Dora Noda
Software Engineer
2298 posts · View all authors
Fly.io Halved L40S to $1.25/hr — Then Scheduled GPUs for Deletion on August 1
Fly.io cut its L40S GPU to $1.25/hr and then deprecated all GPUs after August 1, 2026. A line-by-line market comparison shows why rented GPUs look cheap until they disappear — and when owned Hetzner hardware wins on cost and control.
Fly.io Sprites at $0.07 Per CPU-Hour: Why Zero When Idle Still Cost $35,000 for 200 Sandboxes
Fly.io Sprites charges $0.07 per CPU-hour only while active — idle is free. Yet a 200-sandbox benchmark put Sprites at $35,000 while Northflank hit $7,200 and a Hetzner fleet costs under €900. The math of idle ratios explains why.
Heroku Is in Sustaining Mode: What Staying Costs vs a €4.35 Hetzner Box
Salesforce put Heroku in sustaining mode in February 2026 — no new Enterprise contracts, no new features. A line-by-line bill shows the cheapest always-on Heroku app still costs $12/month next to a €3.79 Hetzner CX22 with 20TB included, and the gap widens with every app.
Hetzner Just Tripled Its Best VMs: What the 2.7x Price Shock Does to Self-Hosting Math
Hetzner raised CCX and CPX cloud servers 2.1x to 2.75x on June 15 on top of April's 37% hike. A line-by-line repricing of the same Node.js plus Postgres workload against Railway, Render, and Fly.io's 2026 meters shows the gap narrowed — but the flat box still wins once egress is counted.
Hetzner's New -Ltd Tier: What Lower-Cost Hardware Really Trades Away
Hetzner's June 15, 2026 standardization added a cheaper -1-Ltd tier built from lower-cost components alongside fixed -1/-2/-3 types. Here's what the discount actually buys, what variance it introduces, and why a Cluster API fleet should not default its node pool to it.
Kubero's PaaS on Kubernetes: What a Dashboard Over kubectl Actually Solves — and What You Still Operate Yourself
Kubero gives you a polished PaaS surface on Kubernetes — git-push deploys, pipelines, and add-ons without Helm — but it assumes you already own a healthy cluster. Here is exactly what the dashboard automates, what it leaves you holding, and where a Cluster API fleet closes the gap.
NocoDB's Enterprise Gate Is the Third Warning: How to Vet a Self-Hosted Platform's License Before It Vets You
NocoDB gated Calendar Sync and Image Annotations behind Enterprise in July 2026 — after Plex paywalled remote streaming and MinIO stripped its admin console. Three moves, one pattern, and a five-question checklist to tell Apache-2.0 from open-core before you build on it.
Plex Paywalled Your Own Movies: Three Self-Hosting Rug-Pulls and the Apache 2.0 Test That Catches the Next One
Plex paywalled remote streaming, MinIO stripped its admin console, and NocoDB gated new features behind Enterprise — three self-hosted tools that moved free features behind a paywall in 18 months, and the license checklist that separates Apache 2.0 from open-core risk.
R2 at $0, B2 at $0.01, S3 at $0.09: What Egress Really Costs Your Object Store
The same 500 GB of object storage costs $7.50 on R2, $3.48 on B2, and $11.50 on S3 — but egress flips the bill from $0 to $441 at 10x read volume. A line-by-line recompute across R2, B2, S3, and self-hosted MinIO, plus where a PaaS should draw the line.