- Render is closest to what Heroku do, however being on their own hardware they can undercut Heroku who, by running on top of AWS, are both limited but apparently also don’t want to compete on price.
- Fly is both aiming to be a Heroku alternative but also have a really compelling use case of placing many smaller VMs closer to your customers. I believe they are heading towards a target of scale to zero on distributed VM regions for your app. They have some super clever ideas around distributed DB read replicas.
- Railway I think is somewhere in the middle, but I can’t understand their pricing… they say “you only pay for what you use” and the pricing page imply a that you can use fractional resources. It seems confusing as to if they have some sort of auto scale to zero or not. The docs are lacking on in the regard.
For me Fly I think are winning. Probably with Supabase or or Crunchy Data for the DB.
I am skeptical of edge compute being generalizable. I do forsee a bright future for it for embarrassingly parallel problem space, where data sharding can be done cleanly based on an end user.
I think Fly.io employees are a lot more active on HN which is why you see them mentioned more often. They also write great blog posts which get a lot of attention here.
I also agree with the sibling comment. I came to Fly.io being sold on servers running close to the users. But I didn't see much of a peformance improvement with my web apps as they all have to communicate with Firebase. There's probably situations where this technology makes sense, but I haven't found a use case yet.