I knew when I got hit with the per seat pricing change a few months ago that there were preparing a raise and needed to get those numbers up. Good for them I guess.
Funny enough I had big VC call me for due diligence (because I posted a lot on their forums and they spotted my name) and I happily told them how pissed I was with that change and how I went from vocal evangelist for the platform to looking for an alternative.
That change really sat poorly with me as well. My brother and I have a small pet project that makes zero dollars but we would have had to pay $50/month just to allow him access to the project on Render.
Still not as _terrible_ as Vercel which straight up doesn't deploy if the user isn't a paid org member lol. Now that is shameful as shit!
But this pricing change from Render was bad yeah. :(
Hi folks, I'm the founder and CEO at Render. With this raise, the company is doubling down on making the cloud delightful for growing software teams who don't want to think about infrastructure.
We're looking for great people to join our team! See render.com/careers for all open roles.
As far as suggestions go, I moved from Heroku to Render but I'm again looking for an alternative. There was something that Heroku had that I'm strongly missing in Render: shared credits, for projects that have low usage.
I have _many_ tiny-usage projects, I'll say "10" but really many more. The thing is, even if you put their usage (resources, network, disk, etc) together it's still a "small" project equivalent, something that could run (capacity-wise) on a single VPS easily for $20-30/month. But the way Render is structured, even if I get 10 requests/month on each of them, I need to pay that per project. Which adds up quickly when you have many small projects as a hobby.
So I'm wondering if something like what Heroku had where there's a shared pool of 2000 credits that I can use among my projects as they get used by people, and when one of them becomes more popular then I can "upgrade" it to have a proper full-instance for each of its parts while keeping the rest of them in the pool.
If I wasn't so bad at devops, here the equivalent is I'd rent a mid-size VPS and have one folder/project, and I would be able to have them all hosted in that server with a lot of capacity to spare for $20-30/total. The way I have it now, if I wanted to host the same thing with Render, it'd be $250+/month only for my active projects. Heck, I think even my Raspberry Pi would be able to run all of these projects of mine properly (again, capacity-wise, I def love Render for its easiness of use).
Second, have you guys had a chance to revise your hiring pipeline? When I spoke to your recruitment team a bit over a year ago they were asking for 8 straight hours on a zoom call as part of the software engineering interview. I had to drop out of the process because fitting that in was exceptionally difficult. (They did offer to split it into 5 and 3 but I still couldn't fit that in). They remarked they were looking to update that process a bit.
The above aside - I remember thinking everyone I spoke to there was pleasant and enjoyed working there. I was sad to have to drop out.
I was very impressed by render when I was investigating hosting platforms, but if I'm being honest I got scared away by the postgres pricing(free for only 90 days: https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases).
Question: After some more research, I noticed that even among competitors there aren't really any "always free" options(e.g. even AWS directly only offers 1 year free for RDS). What is it that makes free-tier postgres so uncompetitive in comparison to hosted compute? Is it because dedicated disk is more expensive than shared cores?
I'd like to give it a shot but I often don't get past HR because I'm in (theoretical) CS and lack "real world experience". Which is lame because the stuff I've done from my trench is amazing (source: trust me, lol).
Anyway, I'm really good on the backend, creating high performance REST APIs, documenting them, etc... and know a great deal of postgres.
I also have a good intuition for what's going to stick or not in the field. I was doing AWS ~15 years ago, back when you had to use an ugly SOAP interface to get things done, but I saw the potential and created the first automated cluster of bioinformatic tools in there. Right now, I'm betting on Rust, WASM, V8 isolates, and everything that has to do w/ lightweight function execution.
If that sounds good for render's mission, I'll be glad to take part in it.
Do you have thoughts on the Heroku->Render dynamic? Is there a name for it? I've seen it enough now to recognize a solid pattern for a successful business:
1. Company starts to do X, makes it a wonderful experience
2. Users love it, it's successful
3. Company stop treating users well
4. New company steps into make X a wonderful experience again, with the advantage that the market is pre-validated.
How much of an advantage is it to know that users want what you're creating? Do you have any tips, like ways to reassure people you won't follow the same dynamic as the original company?
