It wasn't that way last year, and coldstarts were measured in seconds.
Re:The economics of a Postgres free tier
by tristan957 on Thursday July 11, 2024 @07:14PM
(#40941449)
I went all the way back to just a few days after I started[0]. I can't find any restrictions on the free tier uptime for the primary/main database in any of the Wayback Machine snapshots of https://neon.tech/pricing.
Last year we did take a lot of heat for cold starts. Here are two blog posts which discuss how we have worked on cold starts.
1. https://neon.tech/blog/cold-starts-just-got-hot
2. https://neon.tech/blog/posix_spawn-close_range-fixed-cold-st...
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230517084346/https://neon.tech...
I can't say this is the disconnect some are having, but it's the one I did until just now. I read "24/7 compute" and assumed that meant no cold starts. It really meant "up to 24/7 uptime but it will still scale to 0 and require cold starts."
Re:The economics of a Postgres free tier
by tristan957 on Friday July 12, 2024 @12:29AM
(#40942739)
The free tier has mentioned that auto-suspend isn't configurable on the free tier for every archive I could find on the Wayback Machine.
If you want an always on compute on the free tier, you can just setup a cron job, and every 4 minutes or so send a "SELECT 1" which will keep the database awake.
There’s a disconnect here. You are 100% technically correct. Your product’s messaging is confusing. Saying “24/7 compute” makes some people think no cold starts. Enough people in fact that you have to keep correcting them.
Nobody knows your product as well as you do.
Re:The economics of a Postgres free tier
by tristan957 on Friday July 12, 2024 @10:08AM
(#40945710)
I'll provide this feedback. Thanks for your explanation.
I have had to correct others in our Discord server for instance too.