Railway is getting so good I'm not sure what Vercel brings to the party anyway.

While I used to think Railway was an amazing service, I had a production workload get broken because they removed a feature without any depreciation period or warning. I now struggle to recommend it for anything more than a hobby project. Vercel has the benifit of being big enough they have to do things properly. For reference https://station.railway.com/questions/smtp-connection-failur...

SMTP is gated behind the $20/mo Pro plan to reduce spam on the internet.

It sounds like you were running a production workload on the Hobby plan

that's rich, from Railway employee.

your company's mod in that thread said there was supposed to be no SMTP at all for any plan but it was enabled by a bug. then once you saw people were using it you decided to milk your bug via the most expensive payment plan.

but that's your internal dealings. from your paying customers perspective, company had a change in the environment where something was working and now it's not. which could be even okay if it was a legit bug that was fixed, but what makes it worse is instead you said "just pay us 4x more and you get it back". for some users it probably just broke production, is there a more perfect time for blackmail right?

don't try to paint it as altruistic attempt to reduce spam in the internet, this is sleazy af

You were too cheap to pay $20/mth for the Pro plan... That says a lot more about you than Railway.

theres also a ton of smtp-> mailservice proxies.0

And their CEO doesn't post selfies with war criminals

OOTL, what is this a reference to?

His photo with a prime minister of a country with a famous arrest warrant in The Hague.

You know, the same country whose former prime minister is this person: https://jmail.world/person/ehud-barak

I would stay away from any startup for production workload.

Made the mistake. Never again.

Fly, railway, render. Avoid. All have weird show stopper bugs for any reasonable scale and you will fight against the platform compared to using big cloud.

And big cloud works better even in cases where PAAS is advertised as simpler (google cloud run and build is as easy to setup as railway but you have much more knobs to control traffic, routing, roll out etc)

Jmail is itself an experiment, that doesn't need to be production quality.

Why not bare-cloud? Esp with AI... in 10min or less an agent can deploy almost any stack to an optimal AWS setup for a fraction of the cost of any platform.

AWS is still expensive as fuck, just go for a VPS or dedicated server at that point

Every single mentioned service is either an AWS or GCP abstraction.

Angelo from Railway here, Railway runs our own metal for the sheer reason to preserve margins so we can run for perpetuity.

We're nuts for studying failure at the company and Heroku's margins was one of the things we considered to be one of the many nails in that coffin. (RIP)

(my rant here: https://blog.railway.com/p/heroku-walked-railway-run)

thanks for the correction

Fascinating, thanks for chiming in.

Pretty sure Hetzner don't share infrastructure with either of those.

Wake me up when GCP allows you to spending limits

It is fucking CRAZY how many cloud companies don't let you set a spending limit.

I had to hunt around for a host in a suitable geography with a spending limit, almost had to go on-prem (which will happen eventually, but not in the startup phase)

Waking up to bankruptcy because of bots out of your control visiting your website seems a little nuts. Adding some other bullshit on top (like cloudflare) seems even more nuts.

Yeah I can manage all that and have the machine stop responding when it hits a spending limit -- but why would I pay for the cloud if I have to build out that infrastructure?

grumble.

2 reasons basically.

1. Because people vote with their wallets and not their mouths, and most companies would rather have a cost accident (quickly refunded by AWS) rather than everything going down on a saturday and not getting back up until finance can figure out their stuff.

2. Because realtime cost control is hard. It's just easier to fire off events, store them somewhere, and then aggregate at end-of-day (if that).

I strongly suspect that the way major clouds do billing is just not ready for answering the question of "how much did X spend over the last hour", and the people worried about this aren't the ones bringing the real revenue.

> I strongly suspect that the way major clouds do billing is just not ready for answering the question of "how much did X spend over the last hour", and the people worried about this aren't the ones bringing the real revenue.

See: Google's AI studio. Its built on Google Cloud infrastructure so billing updates are slow which peeves users used to instant billing data with Anthropic and OpenAI.

> and the people worried about this aren't the ones bringing the real revenue.

It's this one. If you're in a position to refund a "cost accident", then clearly you don't have to enforce cost controls in real time, and the problem becomes much easier to achieve at billing cycle granularity; the user setting a cost limit is generally doesn't care if you're a bit late to best-effort throttle them.

People act like this is an easy problem. What should a cloud provider do when you hit your limit? Delete your files from storage? Kill your database instance? Automatically terminate your VMs? Erase your backups?

Try it out. Implementation is always harder than conjecture

I do. Every day, for at least 5 services.

Are you able to bypass the aws web app entirely via the command line?

yea i mean i basically have claude code do everything with aws cli.

if they had used hetzner Cloud servers, probably like 500 a month lol

500 at hetzner, they don't go up to that price, and even with their prices raised during the RAM shortage, for 500, you can still have 5 servers each with 4TB NVMe and 128GB RAM, and a Ryzen 9 7950X3D (16 cores).

Seems like their setup price has gone up from 1 month to 2.5 months. Ouch. That'll be to cover the RAM price.

With cloudflare? Less than 100, easily.

The pricing is so bad I had to remove my CC details. One mistake and you wake up with a 50K bill for your personal project that was just you exploring.

I don't think cost is the dominating concern here.