It feels like fly is trying to repeat a growth model that worked 20 years ago: throw interesting toys at engineers, then wait for engineers to recommend their services as they move on in their careers.

Part of that playbook is the old Move Fast & Break Things. That can still be the right call for young projects, but it has two big problems:

1) AWS successfully moved themselves into the position of "safe" hosting choice, so it's much rarer for engineers to have influence on something that's seen by money men as a humdrum, solved problem;

2) engineers are not the internal influencers they used to be, being laid off left and right the last few years, and without time for hobby projects.

(maybe also 3) it's much harder to build a useful free tier on a hosting service, which used to be a necessary marketing expense to reach those engineers).

So idk, I feel like the bar is just higher for hosting stability than it used to be, and novelty is a much harder sell, even here. Or rather: if you're going to brag about reinventing so many wheels, they need to not to come off the cart as often.