Comment by mrkurt
4 years ago
For what it's worth, we (Fly.io) have this feature, and announced it as part of our launch post on HN. But literally no one has asked us to enable it on their apps. So we never made it self service.
I think for most companies, it's better to set the expectation that the service costs money, bursts will cost more money, and then forgive outlier charges once or twice. It's tremendously difficult to compete against the AWS's of the world, putting work into features specifically to minimize how much people spend seems like a good way to fail a company.
Very interesting that this feature is often demanded in tones of righteous outrage on posts about autoscaling cloud services, yet when actually implemented, nobody has actually set it up.
> So we never made it self service.
I may not underestand parent, but it sounds like its not equivalent to a button next to the auto-scale but more like an email and pre-requisite knowledge that it exists?
Yes we advertised it as a feature to all new signups, with a link to request limits. It's not equivalent to a button, the dirty secret is that when people requested it, I planned to put a notification in my calendar to go look at their usage the last day of the month and adjust their bill accordingly. :)
We were concerned about spending time on marginal features that didn't actually matter much to people, so we "launched" it without building it to see if anyone cared.
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In addition to there being no self-service, the kinds of people who want this aren't going to be using Fly.io in the first place. Look at the prices. DigitalOcean's $5 droplet would cost over $50/month on Fly.
That's not true. Our CPU VMs are similar to DO's CPU optimized droplets. The cheaper droplets are all shared CPU.
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I'd argue that many users that end up with surprise bills are either inexperienced or are deploying something small without giving it much thought.
In those cases, the users will either not know or not think about such expense limits.
The solution is to set relatively strict limits by default and even occasionally warn users about unused/underutilized resources.
But as you said: such features are bad for the bottom line .
And I can appreciate the enormous difficulty of competing with the big 3.
I think such features create really negative surprises too. People expect their app or service to keep working at almost any scale. Disabling an app that hits a threshold sounds terrible, because most peoples' apps _benefit_ from more (legit) activity and they are delighted to pay the extra fees if things just continue to work.
For people who are inexperienced or don't give it much thought, just waiving their overage fees creates a really nice experience. We've had multiple instances of people asking why their bill is so high and being relieved/excited when we explained it and made it go away. People love when we're responsive to problems.
> putting work into features specifically to minimize how much people spend seems like a good way to fail a company.
What a customer-hostile thing to say, never working with you!
What if I told you that if you're actually trying to build a relationship with your customers and have them want to do business with you, it's best to focus on solving their problems as opposed to taking as much of their money as possible.
> What a customer-hostile thing to say, never working with you!
The point is that I'd rather just wave surprise fees than build a bunch of infrastructure to prevent them. From what we can tell, customers almost never have surprise bursts of traffic, but it's something they think about a lot. It's pretty easy to just say "you're not responsible for expenses associated with abuse or attacks or other nasty surprises".
The purpose of a metered service is to give people access to tools and features that would be prohibitively expensive otherwise. The trade off is that the expense also grows incrementally.
Sounds like we agree on what you're doing, we just disagree about whether it's a good approach.
I don't want to need to depend on you being in a good mood to waive fees (or more likely, to hope you're not so low on runway that support gets incentives not to waive them until after your next round closes). I don't want to have to guess whether your terms mean what they say, or whether that giant potential bill might magically go away if I incur it and can convince you it was, quote, nasty.
I do want to deal with people who have thought hard about how to build their product in a way that I can depend on and reason confidently about, and who treat me like the seasoned adult I am.
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> It's tremendously difficult to compete against the AWS's of the world, putting work into features specifically to minimize how much people spend seems like a good way to fail a company.
It's also something that people actively dislike about AWS, and thus a good selling point. Albeit it's probably mostly smaller projects that care about this.
It sounds like a good selling point but I don't think it works out that way. People dislike a lot of things about AWS and it's still something that almost every technical business spends money on.