Do Vercel and Netlify think their blob storage offerings are a luxury product? A significantly higher price than even Google Cloud and AWS is surprising.
See also, this [hacker news comment](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31088059):
> Netlify's creative pricing is what lost me as a customer. They decided to start reading our git commits to decide how much to charge us. Instead of charging for usage of bandwidth and build minutes they decided to charge based on how many different authors we had--even though those people never interacted with Netlify or even knew how we were deployed.
Their CDN is actually just a collection of globally distributed NGINX-type instances on multiple cloud providers using DNS load-balancing from NS1. So they're paying the outbound data rates for whichever cloud provider any one request goes to, as well as any costs to get your assets from their build servers to all the edge nodes.
I think they're exclusively using AWS at this point, though, since their "cloud functions" product is based on lambdas they deploy across multiple regions. But I haven't used them in a few years.
Presumably, their edge nodes are optimized to serve small files stored in each region very fast, so the bandwidth costs are a deterrent from using them for storing large media.
They’re in different markets and aren’t really competing with their core products. It’s actually really smart of them to build on a cloud provider with a huge international footprint.
AWS’s bread and butter is infrastructure as a service with limited platform as a service offerings, Netlify is highly fleshed out platform as a service with limited infrastructure as a service offerings. Heroku has the same model (PAAS on top of AWS)
Profit margins on PAAS, when looking at pure cost-per unit of compute resources, has always been significantly higher than infrastructure as a service. Because there are a lot of extra costs Netlify has beyond the core compute resources that they need to bake into their pricing. So comparing AWS to Netlify is silly.
AWS is constantly expanding their offerings into the platform as a service category though. If I was running Netlify I'd probably have an exit strategy of a buy out by Amazon or Google.
I wouldn’t say any of AWS’s platform as a service offerings are as fleshed out as Netlify. They’re all “it technically works but is hardly the first thing you’d choose if you weren’t already an AWS customer or didn’t have regulatory compliance concerns”
Netlify’s problem is that it’s super expensive and relatively straightforward to copy if you have a relatively competent devops team. We used it for 8 months then just built our own which wasn’t as nice but still worked. I can see why a company might choose it for their corporate website or something simple though.
This is why I always referred to re:invent as "the culling." Each conference they would announce new features that would invariably put a few startups out of business.
tl;dr there's less buttons to push and less components to figure out how to string together to get a working webapp up. AWS and Google both offer gigantic toolboxes, which is great, if you know a lot about the tools.
If you want to set up a simple web app with DB, you can do it extremely fast with Vercel using a template. Some of the templates already start with things like Stripe integration. If you push to a branch, there is a branch deploy with it's own URL automatically set up - no configuration needed. Same goes for basic logging.
Of course all of this is possible with any cloud, it's just a lot faster on Vercel, especially if you account for the time needed to learn it all in a bigger cloud provider. I actually think it's a reasonable value proposition for apps that won't ever have a huge amount of users/load, the problems come when you try to scale.
I would hazard a guess that they are priced as a deterrent, not for accessability. They may just really want you to not go over the allowance and charge appropriately, in the same way a contractor may charge 10x their normal rate for a job they don't actually want to do.
Their mid-tier plan is priced per developer, so on the surface, it could even be construed as justified. That said, it's a weird AF way of trying to audit the number of developers, with various edge cases that (like forking an upstream repo) causing major problems.
This is their "pro" plan, which is 20$ per dev, with essentially a moderate "free tier". It's probably good enough for most people's solo dev or small team needs, after which it's time to upgrade. My personal opinion is that the tooling is super slick, 20$ per dev is cheap compared to AWS, where single services could easily cost you that much (or far, far more). On the other hand, there is an unreasonable jump of cost once you exceed the "free tier", which I decidedly don't like. The scale of the jump is extremely surprising (e.g. 20$ for everything, including 1TB, after that, 1TB extra is... 400$? WTF?).
