For experiments and hobby projects the value proposition is amazing. Where else can you spin up an independent instance for $1.94 per month?*

*Note this is for an instance with only 256MB RAM (https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/), but it's definitely possible to run non-trivial projects on that. Rust-based web servers like Rocket require only about 10MB RAM. Basic PHP servers should also fit from what I can find.

There are plenty of better deals as long as you don’t limit yourself to big clouds and clouds with startup-esque landing pages frequently posted to HN. LowEndTalk may be the most well-known place for finding such deals.

(Not saying the typical cheap VPS on LowEndTalk has comparable PaaS features. Only responding to parent’s use case of a single cheap instance.)

Best business model in the world, buy stuff in big bags, put it in smaller ones, sell at a multiple of the original price.

Fly is mostly (to my knowledge) reselling Netactuate and OVH servers, their main innovation is the developer experience on top, using Docker on a MicroVM based approach. Of course not only that, but I think it’s their main differentiator.

Haven’t used that in a while but Scaleway offered ridiculously cheap dedicated ARM hardware close to these price points, not sure if they still do.

Nowhere? Because that's a ridiculously low amount of RAM to offer even in your cheapest offerings?

You can easily get 4 GB of RAM for $5 from the likes of Hetzner or Hostinger, so that's 16x more RAM for 2.5x the price. One relatively unknown provider I have used in the past offers 2 GB of RAM for €3.6/month (if paid monthly, €3 if anually), so 8x more RAM for 1.5-2x the price. I'm sure I could find something even cheaper, but I'm just looking at providers I have personally used.

BTW that dropdown seems to be sorted cheapest > most expensive. If you go to the bottom of the list the price for that same VPS doubles.

Oracle free is one 4 core 24gb ram vps + 2 dualcore amd vps.

One such microVM per month used to be within the free monthly allowance, is that not the case anymore?

Maybe if you're limiting yourself to AWS-wrapper cloud companies. What good is a $2/mo cloud instance if it's down multiple times a month?

Just get a $5/mo VPS instead if you're really concerned about a few dollars a month.

I used to use Racknerd for that sort of thing, and the costs were around there -- maybe $1.90/mo for a 512MB instance. It was easy to squeeze several hobby projects onto the machine.

I'm getting 1$ for a 2gb ram vps in ovh for the first year

i recommend lowendtalk what fly.io doing is running colocated baremetal servers and using firecracker to overcommit (probably via memory ballooning and other disk compression on demand)

if you are going to haggle over $2/month then you are better off just connecting your raspberry pi with wireguard/cloudflare tunnel on a residential connection

Sounds like a Lambda function....