I think that a lot of people don't do global distribution by default, and thus miss out of many customers from countries that aren't close to one of their datacentres. But they don't realise this (how can they - they have no data on what might be) and thus think that they don't "need" global distribution because in their current world, they're fine.

If the site doesn't make many requests in order to work (like for instance HN) then you can also use it just fine despite being very far away from their DC.

And by optimizing for few requests and small size, you also get the additional benefit that it will work nicer if the user has a bad internet connection!

You are quite right, and Fly.io can be that "gateway drug" to taking advantage of it. I suspect that is also their exact business model too, attract customers when they are small and run in one region, then as they grow encourage global distribution extracting business from them.

My business doesn't "need" global distribution but it could defiantly be argued that it could "benefit from" being so.

It can also be harmed - GDPR is not easy to comply with / stay on top of as an example

Exactly. Not even a better Heroku, just a cheaper one is the main reason why people switch from it.

I've said it many times but a startup whose elevator pitch is "Heroku, but cheaper at scale" (and I mean exactly the same UX) would be worth billions

As far as I can tell, that's Render's pitch.

They aren't there just yet, but it wasn't far off last time I tried it ~6 months ago.

We're getting there. Which features would tip the scales for you? (in the last 6 months we've added managed Redis, SSH access, DDoS protection, a public API, a free tier, an improved dashboard, one-off jobs, and more: https://feedback.render.com/changelog)

We specifically needed SOC2 compliance. Annoying, but necessary.

I see you're working on it, that's great!

Most people need to do something on the gradient of "run in one city that's nearest my users" to "run in every city everywhere". We have excited single region users in Sydney, because the internet sucks for Australia/New Zealand.

Running in the right first location is good for users. And Virginia is almost never the right first location.

Curious how Heroku compares to the new JS environments — like Netlify and Vercel. The experience and price there seems extremely nice. Wonder how Heroku has kept up in that regard.

Keep an eye on Render, AFAIK they have PITR and HA for Postgres on a roadmap. It's a solid Heroku replacement.

Yes, I think you're right. I've used Heroku a lot and it's great for small apps which I'm not too interested in optimising by the ms. I always thought fly was very optimisation heavy - but in reality it is a better cheaper heroku if you ignore all the global distribution stuff!