Render raises $80M in Series C financing

Google will buy them to reduce chance of legitimate competition probably…

Is this a better heroku?

My experience is that anything outside of the standard process for deploying apps is actively frowned upon by everyone except startups that need to move extremely quickly to create PoCs. So unless this platform is much much cheaper than the public clouds it seems like a limited market.

I gotta say, reading this I have no idea what Render actually does or how it's different from AWS or Heroku. They say they've threaded the needle between the two to provide a new way of deploying infra, but what that is…who knows! Naturally a paragraph on AI.

At some point companies lose the ability to say, "We are X. It used to be that Y, which had issues of A, B, C. Instead, X does Z, so $USERS can now D, E, F." Where the letters are specific (not empty words like "innovative").

As they grow, these companies add additional products, which is one reason I think they lose this. That's okay! Add one or two sentences (max) that say, "Once we solved Z, we kept building to offer L, M, and N. We expanded from serving $USERS to supporting $EXPANDED_USERS who need O and P."

It's kind of wild how rare that clarity of communication is. Stripe still does a pretty good job despite the _huge_ range of products, complexity, customer profiles, abstractions, and interfaces.

You can definitely tell when companies are either parroting what they've read other splash pages say or are using LLMs to say a bunch of empty platitudes. Good writing is really fking hard.

Just in response to some of the other comments here. Render has been around for a bit, I always saw it as a better Heroku. Not so sure they need differentiate themselves, they have been around for a while. IMO they are a nice fit because AFAIK they have not invested any new paradigms and really built it up as a Heroku 2.0.