code to keep up with the marketing ;)

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#429

Post by LightBug1 »

duxup wrote: post #228

"We raised a bunch of money" Generally speaking (I'm not a fly.io customer) at this point that phrase WORRIES me as a customer of any service. It makes me think that the company exists just on a constant flow of VC or similar money and what I'm using or paying for isn't a realistic or future cost and I'm involved with a system or platform that is getting stretched larger and larger regardless of income and the more m…

"We bent over. We know it's a bold move. We'll see how it plays out. And you, my dear boys and girls, will be along for the ride"

Re: We raised a bunch of money

#430

Post by ignoramous »

mirchiseth wrote: post #301

Razing money or not as a self proclaimed PaaS geek I have always enjoyed reading fly.io blogs. Two of my favorites are How they run containers as VMs [1] and How they outgrew Hashicorp Nomad and wrote their own scheduler [2] [1] - https://fly.io/blog/docker-without-docker/ [2] - https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchest...

The serverless server by Will Jordan is one of the best biztech posts I've read in the past few years: https://fly.io/blog/the-serverless-server/
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