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Comment by saganus | Hacker News Reader

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saganus

I didn't found the pricing info either until I played around in the terminal, which gives us this:

$ pricing

Polybit offers pay-as-you-go services.

Action | Cost

---------------------|---------------------------

API Request | 1 Credit

Database Query | 1 Credit - FREE in Beta

Project Deployment | 10 Credits - FREE in Beta

Create New Project | 50 Credits

Create New Database | 50 Credits

Package | Credits | Price

---------|-----------------|---------------------------------

         | 1,000 (x2)      | FREE - Received on Registration 

 1       | 10,000 (x2)     | $9              
                
 2       | 100,000 (x2)    | $49          
                   
 3       | 1,000,000 (x2)  | $249       
                     
 4       | 10,000,000 (x2) | $999

Limited time - purchase now with `purchase <package>` while we're in beta, receive 2x the credit

Edit: Well...formatting sucks since I just copy-pasted. But it's somewhat readable I hope

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I realize this style of pricing is the new hotness and I get why it's appealing for the company providing the service, but as a developer this is really unappealing to me. The last thing I want to do is have to worry about how many API requests my application is making because it costs money.

For example; if I want to render a complicated page out and the API design will be better if that's done with 10 API requests then I want to make it with 10 API requests. I don't want to have to feel like I need to make some kludgy nasty single request in order to reduce my costs by an order of magnitude.

Similar with queries; I'd rather use multiple simple queries than craft some nasty monstrosity query that gets all the data I need at once.

Am I just crazy?

Full disclaimer: I work for a more traditional web host. But these views are totally unrelated to that (I think), it's just based on my personal thoughts/take on this pricing structure.

PS - I really dig the design of the site and think this is really cool and everything. Just the pricing structure seems like a friction point for me personally.

No your not crazy at all!

Sometimes it is better to do many smaller requests versus one bigger request, and it would be nice to see a pricing structure based on bandwidth at least.

Pricing is going to be something we continue to iterate on. Always appreciate feedback!

How often do the credits refresh? Once per day? Per month?

If it's per month it feels very expensive to me especially at the lower tiers compared to the number of transactions I'd expect to be able to do on say EC2 or GC for similar money... Am I just not the target audience?

This pricing level really limits what kind of apps would make financial sense. Nothing ad-supported for a start.

And another example since IoT is mentioned on the website. Imagine I'm selling a temperature sensor gadget that reports once per minute. That's 2 credits * 60 * 24 * 30 per month. Even at the highest level that means 115 devices for $999 per month. If I want to sell the gadget for $10 one-off (not a low price taking into account retail margins) you can see the problem.

confused about what x2 means?

It means you get 2x the credits because they're in beta. So presumably 10,000 (x2) means for the price on the right column, you'd get 20,000 credits. Just a guess.

This is exactly what it means. :)

We're early and we're super grateful for anybody who's willing to test drive the services. I expect I'll be giving away a lot of free use to active early adopters.

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