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Free Postgres databases for small projects

fly.io

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Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#11

Post by sneak »

> Even for our free services, we require a credit card number. We know that's the worst and it gives you heartburn. It's not because we plan to charge you.

> But here's what happens if you give people freemium full access to a hosting platform: lots and lots of free VMs mining for cryptocurrencies.

You could also permit people to make a cryptocurrency bond deposit to get a free account, which is forfeit if their account gets terminated by you for abuse. Payment cards are strongly linked to government ID in the USA, sadly, which means that presently someone has to effectively dox themselves to you to get a free account.

PS: Please increase the contrast of your body copy. Light grey on white is hard to read even with good eyesight.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#12

Post by gkop »

sneak wrote: post #11

> Even for our free services, we require a credit card number. We know that's the worst and it gives you heartburn. It's not because we plan to charge you. > But here's what happens if you give people freemium full access to a hosting platform: lots and lots of free VMs mining for cryptocurrencies. You could also permit people to make a cryptocurrency bond deposit to get a free account, which is forfeit if their acco…

Your suggestion would make you a target for folks trying to launder purloined cryptocurrency.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#14

Post by atonse »

bradgessler wrote: post #8

Fly is great. They’ve got Chris McCord there, who has already improved their Elixir deployment story. I tweeted a few weeks ago about improving the default Rails deployment experience to not require DB provisioning and configuration of env vars like SECRET_BASE_KEY and they said it would likely ship within the next 3 months. My hot take is they’re setting themselves up to ride the server-side rendered HTML renaissanc…

We're betting the same, and Fly.io doesn't know it yet, but part of our solution will eventually be made possible (much easier) thanks to their architecture. :)

But we aren't yet ready for that piece.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#16

Post by cyanydeez »

gkop wrote: post #12
sneak wrote: post #11

> Even for our free services, we require a credit card number. We know that's the worst and it gives you heartburn. It's not because we plan to charge you. > But here's what happens if you give people freemium full access to a hosting platform: lots and lots of free VMs mining for cryptocurrencies. You could also permit people to make a cryptocurrency bond deposit to get a free account, which is forfeit if their acco…

Your suggestion would make you a target for folks trying to launder purloined cryptocurrency.

cryptocurrency and any free tier compute makes you are target for mslfeasance. cryptocurrencies are basically cancer to compute resources

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#17

Post by tptacek »

tylerchr wrote: post #6

> We've had a free tier since we launched ten years ago (in 2020). I’m not a Fly.io customer (although more and more I am thinking I should be), but I eagerly read every new blog post because I’m so entertained by their tone. These people are clearly having fun at work.

This is a sort of content-free comment, but I'll say it anyways because it's been gnawing at me for months --- there is a lot of content queued up for us to write about; just a freaking avalanche of stuff we've been working on. I keep looking for places to break it off and start writing about it, and the work keeps growing and foiling our attempts.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#18

Post by mrkurt »

melony wrote: post #3

Free tier of CloudFlare Pages/functions runs the app at the edge by default. For Fly.io, this scaling has to be manually configured for both the app and the DB. Are there any plans to offer it by default for the free tier? It is hard to evaluate the benefits of having the data center near the end user when it is not offered out of the box, especially since all the Fly.io blog posts talk about how great their service…

We'd like to automate this! We've made it nearly transparent for Rails apps, and almost as transparent for Phoenix apps, but there's a lot of work to do. Right now with Rails you:

1. Provision your DB

2. Add regions

3. Add our Ruby gem to your Rails app

4. Deploy Rails

5. Set the same regions for the Rails app

And it just works. Phoenix is close but we haven't quite polished up the Hex library yet.

I think being transparent about regions is a feature! We can definitely automate most of those steps away, but the region you're running in will never be obfuscated. CDNs are _notorious_ for placing content and features where it's cheapest for them and I think that's gross.

Whether we can make it free or not is an open question. Ultimately there's a cost to storing a bunch of redundant data. We have ideas for suspending and resuming read replicas, it's just complicated!

At the moment we're a pretty good place to deploy your full stack app for free. And we're a very good place to cheaply run a full stack app in multiple regions.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#19

Post by password4321 »

sneak wrote: post #13

For comparison, note also that ElephantSQL offers 20MB databases on their free tier with 5 concurrent connections. They charge about $20/mo for the tier that Fly is offering here for free. https://www.elephantsql.com/plans.html

https://supabase.com/pricing - 500MB, 2GB download/month (can be used as plain PostgreSQL)

https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing - 5GB, 250M "request units"/month (distributed, PostgreSQL-ish https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/postgresql-compati...)

I was not aware of the other portions of the free compute tier from Fly.io, was looking into Oracle Cloud. (Ask HN: What cool stuff do you run free-tier? Sep 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28652736)

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#20

Post by mrkurt »

hstaab wrote: post #9

Recently, I gave Fly an honest go for a new multi-container project that seemed like a good fit. After digging in, I found that the pg clusters had some sort of system wide bug and couldn’t be attached to any of my apps. It was a bummer. Everything seemed great, I just literally couldn’t use it. I’d love to hear others experiences with the PG features. I could see it replacing Digital ocean for my use cases (if it wo…

I'm sad this bug burned you. We had some brittle infrastructure for talking into a Postgres cluster, and it was a bit of a fire drill to rip it out and simplify. You would have a better experience if you tried today!

We know this because we have metrics on how many people created and then destroyed Postgres DBs without successfully connecting an app to them. When we show this to investors we'll explain that the improvement was a big win for our "go to market efforts". But you should know it was really just a bug fix for something we disappointed you with.

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