(Render CEO) We're going to be hybrid and multi-cloud for the foreseeable future. We're reducing our reliance on GCP for some things, but I don't expect us to ever be AWS-only.
Hard to blame them. Google shutting down Domains, instead of rolling it into Cloud Domains, seems like a harbinger of what they’re planning for Cloud. Why offload it when they have a natural product to put it under, unless they’re also planning to shut down that product?
When I hear about a raise, especially this large, my initial thoughts are, "great! they must be doing something right", then I remember all those startups that raised mega rounds and ended up selling me as a customer down the river, either by the way of selling to someone like Google and writing an "amazing journey" blog post or just lock me in and jack up prices (I'm looking at you Customer.io).
That's why I always look for profitable companies that have built a business around solid foundations rather than raising external capital in round B, C, D all the way to Z.
If you want to see how those companies *really* were doing, look at their stock prices after they go public. Very few go up or even stay flat. Most of them crash right after the stock handcuffs come off and the investors have passed the bucket to the general public. I even have an anti-portfolio of public companies with investors who wouldn't shut up for a minute about how amazing they are doing, when they were private companies. All of them have done considerably worse than the market average or any basket of tech companies, even excluding the big five.
Have used Render for a few months to run some heavy worker scripts I wanted to place quickly -- it's a solid service but some of the UX is a bit rough and nearest DC to UK is Frankfurt although that turned out to not be an issue
I don't understand how any of these cloud wrapper companies will make their VC money back. Doesn't Vercel only have ~$25 million in ARR yet is somehow valued at $2.5 billion [0]?
If a company is using Vercel to start up, they're pretty good for what you get, but eventually AWS (which Vercel wraps) will win out in pricing, even counting hiring devops/cloud/backend engineers.
A way out for them would be to run their own infrastructure down the line which would allow them to pocket the (insane) margins the cloud providers currently make.
Some things I like about Render vs Heroku since switching:
- Building the container from the Dockerfile in my repo seems to be a lot faster because it keeps all of the image layers cached.
- I can control the external IPs that have access to my postgres database. I usually keep them all off and only let the webapp access it internally, and then whitelist an IP as needed.
- Env groups are nice - if I want to start another service I can have it use all the same environment variables vs trying to keep them in sync myself.
A couple of years ago they had some multi-hour outages but things have been pretty stable since, a couple of the multi-minute outages were on me as I was upgrading the database or messing around with some configs. https://status.pinnacleclimb.com/
One thing I'd love in the future is some sort of postgres upgrade button. They handle minor version updates but to do a major version I need to put the app in maintenance mode, dump, restore, and swap to the new DB. It would be amazing if that could be automated with something like pglogical.
huge congrats to the Render team! especially raising a big round at a time when many VC insiders are saying things like the "series B and above market is closed".
I particularly remember the mad flurry by "cloud distro" startups to capitalize on Heroku essentially shutting down their free tier last year. It's an infrequent thing but I think having a playbook for how to respond when a major competitor churns up their own users on a silver platter is super helpful for future reference.
anything you'd call out as particularly helpful to you in the "post heroku wars" period? looking for specific principles i can extrapolate to other similar situations
no magic sauce; the most helpful thing was just staying up despite the massive influx of users and getting even better at fighting platform abuse. This may be very specific to what we do as a cloud provider.
I would have definitely proposed it to my company, but unfortunately the per-seat pricing is a no-go for us. We are having flexible teams, and we often change people per project or hire from contractors so the user management can quickly become a mess on per-seat projects.
We will end-up creating some shared accounts to save on costs, and it will become messy to manage, some people will be denied access,... so unfortunately we will need to pass.
What's the meaning behind the name "Render"? I've a background in graphics tech so to me render is rendering pixels, something that Render does not do.
This feels like an extremely _sparse_ space as a user. There was Heroku, which was the undisputed hero when launched and for many years, until they got acquired and things started going down and down. Then currently AFAIK there's Fly and Render, and very few alternatives.
