Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Free Postgres databases for small projects

fly.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 231 posts

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#21

Post by cultofmetatron »

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…

oh shiet. that explains so much when it comes to their elixir support.

Fly.io was still very beta when My startup was launching. if we were creating out deployment now, fly.io would be top of my list.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#22

Post by dmw_ng »

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…

You can squeeze a hell of a lot more perf out of general purpose compute that is maybe an extra 15 ms away than one-shot workers lacking any in-RAM persistence, or ability to do much more than limited local k/v lookups. The equation is totally different.

Many workers I've seen (or written) start by reaching out over the Internet to another backend. There goes most of your edge benefit almost immediately.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#23

Post by mrkurt »

password4321 wrote: post #19
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 202…

It's worth noting that our 3GB free is a quirk of our infrastructure.

We want people to try a read replica. We only provision volumes down to 1GB. 3GB sounds better than 2GB.

Sometime soon we'll cross the threshold of relevance and you'll just use Supabase or Cockroach on Fly. They're great f'n products.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#24

Post by vlahmot »

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.

I also like the frankness and simplicity of their communication style.

No fancy buzzwords, to the point and speaks to things we all know are true but are typically not addressed or are wrapped up in spin. The first and last paragraphs are great examples.

The authenticity of it leaves me with a strong sense of trust and respect.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#25

Post by ignoramous »

> We could tell you we want to prevent crypto mining because we care about the planet, and that would be true. We also have a capitalism nerve that hurts when people spend our money gambling. Your credit card number is the thin plastic line between us and chaos.

Could a payments platform like Stripe build a one-click "Freemium powered by Stripe" button ala OpenID, so that these services may free-tier in a friction-free way?

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#26

Post by mrkurt »

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…

shhh!

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#27

Post by tptacek »

ignoramous wrote: post #25

> We could tell you we want to prevent crypto mining because we care about the planet, and that would be true. We also have a capitalism nerve that hurts when people spend our money gambling. Your credit card number is the thin plastic line between us and chaos. Could a payments platform like Stripe build a one-click "Freemium powered by Stripe" button ala OpenID, so that these services may free-tier in a friction-fr…

The real problem here is just abuse, and Stripe has abuse detection products. We have a lot of 2022 goals, but any list we've made in the last quarter would have included "get rid of the credit card prompt" in the top 3. So, yeah, something's going to happen here. We hate the fucking credit card prompt.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#28

Post by lewisl9029 »

I'm so glad Fly exists. Every other edge focused thing out there I'm aware of are "serverless" which these days basically means they charge per request.

That's fine for a lot of use cases, but the unit economics of the per request pricing model means it's really hard to operate a predictably sustainable (i.e. profitable) business without also charging our customers on a usage basis, or enforcing limits on usage, neither of which is ideal for maximizing engagement as incentives are no longer aligned.

Fly just gives us compute at the edge for a predictable price per unit of actual compute resources as opposed to requests, and gives us freedom to serve as much traffic as we can min-max onto those resources, like we could with traditional cloud compute.

This provides much better unit economics for many kinds of applications, at the cost of having to manage the scaling ourselves. But because the option exists, we can make this tradeoff on a case-by-case basis, which is so much better than if all we had was "serverless" stuff at the edge and had to choose between just low latency across the globe vs good unit economics.

Re: Free Postgres databases for small projects

#29

Post by tyingq »

JadoJodo wrote: post #10

Tangentially related: I really dig this “soft” serif font that seems to be making the rounds (including on fly.io). I can't figure out if I like it because it is making the rounds, or if it's just easy on the eyes. Either way, I dig it.

The one on the titles? It's P22 Mackinac Bold: https://www.p22.com/family-Mackinac
Post reply on HN