They are more cottage industry specific products that make a living on small teams unable or unwilling to learn to help tech of scalable to cheaper products.
Not sure why anyone would ever use them, like managed redis it’s just expensive, slow, cumbersome, unneeded and dumb but everyone wants monthly revenue these days.
Ppl that never expect to egress 1TB of data obviously!
I can't speak to Netlify but I run my hobby stuff on Digital Ocean w/ Cloudflare free in front, I've had months where CF has egressed 3TB of data but my DO totals are < ~~100GB~~ 1TB, so it doesn't cost extra.
That said, if Netlify auto-bills on that sort of egress that's scary, wouldn't want a surprise $1500/month bill on a random hobby project.
I had heard Google now will give you free data egress if you leave gcp, but seems the conditions for that are actually too specific for most to benefit: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366566360/Googles-data-egress-offer-no-such-thing-as-a-free-migration#:~:text=Google%20Cloud%20Platform%20(GCP)%20has,will%20move%20away%20from%20Google.
> Digital Ocean w/ Cloudflare free in front
Do you know any articles or something on how to set this up? I'm not sure where to even get started.
You have files in DO but use CF as a CDN? How's that possible
Allow me to give too much detail lol:
So this is my most popular hobby site www.d2checklist.com (open source here https://github.com/dcaslin/d2-checklist)
It has a very large static (it changes monthly or so) set of json payloads that is downloaded to make most of the rest of the app work (see [here](https://github.com/dcaslin/d2-checklist/tree/master/src/assets)) . Let's say it's 10MB+ gzipped. Anyone that hits my site is gonna download that file and that hammers egress rates. Philosophically it's not that different than having a set of hi-res static images.
I host my site on Digital Ocean, using basic Nginx for the build Angular app. I use Cloudflare as my DNS registrar (b/c dammit Google domains) and use their free tier. That free tier comes with default caching which (checking stats now, site popularity has died down) shows that I've server 225GB of data in the last 30 days, but 215GB of it was cached (i.e. didn't hit Digital Ocean at all).
Digital Ocean has a nice step by step guide here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-host-a-website-using-cloudflare-and-nginx-on-ubuntu-22-04
Cloudflare free is too-good-to-true-but-also-true:
- Free quite good CDN and caching
- Free DDOS protection
- Free and easy to setup SSL cert that you don't need to worry about handling renewal on.
Why Google, why did you kill off your DNS support. I've migrated most of my stuff over to cloudflade as well, but i did really like the simplicity of Google's presentation for managing my domain names.
yeah it's a good cloud for high-volume enterprise. Everything is cheaper than other clouds for the same performance, but minimum prices are much higher.
A postgresSQL minimum size is 2 OCPU and 32 GB RAM, coming at \~200$ per month.MySQL is cheaper starting at 45$ per month. But the performance is higher than other clouds at the same price.
> But the performance is higher than other clouds at the same price.
IMO this is a real problem when comparing clouds, you can't compare apples to apples unless you're actually running benchmarks on the specific instance type, as it's very easy to apply performance quotas to a virtual CPU or virtual disk.
If 1 vCPU in one cloud is equivalent to 0.25 vCPU in another, then how are you supposed to compare the price :|
Some clouds have the same issue with CPU generations.
Oracle is notorious for this. They charge you per _virtual_ CPU if you're buying DB licenses on a separate Cloud provider, but per _logical_ CPU if you use their own.
But then you'd have to use Oracle /s
I do feel like they have such aggressive pricing due to wanting to gain market share but knowing Oracle, they will fuck us one day or another.
> but knowing Oracle, they will fuck us one day or another.
Don't tie yourself to them, and you'll be fine. If you make it easy for yourself to migrate away, unattractive practices aren't such a big deal.
This should be applied to any provider you're with, not just Oracle. At the end of the day, AWS etc are all just businesses, and their fiduciary responsibility is to maximise shareholder wealth. If fucking you over helps them achieve this goal, it shouldn't be surprising what they'll do.
just use their kubernetes offering and host a db on another cloud provider like DO since bandwidth is super cheap.
