The state of the feature requests šŸ§

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Hello everybody,

we are a long-time Render user and we are satisfied with the product mostly.

There is however one annoyance I would like to discuss here. Itā€™s the feature requests portal (feedback.render.com).

I think it deserves some more love from the Render staff. Some requests are more than 2 years old. Some are planned with no ETA.

Having at least an estimation with a precision of a year could be helpful. Some are in progress with no meaningful update for a long time. We have no idea if it will be done in a month, or a year. At least a brief update once a month (for example) could improve our feeling. Now it feels more or less like a black box and all we can do is hope and wait.
The lack of some of the requested features will be a show-stopper eventually, so we need a bit more certainty and transparency to feel like we donā€™t need to look for alternatives.

Please, take this as a constructive feedback.

I am looking forward to a response. :slight_smile: Thank you.

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Thanks for the feedback. You bring up a valid point, but one thatā€™s difficult (if not impossible) to address to everyoneā€™s satisfaction.

Ultimately, we have many more feature requests than we can reasonably handle (265 as of today) at our current team size. Many requests are for features that take entire companies to build (e.g. object storage or managed Mongo/Elasticsearch/MySQL). Still, weā€™re working hard to increase our engineering bandwidth and have shipped many more feature requests this year compared to pre-2021. We also work on things that are not on the public roadmap (reliability, performance, security), so while you might not see movement on the board, things are still improving every day.

Software ETAs are hard, even with a 365 day precision. As a startup, we have to work with ever-changing priorities and business realities, and I believe incorrect ETAs are a lot worse than missing ones. I want to make sure engineers at Render arenā€™t struggling to meet artificial deadlines; we want to build the best features and products possible, and a seemingly simple request might end up needing a major refactor of the code base to ensure quality and maintainability, pushing the ETA back by weeks or months and leaving customers hanging.

This is probably not the answer you were looking for, but I should also note that most companies donā€™t publish public roadmaps, and for good reason. Weā€™re choosing to be transparent to the best of our abilities, and while the process isnā€™t as clean as any of us like, weā€™re committed to improving every day.

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Thank you for your reply @anurag. I really appreciate that.

I completely understand what youā€™re saying and agree with everything.

I noticed that you moved the GitHub Deployments Integration | Feature Requests | Render feature request from in progress to planned. Of course, I would like to see it completed asap :smiley: but knowing itā€™s on hold is a lot better than me thinking that youā€™re actively working on it. As you already said, transparency is very important. And exactly that was my point with this thread.

I donā€™t want non-realistic estimations, just status updates where possible.

Thanks again and keep up the work you and your team are doing.

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