Of course, if Render directly says, "We're going to be like Heroku before it went off the rails," that's not compelling to media or investors. So, instead, they've got to fluff it up a bit with marketing buzz. Throwing in some AI won't hurt, either.
AWS is too low level for me. Render helps us spin up new applications in a few clicks. Kind of like Vercel for backend.
Might just be a skill issue but I can definitely see the value from using the product.
We had good success with Lightsail; but then moved to Fly.io & the Cloudflare platform and spend ~zero time on sre & devops.
None of those integrated of course, but easier than going big cloud or self hosted
Their “you’re on your own” option is really nice though for cheap, non-mission-critical stuff, and you can even scale the compute to zero during inactivity and just pay the attached volume costs.
If you add the same capabilities you end up becoming the cloud provider concept you wish to "disprove"
A good number of companies out there move to google scale infrastructure and spin up whole devops teams when they would be fine without all that out of fear of having to move later. That later might never come.
It’s so, so, so important to repeat your message at every opportunity; particularly at moments, like fundraising announcements, where you’ll have access to new potential users (vs. something like a feature release where the readers are far more likely to be existing users.)
Additionally, another group of readers here would be potential hires. They probably want to know why you’re different!
The major cloud providers are quite intimidating to work with and frankly we have much bigger problems to spend our time on than (potentially) saving a couple grand a month. Heroku was nice but it’s been abandoned for years. Fly is a similar competitor but they seem to have monthly outages. We find Render simple, boring and dependable - for us that’s worth the premium they charge.
Before this I used Heroku. Heroku basically filled the same role but nowadays it's less flexible and after all the issues I couldn't wait to get away from them. Render feels like a better Heroku for my specific needs.
It might be hard to understand the value prop because it seems like a commodity… but that’s exactly the value prop: a commodity that works well, is priced right, and you don’t need to worry about using some weird toolset or rolling your own infrastructure.
In 3-5 sentences, what specifically differentiates Render from, say, AWS Lambda?
For example, how much money would I save from making the switch?
At some point companies lose the ability to say, "We are X. It used to be that Y, which had issues of A, B, C. Instead, X does Z, so $USERS can now D, E, F." Where the letters are specific (not empty words like "innovative").
As they grow, these companies add additional products, which is one reason I think they lose this. That's okay! Add one or two sentences (max) that say, "Once we solved Z, we kept building to offer L, M, and N. We expanded from serving $USERS to supporting $EXPANDED_USERS who need O and P."
It's kind of wild how rare that clarity of communication is. Stripe still does a pretty good job despite the _huge_ range of products, complexity, customer profiles, abstractions, and interfaces.
You can definitely tell when companies are either parroting what they've read other splash pages say or are using LLMs to say a bunch of empty platitudes. Good writing is really fking hard.