🔗 Feature story: why we got rid of plans

How Fly.io replaced pricing plans with pay-as-you-go:

When you're looking for a platform to host your app, one of the first questions you'll ask is: "how much is this gonna cost me?" Oh, how we wish we could boil things down to one number to rule them all, but Legal refuses to let us put a "42" on the pricing page and leave it at that.

Users are doing all kinds of things on Fly.io—like sorting through the US_ _Patent system and helping teenagers in New_ _Zealand learn outside of school—and therefore using wildly varying kinds and amounts of resources. That means the (infuriating) answer to cost questions is always: "it depends." Plus, there are a few different ways to structure pricing from the company side: you can either group certain resources together based on what you think different groups of customers might want (like a prix fix menu), or you can price each individual resource and let folks order á la carte.

In the beginning, there was usage based pricing. Fly.io actually launched on the "á la carte" side of things, charging just for usage. At that point, we were just inflating Frankie the hot air balloon, and Support did not yet exist. Users told us they wanted Support, so we said "You bet!" But instead of just building paid Support options, we thought about other elements that users would want (like BAAs, SOC2 reports, etc) and packaged it all together.

We ended up with plans we called Hobby, Launch, Scale, and Enterprise. Each one had some built-in "allowances" (free resources), some had Support, and all of them were anchored to different types of users. For example, the Scale plan was for users who needed to run multi-region, high-availability workloads, had specific compliance requirements (like needing to be in line with HIPAA), and wanted priority email support.

This worked for a while. But over time, we started getting feedback from prospective users (and comments on Reddit, we won't lie) about how our pricing felt unclear. Folks were thinking about using us, but couldn't get a sense for how much it would cost.

We also realized that the groupings we came up with might not actually make sense for some of Fly.io's users. For example: some folks might want ultra-available Support, but not care at all about compliance. And once we started digging into it, we started asking: why build a company around primitives that are really simple and swappable, and then make a payment structure that requires picking Option A, B, or C? "There must be consistency!" we said. (We were getting pretty fired up at this point.)

So, we got rid of Plans. Instead of grouping resources together, we've gone pure "pay as you go." We want you to be able to take a glance at our compute costs, do some back of the envelope math, and rest easy that you know what you're in for. You don't even have to do the math! We made this_ _calculator so you can just plug in what you need and have it spit out an approximate total.

In this brave new world, your invoice will be:

- whatever compute/product resources you use, pro-rated for the time you use them, plus

- whichever add-ons you pick, like Support and/or Compliance

To be super clear: this new á la carte set-up is just for new accounts. Anyone who was already on a plan still has it, no sweat.

Our aim in getting rid of plans here was to make pricing simpler. Some folks_ _have pointed out that separating out Support and Compliance as "add-ons" means that after this change (which went live October 7th) people who sign up for new accounts could end up paying more than their historical counterparts, depending on what they choose. For example, our previous "Launch" plan was $29/month, and it came with Standard Support and some free compute allowances. Today, Standard Support is $29/month by itself.

Given that, was this the right call, on balance? We think so, since we figure:

- Users who are already on a plan with us probably understand our pricing well enough, so we haven't touched anything about their set-up.

- For prospective users, being able to easily and quickly answer the "how much is it gonna cost me" question is crucial.

- With this new set-up, we're able to price each element at what it actually costs us to provide it to you, plus the margin that allows us to make this a viable business.

continue reading on go.news.fly.io

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