Comment by thenaturalist
7 days ago
Hey there, congrats on publicly launching this after your work over the past months!
Having followed the project for a while now, I really scratch my head when looking at your pricing.
The entire innovation of the past decade in database land has gone towards decoupling storage and compute, driving query engines (like DuckDB) and file formats (like Iceberg).
Yet you force-bundle storage and compute in your pricing while also selling a serverless product.
What's the reason behind that?
Why do it in the first place?
How does your pricing work?
The 40/ 500 compute hours I get are included in the spend limit per tier (i.e. max 160 additional hours in Starter etc.) or completely separate?
Why are there member constraints on a database product?
How does that factor into cost/ map to SDL / reasonable team setups of people operating analytics projects revolving around a database like yours?
I have never seen such a limit with any other vendor and esp. when you wanna get a hold in the market/ have people start using Hydra for the specialized role it can provide, having a 2 person limit for the minimum tier if I wanna PoC this would likely be a show stopper tbh...
[Joe, Hydra cofounder] Hey there, I appreciate you taking the time to write this up - helps a lot to hear what's confusing.
One of the downsides of serverless is that it can be difficult to predict the overall monthly cost when the granularity of billing (per invocation, memory usage, or execution time) is complex. For developers this might be totally fine (even preferred), but we think that giving a single, predictable price: Hydra $100 / month is better for businesses to plan around.
Usage caps per plan are purely soft limits so users don't actually encounter them. Yes, we want people to upgrade to higher plans. In the words of Maya Angelou "Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt" - meaning, we believe these are the best prices we can offer today to build a sustainable project on. That said, I appreciate your point about our # of users limit. If we removed that limit would you try out Hydra?
Hi Joe, much appreciate the response!
Resounding yes RE removal of user limits.
I would want people to have access, to play around with the tool but also to be able to share responsibility wrt to ops/ extension/ incident mgmt etc.
Ok, I'm down to run an experiment and remove the user limits on your account! DM me on X (@JoeSciarrino) or email founders@hydra so I know which account is yours.