Region-specific Machines pricing
Region-Specific Pricing & Brazil
- Users deploying in expensive regions (notably Brazil) are surprised by steep price hikes and worry about future bandwidth charges, especially for internal data replication (e.g., LiteFS).
- There is confusion over whether internal traffic between machines is billed; docs suggest yes, some users’ experience suggests no, but this is unresolved in the thread.
- Fly staff explain that costs differ significantly by region (e.g., import taxes, local hosting costs), and global flat pricing would mean cheaper regions subsidizing expensive ones.
- Some would rather accept higher latency (host elsewhere) than pay premiums for edge regions.
Hobby Plan, Pay-As-You-Go & Billing
- The $5 Hobby plan was deprecated; existing users are grandfathered into a “Legacy Hobby” plan.
- New users are on a pay-as-you-go model with no minimum monthly fee; some report small bills being forgiven, but documentation is unclear.
- Several commenters felt the deprecation was quiet; Fly counters that they announced via forum and email.
- Fly’s billing system is acknowledged as historically poor; region-specific pricing became possible only after billing improvements.
Reliability & Operations
- Reports range from “rock-solid for a year+” to “bad enough that we migrated off.”
- Problems cited: flaky deploys, database connections dying, autoscaling to zero despite minimums set, builder VM issues, TLS expirations, upgrades that didn’t restart servers, and un-debuggable outages.
- Some users find it hard to distinguish platform issues from their own mistakes; they want every user-impacting issue reflected on the status page.
- Fly documents incidents on an “infra log” and describes ongoing work to improve volume mobility and CLI error reporting.
Product Strengths & Use Cases
- Strong developer experience: simple YAML replaces complex CloudFormation; easy autoscaling, global routing, and per-employee environments.
- LiteFS and “lambda-like” machines with attached SSDs are highlighted as unique advantages.
- Especially attractive for small teams, hobby projects, and apps needing global edge distribution.
Comparisons with Alternatives (Render, Hetzner, Others)
- Render is viewed as more mature in some respects, solid for sizable production workloads and cheaper than Heroku, though not perfect.
- Hetzner is repeatedly cited as vastly cheaper; some argue Fly’s higher cost buys managed ops, global edge, and autoscaling, others criticize cloud margins.
- Experiences with Hetzner are polarized: some warn about aggressive null-routing and slow support, others report years of excellent uptime and low cost.
- DigitalOcean and other VPS/cloud providers are mentioned as middle-ground options.