Currently I spend a big amount of money every month running Azure Functions alongside my applications that have their frontend running in Netlify.
But why do I not use the Functions that are supported in Netlify? I don’t need any features that are unavailable. And now you even have background functions with support for generating a PDF and sending an email. You apparently cover 99% of all thinkable needs with your functions. Yet I don’t dare to use them.
Currently I spend maybe $400 per month on computing resources to run my Azure Functions. That is far more than I pay to Netlify. What happens if I move my computing needs to Netlify and maybe I am more successful and my consumption goes up and up and up. Will I start costing you more money than you earn on me? What will happen then?
Will you increase the price and by then I am unable to migrate back to Azure. That’s what I worry about.
I am asking if your current pricing model is viable. You offer 125k invocations per site/month and then another $25 and I guess that is for another 125k invocations? Can you somehow guarantee that you will not raise the price beyond those ballpark figures? Do you have a “fair use” clause somewhere that I risk hitting and then all my work on Netlify Functions is wasted?
Our pricing can change, yes. I cannot promise it won’t. I can suggest that you make a judgment call for your business:
“Netlify’s pricing is good enough to justify the effort I’ll spend migrating based on what I’ll save and is good enough to potentially justify retargeting another service if pricing changes in the future.”
I understand the math may work out to “$400 is cheaper than $theycantpromiseanything” which is a judgment call you’ll have to make for yourself. Nothing we do should make you “unable to migrate back to Azure” - we aren’t about vendor lock-in here
However, the current pricing does not match what you describe.
…shows how much extra usage packages cost - the $25 unlocks 2 MILLION invocations, and each additional $19 after that unlocks 500 thousand.
Thank you for your reply. It is greatly appreciated.
And it is nice that you are not about vendor lock-in. However, when investing in code that cannot be moved but has to be rewritten, is a sort of vendor lock-in in reality, even if that was not your intention. It’s just in the nature of writing code for a certain platform and not something I blame you for. So it’s a circumstance and I am trying to navigate as well as possible under those circumstances.
For Azure I know the price will either stay the same or decrease. That makes me feel safe to invest in it. I was seeking the same feeling from Netlify and can see that I cannot find it now. Perhaps in a few years. I will certainly still be here by then and might reconsider in the next product I develop.
If you’re paying $400 currently, why not look at the Business plan for $99 per month? It offers UNLIMITED functions on every single site you make, plus other stuff. I would imagine you’d worry less about the specifics of the function pricing since your plan offers unlimited? If the business plan was going to change I’m sure there would be a lot of time to inform users, but also I doubt it would go to $400?
Personally, I’d like to see a mid-tier pricing choice between pro and business. I think that price jump from 19 to 100 to be considerable high and a hard sell, furthermore it’s hard to justify to potential clients who entrust you to compose modern web apps and are coming from SaaS system like wordpress.
Most my apps border between pro and business. I’d like some business features like for one, how business prevents Netlify Identity from being shown when using external oauth providers to be available as feature cost (ie: XX USD extra). I understand that decision making from a Netlify position but I think it’s important to also consider that Netlify in a lot of cases is used in-conjunction with other SaaS services, so Netlify is never a one-cost covers all provider and when you have an 81 USD level change it’s like chill fam… chill.
Because I am not concerned about the current pricing. I am concerned about the future price after I have completed my investment. “Unlimited” is exactly the sort of policy that I am worried about, because it comes with a fair use policy, either implicitly or explicitly. Either that, or throttling. So I am trying to extract here what is the ‘real’ price going to be.
hey @gyxi, good to hear that you are thinking about the future. This goes a bit beyond what support can help you best - can i put you in touch with another team to discuss? we can reach out to you via email and assist in making the best decision.
