Rethinking App Deployment: Why Your Current Platform Might Be Holding You Back

There are numerous ways to deploy your app, but most of them have significant drawbacks. This article will explore why you might want to consider a new, highly effective platform and what the fundamental problems with many popular deployment services are.

The Flaw in Per-User Pricing

Let's take a look at a common platform like Vercel. While powerful, its pricing model can be a major issue. The problem lies in the "Collaborate" plan, which charges $20 per month, per member. Why should you pay per user for your development team when the entire purpose of your application is to serve your end-users? This model becomes especially problematic when working with clients, as onboarding them requires either sharing logins or having them pay a significant monthly fee just to grant access for development and maintenance.

In contrast, platforms like Superbase and Trigger.dev offer a more developer-friendly model. Their plans feature unlimited total users and team members on their free tiers, with pricing that scales based on usage, not on the number of developers. For example, Trigger.dev allows for five team members on its free plan and 25 on its next tier. This is the way it should be done: pricing should be primarily based on usage and the tier of service you require, not just how many members you have on your team.

The Search for a Complete Solution

The combination of Superbase for your database and Edge functions, alongside Trigger.dev for workflows, provides a powerful, usage-based backend. However, this setup leaves a critical piece missing: a place to host your frontend. While you can technically serve HTML from a Superbase Edge function, it's not a practical way to build a modern web app. You need a dedicated, robust solution for hosting your frontend code.

Many developers default to older platforms like Digital Ocean or Hetzner, but their user experience often feels dated and clunky. A platform's website and dashboard are a reflection of its commitment to user experience (UX). If the interface is confusing, it signals a lack of focus on making developers' lives easier. The goal is to get work done seamlessly, not to spend hours figuring out how to change environment variables.

Exploring Modern Hosting Alternatives

This brings us to several top choices in the modern hosting landscape: Railway, Render, and Fly.io.

A Closer Look at Railway

Railway is an appealing option because it consolidates many services in one place. You can manage GitHub repos, backend and frontend servers, a Postgres database, and Redis all from a single dashboard.

However, it has a couple of significant limitations: - No Native S3: Railway lacks a built-in S3-compatible object storage solution. This means if you need to store user-generated files, you'll have to set up an account with AWS S3 or a similar service, which adds complexity, especially when managing client projects. - No Free Plan: While there is a free trial, Railway does not offer a permanent free tier. You cannot host a small project for free indefinitely, which can be a barrier for experimentation and small-scale applications.

Why Render Falls Short

Render initially seems promising, but it quickly reveals some serious issues. When attempting to set up the four core services for an application—database, backend, frontend, and storage—you run into immediate problems.

• No S3 Solution: Like Railway, Render does not currently offer an object storage service, though it is on their roadmap.
• Costly Services: The free tiers are extremely limited. A basic web service starts at $7 per month. If you need four separate services, you're looking at close to $30 per month just to get started, whereas you could run the same stack on Superbase and Trigger for free at a low scale.
• Horrendous Cold Starts: The biggest deal-breaker is the performance of the free tier. Applications experience unacceptable cold starts, spinning down after just a few moments of inactivity. When a user visits your app, they can be met with a loading screen that lasts for an eternity or even a 500 error. This makes the free tier practically useless for any real-world application.

The Ultimate Choice: Fly.io

After ruling out the others, we arrive at Fly.io. This platform has gained a massive following, and for good reason. While its marketing once focused heavily on its globally distributed network for low-latency edge deployments, the core product is what truly shines. The focus is on providing a robust and flexible environment for developers.

The dashboard is one of the best-looking and most intuitive interfaces available. But the appeal goes far beyond aesthetics.

Key Features That Make Fly.io Stand Out

Fly.io combines the best of serverless and traditional hosting. Instead of being completely serverless like Vercel, your app runs on one or two virtual machines that can be shut off when not receiving traffic.

• Extremely Fast Cold Starts: It uses Firecracker, the same technology behind AWS Lambda, resulting in cold starts that are under a quarter of a second.
• Scalability: The platform handles scaling automatically, so you don't have to worry about managing infrastructure as your app grows.
• Integrated Services: Fly.io provides everything you need to build a fully-fledged application out of the box:
  • Object Storage: A built-in, S3-compatible solution.
  • Postgres: Managed Postgres databases.
  • Redis: Managed Redis instances via Upstash.

You can deploy any server, any static frontend, and anything else you can imagine, all while having your core database and storage needs met within the same ecosystem.

A Robust and Reliable Foundation

Fly.io offers a pay-as-you-go model that is both powerful and cost-effective. While it might be slightly more complicated to set up than some all-in-one platforms, the trade-off is a more reliable and scalable infrastructure for the long term. You don't have to worry about the unpredictable downtime or breaking changes that can sometimes affect other cloud offerings. For any developer or team looking to move beyond the limitations of typical hosting providers, Fly.io presents an extremely strong and compelling choice.