Ask HN: Any interest in a 5x cheaper alternative to Fly.io for containers?

3 v-yanakiev 2 5/24/2025, 10:06:50 AM

Motivated by recent drama regarding Fly's throttling changes (https://community.fly.io/t/predictable-processor-performance/22259), I started thinking about building an alternative to Fly.io's performance machines (no overprovisioning), which would be 5x cheaper.

https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/

Instead of paying $0.1722/hour for a 4vcpu machine/container, you'd pay $0.03444/hour.

It'd run on Hetzner infrastructure, using Firecracker microVMs.

It'd have a minimal interface. You'd build and push a Docker image with a CLI. After that, you'd start containers / communicate with them / destroy them over REST.

Any interest?

Comments (2)

neximo64 · 9h ago

If its just about the price, isnt it just better to run directly on EC2

v-yanakiev · 9h ago

EC2 takes too long to start up https://www.martysweet.co.uk/ec2-launch-times/

Compare this to the <1s starts you can get with Firecracker VMs (used in their own Lambda, and also on Fly.io).

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Ask HN: Any interest in a 5x cheaper alternative to Fly.io for containers?

Comments (2)