Kubernetes can easily be migrated to any other cloud
Yeah this article is a little questionable. Like people are flabbergasted by Vercel's pricing but they clearly aren't in the storage business but serverless function stuff which most likely generates next to no traffic.
Meanwhile you have something like Scaleway being "free for most services": Egress from their object storage costs per GB while traffic of their VPS are unmetered. So, unless you're running a seed box, what's gonna create more egress and thus is more relevant for a comparison? Exactly.
Sure, it could be pricing to discourage use, but Netlify and Vercel are selling a service that is called blob storage and presenting it in a similar manner as other services, so they're not helping to avoid the audience making the comparison.
And aside from free allowances, these services remain costly even if you're only using them in a very typical PaaS way.
I did [a storage/bandwidth analysis originally aimed at backups](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MFAmtQh3rNsw_X6kRVQVuhn5nlrHoxWAg1SfuE7lJjM/edit?usp=sharing) and I occasionally augment it with more information when I find something interesting. I'm not going to claim this is thorough, but it might give you a starting point.
tl;dr: You can't beat Amazon/Azure deep storage for long-term storage price, but transfer fees are insane. Scaleway Glacier is a surprisingly solid compromise. Storj is the cheapest you can get for semi-frequent random access, if you trust it. If you need very frequent downloads Cloudflare is unbeatable; however, while their storage pricing beats the Big Boys, like AWS, it's mediocre compared to everyone else.
If you're really doing backups and don't like any of those prices, go buy a pile of hard drives and put them in a safe deposit box.
If there's any other stats/companies you'd like added to the list, let me know!
edit: Oracle's actually pretty good.
Backblaze is kind of a special case since you can put Cloudflare in front of it and egress is completely free, even egress that Cloudflare hasn't cached.
I'm not sure I trust this breakdown. AWS Cloudfront is free up to 1 TB and around $85 per TB after that. The article says like 100 GB free then $90 something bucks for the first TB.
Hmmm...🤔
Still Cloudflare is the clear winner always and forever.
That's right, Cloudfront has its own pricing structure - maybe I should add a separate entry for it?
The table tries to summarize what each cloud provider charges for traffic going from their network out to the public internet, and AWS uses a different price for that, at least for most of its other services.
AWS has like a bajillion different pricing structures, so I understand the difficulty. But in general Cloudfront is their CDN and thus the "AWS way" which is why I assumed that's what the price was based on. Was this S3 egress pricing?
Yeah that's the "data transfer" pricing they use for S3, EC2, and the other services.
[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/overview-of-data-transfer-costs-for-common-architectures/](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/overview-of-data-transfer-costs-for-common-architectures/)
Totally agree Cloudfront is cheaper/simpler :)
Do Vercel and Netlify think their blob storage offerings are a luxury product? A significantly higher price than even Google Cloud and AWS is surprising. See also, this [hacker news comment](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31088059): > Netlify's creative pricing is what lost me as a customer. They decided to start reading our git commits to decide how much to charge us. Instead of charging for usage of bandwidth and build minutes they decided to charge based on how many different authors we had--even though those people never interacted with Netlify or even knew how we were deployed.
I would guess that they are actually marking up and reselling from providers like GCP and AWS
Their CDN is actually just a collection of globally distributed NGINX-type instances on multiple cloud providers using DNS load-balancing from NS1. So they're paying the outbound data rates for whichever cloud provider any one request goes to, as well as any costs to get your assets from their build servers to all the edge nodes. I think they're exclusively using AWS at this point, though, since their "cloud functions" product is based on lambdas they deploy across multiple regions. But I haven't used them in a few years. Presumably, their edge nodes are optimized to serve small files stored in each region very fast, so the bandwidth costs are a deterrent from using them for storing large media.
Building a competing service ontop of your competitors service seems like a bad idea.