AWS/GCS is not in the same space, they are a lot lower level. For someone like me I'd hate having to move to AWS/GCS, I just want to code my project locally, git push and it's live, no fumble with devops stuff. Also Firebase etc is a bit too high level for what I like, I still like to build the project locally and have it run on my computer fully.
Im seeing a lot of startups using this word, why?? It sounds silly, like you're selling me a childrens toy? You're not delightful, its not a 50's musical number.
[+] [-] Sytten|2 years ago|reply
Funny enough I had big VC call me for due diligence (because I posted a lot on their forums and they spotted my name) and I happily told them how pissed I was with that change and how I went from vocal evangelist for the platform to looking for an alternative.
[+] [-] sergiotapia|2 years ago|reply
Still not as _terrible_ as Vercel which straight up doesn't deploy if the user isn't a paid org member lol. Now that is shameful as shit!
But this pricing change from Render was bad yeah. :(
[+] [-] anurag|2 years ago|reply
We're looking for great people to join our team! See render.com/careers for all open roles.
[+] [-] franciscop|2 years ago|reply
I have _many_ tiny-usage projects, I'll say "10" but really many more. The thing is, even if you put their usage (resources, network, disk, etc) together it's still a "small" project equivalent, something that could run (capacity-wise) on a single VPS easily for $20-30/month. But the way Render is structured, even if I get 10 requests/month on each of them, I need to pay that per project. Which adds up quickly when you have many small projects as a hobby.
So I'm wondering if something like what Heroku had where there's a shared pool of 2000 credits that I can use among my projects as they get used by people, and when one of them becomes more popular then I can "upgrade" it to have a proper full-instance for each of its parts while keeping the rest of them in the pool.
If I wasn't so bad at devops, here the equivalent is I'd rent a mid-size VPS and have one folder/project, and I would be able to have them all hosted in that server with a lot of capacity to spare for $20-30/total. The way I have it now, if I wanted to host the same thing with Render, it'd be $250+/month only for my active projects. Heck, I think even my Raspberry Pi would be able to run all of these projects of mine properly (again, capacity-wise, I def love Render for its easiness of use).
[+] [-] schreiaj|2 years ago|reply
Second, have you guys had a chance to revise your hiring pipeline? When I spoke to your recruitment team a bit over a year ago they were asking for 8 straight hours on a zoom call as part of the software engineering interview. I had to drop out of the process because fitting that in was exceptionally difficult. (They did offer to split it into 5 and 3 but I still couldn't fit that in). They remarked they were looking to update that process a bit.
The above aside - I remember thinking everyone I spoke to there was pleasant and enjoyed working there. I was sad to have to drop out.
Best of luck moving forward.
[+] [-] adverbly|2 years ago|reply
I was very impressed by render when I was investigating hosting platforms, but if I'm being honest I got scared away by the postgres pricing(free for only 90 days: https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases).
Question: After some more research, I noticed that even among competitors there aren't really any "always free" options(e.g. even AWS directly only offers 1 year free for RDS). What is it that makes free-tier postgres so uncompetitive in comparison to hosted compute? Is it because dedicated disk is more expensive than shared cores?
[+] [-] moralestapia|2 years ago|reply
I'd like to give it a shot but I often don't get past HR because I'm in (theoretical) CS and lack "real world experience". Which is lame because the stuff I've done from my trench is amazing (source: trust me, lol).
Anyway, I'm really good on the backend, creating high performance REST APIs, documenting them, etc... and know a great deal of postgres.
I also have a good intuition for what's going to stick or not in the field. I was doing AWS ~15 years ago, back when you had to use an ugly SOAP interface to get things done, but I saw the potential and created the first automated cluster of bioinformatic tools in there. Right now, I'm betting on Rust, WASM, V8 isolates, and everything that has to do w/ lightweight function execution.
If that sounds good for render's mission, I'll be glad to take part in it.
