Pricing Update · Nov 2022 · Request for feedback

Announcements
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tl;dr: we’re considering changing Render’s pricing structure to match the productivity boost we deliver to every developer, team, and organization building in the cloud. Our free tier for web services, PostgreSQL, and Redis won’t change.

I’d love to hear your questions or comments so we can finalize the changes and announce them soon.

Render’s last price change was in September 2019, when we hadn’t shipped most of the functionality you see today: teams, multiple regions, autoscaling, preview environments, monorepo support, infrastructure-as-code, a REST API, managed Redis, instant rollbacks, chat notifications, integrated DDoS protection, HTTP/3, and much more!

Over the years, we’ve helped software companies grow from founding to millions of dollars in revenue in less time than ever before because they haven’t had to build, maintain, and improve all of Render’s features themselves. Developers and teams using Render are no longer gated on internal platform teams; they can set their own pace.

The value of our platform has increased exponentially (and continues to grow), but our pricing has stayed the same throughout.

Ultimately, Render is a force multiplier for software developers and teams building in the cloud. We help you collaborate effectively and move fast so your teams and businesses can scale to new heights. Our product strategy is quite simple: we build features to make you more productive as you build in the cloud.

To better reflect this value, we’re planning to introduce 4 new plans: Individual, Team, Business, and Enterprise. Here’s a quick summary

  • The Individual Plan is meant for personal projects, indie hacking, and for exploring Render without a credit card. It includes free email support, 100 GB in free bandwidth, and 1,000 free build minutes monthly in addition to existing free tier allowances. There is no fee for this plan beyond compute usage.
  • The Team Plan is ideal for smaller engineering teams building on Render. It includes access to teams, email and chat support, 500 GB of free bandwidth, and 500 free build minutes per team member. It costs $19 per team member per month plus compute usage.
  • The Business Plan is best for large engineering orgs and teams with special compliance needs. It includes everything in the Team plan along with prioritized support, custom compute instances, and 1 TB in free bandwidth. It costs $29 per team member monthly, plus compute usage.
  • The Enterprise Plan includes features in the Business Plan and adds volume discounts, contractual uptime guarantees, strict support SLAs, and access to dedicated customer success engineers. You’ll know if you need this one.

Additionally, based on our costs at scale, we’re going to make two other changes so we can continue to offer sensible compute pricing that scales with you:

  • Egress bandwidth usage beyond a plan’s free allowance will be charged at $30 per additional block of 100 GB. This is necessary to cover our costs for global bandwidth and DDoS protection. Inbound bandwidth is still free.
  • We’re removing the Starter Plus and Standard Plus instances because they are not sustainable at scale. In the future, we will introduce self-serve, custom compute plans with per-CPU and per-GB RAM pricing.

The plan is to have these pricing changes go into effect on January 1, 2023, and be reflected on the bill you receive on February 1.

Note: If you create a team before December 1, 2023 and are the only member in it, we won’t charge you a monthly fee until July 1, 2023 (as long as you don’t add a second member). Your team will have access to all the features in the Team plan, including Autoscaling and Preview Environments.

Let us know if you have questions or feedback.

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Just to clarify, this is in addition to, the current plans (Free, Starter, Starter Plus, etc) and not a replacement (of the current pricing structures/plans)?

Feedback: what pricing structure would you recommend for small teams with multiple projects, or even an individual with multiple projects, all paid for (this is currently what I’m personally using - re: multiple Starter plans)

Thank you.
Ed

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Just to clarify, this is in addition to, the current plans (Free, Starter, Starter Plus, etc) and not a replacement (of the current pricing structures/plans)?

That’s right: teams are charged separately from compute usage, and there’s no membership charge for individual accounts.

what pricing structure would you recommend for small teams with multiple projects, or even an individual with multiple projects, all paid for (this is currently what I’m personally using - re: multiple Starter plans)

For smaller teams with multiple projects: we’re launching the ability to group services in early 2023, making it easier to do everything in a single team/individual account.

For individuals who have existing one-person teams, we won’t charge a monthly team fee for any of your teams until July 1, 2023.

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Thank you!

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Me and my team are very surprised to see that Starter Plus for services is gone. 1GB + 1CPU is a very good configuration for many services that are CPU bound but do not need too much RAM (e.g Django based services). Now suddenly we need to go for a 66% more expensive service. Are there any chances you will bring back Starter Plus in 2023 (or a similar offering)?

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Will we be able to move services between teams? Due to the lack of grouping I’ve been using teams to separate projects that have multiple services.