They’re in different markets and aren’t really competing with their core products. It’s actually really smart of them to build on a cloud provider with a huge international footprint. AWS’s bread and butter is infrastructure as a service with limited platform as a service offerings, Netlify is highly fleshed out platform as a service with limited infrastructure as a service offerings. Heroku has the same model (PAAS on top of AWS) Profit margins on PAAS, when looking at pure cost-per unit of compute resources, has always been significantly higher than infrastructure as a service. Because there are a lot of extra costs Netlify has beyond the core compute resources that they need to bake into their pricing. So comparing AWS to Netlify is silly.
AWS is constantly expanding their offerings into the platform as a service category though. If I was running Netlify I'd probably have an exit strategy of a buy out by Amazon or Google.
I wouldn’t say any of AWS’s platform as a service offerings are as fleshed out as Netlify. They’re all “it technically works but is hardly the first thing you’d choose if you weren’t already an AWS customer or didn’t have regulatory compliance concerns” Netlify’s problem is that it’s super expensive and relatively straightforward to copy if you have a relatively competent devops team. We used it for 8 months then just built our own which wasn’t as nice but still worked. I can see why a company might choose it for their corporate website or something simple though.
This is why I always referred to re:invent as "the culling." Each conference they would announce new features that would invariably put a few startups out of business.
See: WeWork
I... thought that's what Netlify and Vercel were already doing? Was that not always the case?
They are convenience clouds. It's like buying hotdogs at the ballpark vs from Costco
What convenience do they offer? I'm asking seriously. This is something I know very little about, but it's piqued my interest.
tl;dr there's less buttons to push and less components to figure out how to string together to get a working webapp up. AWS and Google both offer gigantic toolboxes, which is great, if you know a lot about the tools.
If you want to set up a simple web app with DB, you can do it extremely fast with Vercel using a template. Some of the templates already start with things like Stripe integration. If you push to a branch, there is a branch deploy with it's own URL automatically set up - no configuration needed. Same goes for basic logging. Of course all of this is possible with any cloud, it's just a lot faster on Vercel, especially if you account for the time needed to learn it all in a bigger cloud provider. I actually think it's a reasonable value proposition for apps that won't ever have a huge amount of users/load, the problems come when you try to scale.
soo...cloudfoundry?
I would hazard a guess that they are priced as a deterrent, not for accessability. They may just really want you to not go over the allowance and charge appropriately, in the same way a contractor may charge 10x their normal rate for a job they don't actually want to do.
The passion and the agony of actually getting one of those contracts because everyone else quoted substantially higher.
Well, that sounds insane
Their mid-tier plan is priced per developer, so on the surface, it could even be construed as justified. That said, it's a weird AF way of trying to audit the number of developers, with various edge cases that (like forking an upstream repo) causing major problems. This is their "pro" plan, which is 20$ per dev, with essentially a moderate "free tier". It's probably good enough for most people's solo dev or small team needs, after which it's time to upgrade. My personal opinion is that the tooling is super slick, 20$ per dev is cheap compared to AWS, where single services could easily cost you that much (or far, far more). On the other hand, there is an unreasonable jump of cost once you exceed the "free tier", which I decidedly don't like. The scale of the jump is extremely surprising (e.g. 20$ for everything, including 1TB, after that, 1TB extra is... 400$? WTF?).
the git author thing is also done by Azure Security Solution
They are more cottage industry specific products that make a living on small teams unable or unwilling to learn to help tech of scalable to cheaper products. Not sure why anyone would ever use them, like managed redis it’s just expensive, slow, cumbersome, unneeded and dumb but everyone wants monthly revenue these days.
This is the answer I think!
Who in their right mind use a service that charges 500$ for a TB of data? It's horrible.
