# Fly.io 72 Hacker News commenters recommended Fly.io and 42 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 4 years (6 owners). **Verdict:** Simple way to deploy containers and fast VMs, with pay-as-you-go pricing and praised support. Critics most often cite outages and API downtime. ## Why people recommend it - Fast VMs that start on request (3 comments): "The whole selling point of fly is lightweight and fast VMs that can be "off" when not needed and start on-request." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47381684)) "making it dead simple to get a VM at a domain or IP in a few seconds is good and useful" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46404439)) "Using either the fly command or their api, you can kick off a one-off machine that runs an arbitrary script on boot and dies when that script ends." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47382427)) - Responsive, helpful support including founders (4 comments): "Fly's support was absolutely top-notch, up to and including Kurt personally working with me to help debug our deployments." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052770)) "Fly's support was absolutely top-notch, up to and including Kurt personally working with me to help debug our deployments" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49055603)) "the CEO responded to me personally in less than 10 minutes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46915589)) - Low, pay-as-you-go pricing (5 comments): "Cloudflare, Fly.io litestream offerings and Turso are pretty reasonably priced, given the global coverage." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46875044)) "the pricing is fixed - you pay $1.94/month (less if you suspend your machine) for the smallest instance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48688850)) "missing the pay-as-you-go pricing & rapid scaling model that makes Fly worth using" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48271844)) - Heroku-like, easy deploys (4 comments): "For actual server paas that can run docker containers, render.com and fly.io are what heroku could have evolved to." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45898620)) "They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46918223)) "Fly and Render are what heroku would be if they didn't stop innovating." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48083577)) ## What people warn about - Frequent outages and downtime (4 comments): "great platform occasionally goes down and requires a bit of attention but the support forum is great" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46914779)) "they would go down all the time or have unexpected CI bugs/changes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45985635)) "API downtime is a semi-frequent occurrence, as are transient API errors and slowness." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573553)) - Company's public statements alarm critics (5 comments): "the way certain people at that company speak to others (e.g. that post) is why they will never count me as a customer" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052629)) "I've been watching Kurt's AI-pillness advancing over time, but I didn't expect it to metastasize so quickly." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832102)) "If they're not going to lawyer up when it comes to the 4th amendment, I will never use this service." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50277652)) - Costs add up versus alternatives (3 comments): "I love fly, but it adds up when I have a bunch of small things that I want isolated" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877229)) "There's no reason to throw money at those providers when there are many options a dozen times cheaper." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191527)) "They are almost at Big Three cloud/Vercel level of cost with none of the stability." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49054232)) - Storage and IPv6 limitations (2 comments): "having a disk attached to a VM instance where you can write data is never a default and usually complicated or expensive to setup" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45833936)) "fly.io doesn’t support outbound ipv6 connections but defaults to a dns server that returns them" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46479824)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Railway](https://hackerapproved.com/p/railway.md): 94 recommend - [Heroku](https://hackerapproved.com/p/heroku.md): 82 recommend - [Render](https://hackerapproved.com/p/render.md): 44 recommend - [Google App Engine](https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-app-engine.md): 11 recommend - [DigitalOcean App Platform](https://hackerapproved.com/p/digitalocean-app-platform.md): 11 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://fly.io/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Fly.io", https://hackerapproved.com/p/fly-io/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).