[+] [-] seagreen|2 years ago|reply
1. Company starts to do X, makes it a wonderful experience
2. Users love it, it's successful
3. Company stop treating users well
4. New company steps into make X a wonderful experience again, with the advantage that the market is pre-validated.
How much of an advantage is it to know that users want what you're creating? Do you have any tips, like ways to reassure people you won't follow the same dynamic as the original company?
[+] [-] efields|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr90210|2 years ago|reply
Good luck
[+] [-] pirsquare|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anurag|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulgb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verdverm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksajadi|2 years ago|reply
That's why I always look for profitable companies that have built a business around solid foundations rather than raising external capital in round B, C, D all the way to Z.
If you want to see how those companies *really* were doing, look at their stock prices after they go public. Very few go up or even stay flat. Most of them crash right after the stock handcuffs come off and the investors have passed the bucket to the general public. I even have an anti-portfolio of public companies with investors who wouldn't shut up for a minute about how amazing they are doing, when they were private companies. All of them have done considerably worse than the market average or any basket of tech companies, even excluding the big five.
[+] [-] ergocoder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtkd|2 years ago|reply
There is a lot they are getting right
[+] [-] satvikpendem|2 years ago|reply
If a company is using Vercel to start up, they're pretty good for what you get, but eventually AWS (which Vercel wraps) will win out in pricing, even counting hiring devops/cloud/backend engineers.
[0] https://getlatka.com/companies/vercel
[+] [-] Nextgrid|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swyx|2 years ago|reply
rauchg disclosed their revenue trends recently https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1667995063216148480 i learned later that this interview was done in nov 2022
[+] [-] nickromano|2 years ago|reply
Some things I like about Render vs Heroku since switching:
A couple of years ago they had some multi-hour outages but things have been pretty stable since, a couple of the multi-minute outages were on me as I was upgrading the database or messing around with some configs. https://status.pinnacleclimb.com/One thing I'd love in the future is some sort of postgres upgrade button. They handle minor version updates but to do a major version I need to put the app in maintenance mode, dump, restore, and swap to the new DB. It would be amazing if that could be automated with something like pglogical.
[+] [-] swyx|2 years ago|reply
I particularly remember the mad flurry by "cloud distro" startups to capitalize on Heroku essentially shutting down their free tier last year. It's an infrequent thing but I think having a playbook for how to respond when a major competitor churns up their own users on a silver platter is super helpful for future reference.
anything you'd call out as particularly helpful to you in the "post heroku wars" period? looking for specific principles i can extrapolate to other similar situations
[+] [-] anurag|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MikeTheRocker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ygouzerh|2 years ago|reply
I would have definitely proposed it to my company, but unfortunately the per-seat pricing is a no-go for us. We are having flexible teams, and we often change people per project or hire from contractors so the user management can quickly become a mess on per-seat projects.
We will end-up creating some shared accounts to save on costs, and it will become messy to manage, some people will be denied access,... so unfortunately we will need to pass.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dopeboy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dreadlordbone|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uLogMicheal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MH15|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] purvagujar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] normanvalentine|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tade0|2 years ago|reply
What does Render bring to the table that's new?
[+] [-] franciscop|2 years ago|reply
AWS/GCS is not in the same space, they are a lot lower level. For someone like me I'd hate having to move to AWS/GCS, I just want to code my project locally, git push and it's live, no fumble with devops stuff. Also Firebase etc is a bit too high level for what I like, I still like to build the project locally and have it run on my computer fully.
[+] [-] sergiotapia|2 years ago|reply
- Render
- Railway
- Northflank
- Fly
From easiest to hardest, in the sense of Heroku like to AWS like, I would scale them like so:
Render is definitely the easiest, most friendly and predictable of the four.[+] [-] theappsecguy|2 years ago|reply
Does anyone use Render at scale? I image the bills are hefty.
[+] [-] villgax|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gardnr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drumhead|2 years ago|reply
Im seeing a lot of startups using this word, why?? It sounds silly, like you're selling me a childrens toy? You're not delightful, its not a 50's musical number.
Its just the word dejour.