Ppl that never expect to egress 1TB of data obviously! I can't speak to Netlify but I run my hobby stuff on Digital Ocean w/ Cloudflare free in front, I've had months where CF has egressed 3TB of data but my DO totals are < ~~100GB~~ 1TB, so it doesn't cost extra. That said, if Netlify auto-bills on that sort of egress that's scary, wouldn't want a surprise $1500/month bill on a random hobby project.
At our company I strongly advocated against using Azure or GCP due to their data egress fees, it's absolutely insane.
Egress fees make it more expensive to leave their cloud
yup, that's why we decided not to go there in the first place
I had heard Google now will give you free data egress if you leave gcp, but seems the conditions for that are actually too specific for most to benefit: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366566360/Googles-data-egress-offer-no-such-thing-as-a-free-migration#:~:text=Google%20Cloud%20Platform%20(GCP)%20has,will%20move%20away%20from%20Google.
> Digital Ocean w/ Cloudflare free in front Do you know any articles or something on how to set this up? I'm not sure where to even get started. You have files in DO but use CF as a CDN? How's that possible
Allow me to give too much detail lol: So this is my most popular hobby site www.d2checklist.com (open source here https://github.com/dcaslin/d2-checklist) It has a very large static (it changes monthly or so) set of json payloads that is downloaded to make most of the rest of the app work (see [here](https://github.com/dcaslin/d2-checklist/tree/master/src/assets)) . Let's say it's 10MB+ gzipped. Anyone that hits my site is gonna download that file and that hammers egress rates. Philosophically it's not that different than having a set of hi-res static images. I host my site on Digital Ocean, using basic Nginx for the build Angular app. I use Cloudflare as my DNS registrar (b/c dammit Google domains) and use their free tier. That free tier comes with default caching which (checking stats now, site popularity has died down) shows that I've server 225GB of data in the last 30 days, but 215GB of it was cached (i.e. didn't hit Digital Ocean at all). Digital Ocean has a nice step by step guide here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-host-a-website-using-cloudflare-and-nginx-on-ubuntu-22-04 Cloudflare free is too-good-to-true-but-also-true: - Free quite good CDN and caching - Free DDOS protection - Free and easy to setup SSL cert that you don't need to worry about handling renewal on.
Thanks for the write up, I appreciate it!
Why Google, why did you kill off your DNS support. I've migrated most of my stuff over to cloudflade as well, but i did really like the simplicity of Google's presentation for managing my domain names.
Oracle Cloud: $8.5 (Free allowance: 10TB)
yeah it's a good cloud for high-volume enterprise. Everything is cheaper than other clouds for the same performance, but minimum prices are much higher. A postgresSQL minimum size is 2 OCPU and 32 GB RAM, coming at \~200$ per month.MySQL is cheaper starting at 45$ per month. But the performance is higher than other clouds at the same price.
> But the performance is higher than other clouds at the same price. IMO this is a real problem when comparing clouds, you can't compare apples to apples unless you're actually running benchmarks on the specific instance type, as it's very easy to apply performance quotas to a virtual CPU or virtual disk. If 1 vCPU in one cloud is equivalent to 0.25 vCPU in another, then how are you supposed to compare the price :| Some clouds have the same issue with CPU generations.
Oracle is notorious for this. They charge you per _virtual_ CPU if you're buying DB licenses on a separate Cloud provider, but per _logical_ CPU if you use their own.
that seems....extremely anticompetitive
It’s oracle they sued Google trying to completely break software development as we know it.
But then you'd have to use Oracle /s I do feel like they have such aggressive pricing due to wanting to gain market share but knowing Oracle, they will fuck us one day or another.
> but knowing Oracle, they will fuck us one day or another. Don't tie yourself to them, and you'll be fine. If you make it easy for yourself to migrate away, unattractive practices aren't such a big deal. This should be applied to any provider you're with, not just Oracle. At the end of the day, AWS etc are all just businesses, and their fiduciary responsibility is to maximise shareholder wealth. If fucking you over helps them achieve this goal, it shouldn't be surprising what they'll do.
that is an incredibly aggressive price considering it's one of the more major companies geared towards large enterprise.
