I set a business up to use Netlify to host a handful of legacy static sites (some with build processes, some without), because it was easier to do than S3 + Cloudfront.
They have a GitHub organisation account so looks like for the occasional updates I'll have to manually deploy.
If it was $5 or $10/month I doubt we'd give upgrading a second thought, but at this price point alternatives like build locally and SFTP to cheap shared hosting are worth the extra effort.
We're spending nearly $1000/mo in bandwidth charges on Netlify for serving totally static text files and a few images, which is absurd. I'm considering switching away from them outright. We can use `make` to run our own build, and CDNs are easy enough.
The fact that they charge per contributor when we already pay a lot is insult to injury.
I guess they're either trying to juice harder for a raise or slow losses to avoid other cuts. Whatever the case, I'm not very satisfied. I don't need the platform that badly, and we're definitely not locked in.
How many people you are serving those static files and images to and how much bandwidth does that consume. The fact that they are static sites reveals little about whether the charges are absurd.
Netlify doesn't make it easy to know this. Looking at my historical bills, they're littered with:
1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
2 Extra Bandwidth $110.00
1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
2 Extra Bandwidth $110.00
1 Extra Bandwidth $55.00
2 Extra Bandwidth $110.00
...
For a single billing cycle. No cumulative totals.
I can only see the current month's bandwidth expenditures.
Cloudfront and similar CDNs charge peanuts compared to this.
If you wanted to set up a static site backed by a CDN in your own cloud account, check out withcoherence.com (I’m a cofounder). We also offer a built in Cloud IDE. Should be very simple to migrate from netlify and there won’t be any surprise bills since it’s your own cloud billing directly!
There is plenty of choice for free static hosting, within certain limits and that's basically marketing cost for their main business.
If that were to disappear because of recession / lack of VC money, we still have free cloudflare and if that were to fail and we need to start paying, bunnyCDN is fairly cheap.
GitHub Pages is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service to run your online business, e-commerce site, or any other website that is primarily directed at either facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS). GitHub Pages sites shouldn't be used for sensitive transactions like sending passwords or credit card numbers.”
it's at least unclear what falls under that very wide umbrella term, so any prudent business would stay clear off the github pages for their business website.
Vercel is not free if you want to use a repo in a Gitlab Group. It's kind of like Github organizations. They claim that a "team" is needed, in order to enable collaborations, and that is not free. So not really a viable alternative in this case.
Vercel is also only free "For personal or non-commercial projects." Otherwise starting at $20/mo/user no matter how few builds, requests, or bandwidth.
There's no indication of timeline. Great, they offer a month free, but what happens today if you don't upgrade? Tomorrow? Do your builds just stop? Do they stop at the end of the month?
The pricing is also.. remarkably high. It's not $19/mo for the feature, it's $19/mo for every git contributor who pushes to master. Even on a small team this ramps pretty quickly.
I really like(d) Netlify, and have no problems paying for services. Their starter plan was always surprisingly generous. But the way this change has been handled feels like a pure money grab and a bit of a f*ck-you to the users who have been working with Netlify in good faith.
Power to them I guess, but it leaves a bad enough taste that we'll look elsewhere now.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Within an hour of reading the mail we began moving our infrastructure to Cloudflare Pages.
Crying shame because I would have been willing to pay Netlify 20-30e per month. But going from 0 to 120e+ per month is just too steep to justify given the alternatives available.
As much as the actual scope of this will only affect a small number of users who happen to use the organisations feature, $19 for this feature is _a lot_ for some CI. My $5 droplet on DO gives me a jenkins with no limitations on what repos I can build, writing out statically to Nginx to serve, but I fully admit not everyone can run that sort of thing. In my case, the monthly time cost is next to zero, and it’s never gone down.
This pricing would make me think twice about using Netlify for anything other than a company already making money. Granted, thats not always a bad thing, Akamai has used that sort of model for years, but having services developers like for their personal stuff is usually the best way to get a foot in the door, and this is just another reason a dev might choose something else.
Netlify is very expensive, their Analytics product is $9/month/site. If they just charged $9/month that would be one thing but per site is ridiculous. I ended up just hosting a Plausible instance on DO.
I didn't realise that Cloudflare DNS was such a deal breaker. Is there a reason to prefer something other than CF for DNS? I've always used CF DNS and I've never felt like I'm missing anything.
Edit: I also just checked the docs and it looks like you should be able to just CNAME to a `something.pages.dev`; why doesn't that work with another provider, or am I missing something?
Legacy reasons I guess. I this case it's a matter of a client not wanting to move off e-mail they use through their shared hosting provider, and me not wanting to touch that hornets nest. I'm fine with just setting up a CNAME record pointing somewhere, but I really do not want to change their DNS provider.
As mentioned by someone else, last I tried, CF refused to "finalize" the setup and start building before I had setup the domain. I may have missed something though, I'll have to check again.
I don't think so? I set one up last night and it waited for me to change my DNS. My domain was through them, so it happened automatically, but there was nothing saying it had to be.
This bit us recently as well. Got a $38 monthly bill for a single, one-page, oneoff static site we were hosting there that used to be free. I think it's because the CI (bot) user in our GH org counted as one user, and my GH account counted as a second user after I made a recent commit. Feels like Netlify is trying to juice up their revenue. :shrug:
I checked Vercel, and they do the same thing (charge for GH org accounts).
This does not include public GitHub repositories or repositories owned by personal GitHub accounts (public or private). Though this policy may expand to other Git providers in the future, repositories hosted by other Git providers are not affected at this time.
Firebase hosting is still free. A little bit harder to setup but that's one time.
The thing about checking for git contributors and automatically billing you extra seems kind of wrong to me. It's inventivizing you to monitor users on another platform to save on simple static hosting etc.
If anyone on this thread is looking for an alternative, I’m a cofounder of Coherence (withcoherence.com).
We offer a netlify-like experience (managed CI, preview environments) built on top of your own cloud account. And we also offer an integrated Cloud IDE for use as a development environment. Today we support GCP but AWS is coming soon. To address one comment I’ve seen here with other alternatives, we don’t have the DNS/custom domain limitations of Cloudflare pages.
For a static site, migration should be very straightforward and we are happy to help if you run into any issues. Feel free to ping hn@withcoherence.com!
Static site migration would be very straightforward anywhere. Do you have replacement handling for the `_redirects` file / `netlify.toml`, form handling, `functions` etc
In general we’re not targeting a 1:1 migration from netlify, so while yes we have equivalents for all of the pieces you mention, they work differently and would require migration work to use Coherence.
Coherence offers full-stack containerized application support, so any functions could be run as a backend service - with additional functionality such as databases/redis and wider framework support available (while still getting the benefits we offer such as Cloud IDE and preview environments).
As well, we have our own `coherence.yml` file that would replace the `netlify.toml` one.
As for redirects, we don’t have anything baked in on that front, but very open to adding equivalent support if it was something our users needed. That’s a good call-out! In the meantime, given our ability to run containers as well as static sites, running an nginx or something with the redirects in the config file would be possible as a stopgap.
If you have private repos for an organisation you are probably also paying already which means you get to use GitHub pages.
GitHub pages also supports some rendering mechanisms, alternatively GitHub actions can be used. GitHub pages also has tls for custom domains. So what is left for netlify? Previews?
I originally moved my personal site to net lift because of Hugo support and the support for tls. I’m not affected by this change. But the communication is still weird.