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Right now it’s me and my client with a “Team” account so that if the client no longer wants to work with me, they own the render account and aren’t tied to me. So if my compute fee is $30 month, it will now cost the client $70 a month for the same service, just my account and the non-dev client account. This pricing is very hard to understand and makes the cost of having an account far exceed the cost of the actual compute. In my mind it would be like netflix saying I need to pay $40/month to login, and then pay $20 in order to watch videos.

EDIT:

My client’s bill will go from $29/month to $110/month, which is hard to digest.
I can move to DigitalOceanAP with more ram and cpu for less than the account fee:
2 Pro Tier containers: $24/month
1 Postgres: $15/month
($39 in total)

Or stay on render for:
2 containers: ($50/month)
1 postgres: ($20/month)
Account Fee: ($40/month)
($110/month)

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I am in the same position. Our current compute fees are around $50 a month and my client is just the bill payer. With this new pricing it adds another $38 on top. I think per user pricing is great for optional support plans (e.g. AWS Support Plan Comparison | Developer, Business, Enterprise, Enterprise On-Ramp | AWS Support) that require direct human help but this is not the case here. It is more a nuisance that leads to users sharing account access or kick bill payers from the team to keep costs down.

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Also egress changes are steep
Previously we had 100GB egress allowance per service with 0.10$/GB beyond that, now it’s 100GB per account and 0.30$/GB beyond that (30$/100GB).
Basically egress allowance has been reduced by a factor of the number of services you’re running (if you have 10 services you get 100GB/10=10GB egress/service) and whatever goes beyond that is charged 3x the price.

Are these changes etched in stone?

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Just got the pricing email. Is there anywhere in the Dashboard UI currently that informs me of how many build minutes I’m currently using?

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Eeek!

I’d just finished moving most of my company’s infrastructure over to Render from Heroku and this is quite a nasty surprise. We’re a tiny company with very infrequent web needs, but every so often we need to host something online. The end of the Starter Plus sku and the addition of a $228/yr/user charge for is a massive change and completely ruins the competitive pricing proposition that Render had.

I hope this decision is reconsidered or at least postponed so that we don’t have to do another service migration over the holiday season.

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This new pricing will make me not use render anymore, I have around 5 “teams” where it’s just me and the client, will I be charged $40 per team now on top of compute? that’s $2,400 a year more for not extra benefit at all, announcing this just 30 days before it’s implemented is also really bad.

This makes me sad, I actually liked render.

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This is certainly short notice. I understand the need to pay for all the features you’ve added since your last pricing update in 2019, but I’d be lying if I said we weren’t going to be having conversations about this at my company, and agree with some of the other commenters above about the value proposition being shaken up quite a bit.

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I’ve joined just to post here. I’m not currently a Render user but have eyed it up as a future replacement for our Heroku usage. This change would make me much less likely to use Render now which is sad. For 4 people this is an extra almost $1000 per year, and we’d estimated our usage at under $1500 per year (<$1000 if we don’t migrate postgres), so this an extra > 50% cost now. Although now that Standard Plus is gone as an option our cost estimate has gone up also. These 2 changes combined would double our bill I believe. Enough to make us look around the market again. I hope this get reconsidered.

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We very recently started migrating our workloads to Render.
Our estimated bill after doing so would have been ~ $400 a month. With these changes to Team pricing it will now be ~ $1540 a month.
Sad to say we have paused our migration and will look for other options if these pricing changes go through.

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The build minutes kind of surprises me since as far as I know there is no way for us to do our own docker builds with Render. I already build my own docker images and host them on GitLab but to deploy on render it seems that it must be built by Render and now you want to charge me due to that technical limitation of the platform.

I’m sure I have more feedback but that was the only immediate thought that came to mind. I have yet to go through and see what other pricing changes will impact me (besides the teams cost which is silly for a PaaS offering, in my opinion.)

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I would agree that the per-team and per-user pricing is confusing and raises our costs significantly. In our setup with two teams (used for segregating apps and billing) with two users each (one developer and one admin/billing contact) that adds an additional $76/mo which roughly doubles our monthly bill. It sounds like we could mitigate the increase by “grouping services” (which is unavailable until next year) and removing our billing admin but that raises business continuity and account ownership concerns with the service being linked to a single developer account and limits any incentive to grow our usage by adding more developers/users in the future.

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Thanks for your response, Majiik. You bring up another point the team at Render has been considering. We’re going to look into the ability to add read-only accounts in early 2023, which would address the need for a billing admin or client auditor for Teams.