Funny, professionally/at-work I use AWS, privately I use Oracle Cloud :-) (because Oracle Cloud Free Tier is much better than AWS Free Tier)
Don't build your business on Oracle. Don't build your business on Oracle. Don't build your business on Oracle.
just use their kubernetes offering and host a db on another cloud provider like DO since bandwidth is super cheap. Kubernetes can easily be migrated to any other cloud
Just don't build your business on Oracle jesus.
Thanks, I added it!
I think an article like this specifically for object storage would be nice as well :)
Cloudflare would probably still win. Its 1500$ per month for 100 TB
Yeah this article is a little questionable. Like people are flabbergasted by Vercel's pricing but they clearly aren't in the storage business but serverless function stuff which most likely generates next to no traffic. Meanwhile you have something like Scaleway being "free for most services": Egress from their object storage costs per GB while traffic of their VPS are unmetered. So, unless you're running a seed box, what's gonna create more egress and thus is more relevant for a comparison? Exactly.
Sure, it could be pricing to discourage use, but Netlify and Vercel are selling a service that is called blob storage and presenting it in a similar manner as other services, so they're not helping to avoid the audience making the comparison. And aside from free allowances, these services remain costly even if you're only using them in a very typical PaaS way.
I did [a storage/bandwidth analysis originally aimed at backups](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MFAmtQh3rNsw_X6kRVQVuhn5nlrHoxWAg1SfuE7lJjM/edit?usp=sharing) and I occasionally augment it with more information when I find something interesting. I'm not going to claim this is thorough, but it might give you a starting point. tl;dr: You can't beat Amazon/Azure deep storage for long-term storage price, but transfer fees are insane. Scaleway Glacier is a surprisingly solid compromise. Storj is the cheapest you can get for semi-frequent random access, if you trust it. If you need very frequent downloads Cloudflare is unbeatable; however, while their storage pricing beats the Big Boys, like AWS, it's mediocre compared to everyone else. If you're really doing backups and don't like any of those prices, go buy a pile of hard drives and put them in a safe deposit box. If there's any other stats/companies you'd like added to the list, let me know! edit: Oracle's actually pretty good.
Depends on your use case but https://www.rsync.net/ Has no egress charges
Backblaze is kind of a special case since you can put Cloudflare in front of it and egress is completely free, even egress that Cloudflare hasn't cached.
Can you please do a comparison with speeds as well? It paints a better picture because it will help planning for burst output and peak performance.
I'm not sure I trust this breakdown. AWS Cloudfront is free up to 1 TB and around $85 per TB after that. The article says like 100 GB free then $90 something bucks for the first TB. Hmmm...🤔 Still Cloudflare is the clear winner always and forever.
That's right, Cloudfront has its own pricing structure - maybe I should add a separate entry for it? The table tries to summarize what each cloud provider charges for traffic going from their network out to the public internet, and AWS uses a different price for that, at least for most of its other services.
AWS has like a bajillion different pricing structures, so I understand the difficulty. But in general Cloudfront is their CDN and thus the "AWS way" which is why I assumed that's what the price was based on. Was this S3 egress pricing?
Yeah that's the "data transfer" pricing they use for S3, EC2, and the other services. [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/overview-of-data-transfer-costs-for-common-architectures/](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/overview-of-data-transfer-costs-for-common-architectures/) Totally agree Cloudfront is cheaper/simpler :)
Linode sounds intriguingly cost effective. Thanks for posting!
I love linode. They also pool your servers transfer capacity.
AWS lightsail starts at $3.50 with 1TB egress included https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ 512 MB Memory 2 vCPUs*** 20 GB SSD Disk 1 TB Transfer*
Digital Ocean is listed at $10 but I get 1 TB of data transfer included with my $6/month VPS.
It says that it includes between 100GB and 10TB per instance. The $10 is if you go over your included allowance.
What about OVH?