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Render raises $80M in Series C financing

render.com

61–70 of 105 posts

Re: Render raises $80M in Series C financing

#61
post #9
post #8

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." Wh…

Hello fellow Xtripe! This blog post wasn't meant to focus on differentiation, but you might find this useful: https://render.com/docs/render-vs-heroku-comparison

Every announcement, _especially_ huge press events like fundraising, should be clear on value prop and differentiation. I’m a potential user. You had my eyeballs, but missed the opportunity to sell me. And if you can do it in 3–5 sentences, you can put that everywhere.

It’s so, so, so important to repeat your message at every opportunity; particularly at moments, like fundraising announcements, where you’ll have access to new potential users (vs. something like a feature release where the readers are far more likely to be existing users.)

Additionally, another group of readers here would be potential hires. They probably want to know why you’re different!

Re: Render raises $80M in Series C financing

#62
post #8

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." Wh…

Taken more charitably from the business' perspective, the playbook you outline that you wish businesses provided is outright giving away some of the R&D that they took to arrive at those conclusions, which has some nonzero value to competitors. I would love to go ask some incumbent exactly the playbook of what worked and what didn't on their voyage to the market so that I could just skip all the things that don't work

Re: Render raises $80M in Series C financing

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS is too low level for me We had good success with Lightsail; but then moved to Fly.io & the Cloudflare platform and spend ~zero time on sre & devops.

I'm curious what you use for a database on Fly.io. When I last looked into it, a proper managed database option was the last thing that they were missing from what I wanted.

I'm not skin in the game on either company but I know that they partnered with Supabase for awhile on this. I'm not sure if that partnership is ongoing or not.

Re: Render raises $80M in Series C financing

#64
post #8

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." Wh…

I have a lot of data-heavy websites that are completely automated on Render. I don't need to care about them day to day. Render abstracts a lot of work away from me.

Before this I used Heroku. Heroku basically filled the same role but nowadays it's less flexible and after all the issues I couldn't wait to get away from them. Render feels like a better Heroku for my specific needs.

Re: Render raises $80M in Series C financing

#67
post #18

(I'm Render's founder) What should we build next, HN?

I'm trying to switch to using preview environments right now to optimize my git workflow and it is a bit of a bummer that I can't just assign preview environments their own environment group. I am still trying to wrap my head around the best way to do this because I have a lot of environment variables.

I also have my object storage with Digital Ocean at the moment. Would love to have that all under one roof.

Re: Render raises $80M in Series C financing

#68
post #18

(I'm Render's founder) What should we build next, HN?

We launched our company on Render. It was great for going from zero to one very quickly but we had many problems and ended up migrating to AWS as we scaled.

* Poor visibility into detailed metrics, especially when problems happened in the render load balancer / routing mesh. We had a specific issue where a small number of requests were failing somewhere in render's infrastructure before reaching our application, and at the time there was no visibility to allow customers to know about requests that timed out or failed within render's infrastructure rather than our application. We collaborated with your team to surface and replicate the issue, but it was frustrating. I had a very good set of conversations with a product manager on your team about what we needed and why it was important in early 2024.

* At the time, the hosted postgres implementation was immature. I think this is an area you've already improved dramatically.

* Maybe you could add support for something like AWS PrivateLink so customers can run parts of their workloads on AWS securely over a private network. This would be a neat way to allow customers to stay on Render longer as their needs grow.

Re: Render raises $80M in Series C financing

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS is too low level for me We had good success with Lightsail; but then moved to Fly.io & the Cloudflare platform and spend ~zero time on sre & devops.

I'm curious what you use for a database on Fly.io. When I last looked into it, a proper managed database option was the last thing that they were missing from what I wanted.

Supabase would be a good pick. Vercel and Cloudflare both do SQL DBs now too, curious how they are. Neon seemed interesting, haven’t heard much about them in a while.

None of those integrated of course, but easier than going big cloud or self hosted

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