I just came to HN to see if there was something about this here. I just got my first charge out of nowhere. I’ve had an account there for a couple years and tried it out a long time back but wasn’t actively using it.

I like fly as a service, and I have no problem with them charging, but coming out of nowhere with no prior notice is definitely frustrating and unexpected.

We agree. Presumably by now you got the email we sent out to everyone about reversing the charges. This was a bug.

Thank you for making this right! I didn’t think there was any malice in it and it’s nice to know it was a simple mistake.

I’ve also already unassigned my unneeded address and I’m still interested in using fly for some things in the future.

The same fraud or theft that gives Amazon a 1.5 tn market cap?

Posting a notice isn’t exactly the same as communicating with accounts that will be affected by the change. I hadn’t seen anything about it so it was a surprise to me. Would have appreciated a simple heads up - “hey, we’re going to start billing for this”

You're right to be surprised, we share your expectations.

Out of the blue I received a bill from fly.io for ipv4 addresses. No warning about this, no email communication or anything. Forgot I even had anything on fly.io, was just some test stuff I created years ago. So if you ever tried them out but don't use them, go delete your account just in case they start billing you without warning. Oh and, don't put your credit card into a hosting service then forget about the "free" app you had on there...

Wow, how is that even legal?

same here. no email notification.

"Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important... Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No email sent out and charged on first of January for a mere 2$.

If there's a way to upset your customer base, that's one.

I had already switched off them my paid apps because of poor reliability and just had one internal app.

Shame because I love the workflow and the fact it's using firecracker.

This is the last fly.io sees of me.

What are you switching to?

I moved to digital ocean and hetzner

I get some downtime from digital ocean too but I like to have a backup plan in case hetzner has issues (which didn't happen yet)

IPv6 is the real answer

I also fell into this new trap:

    flyctl ips list

    flyctl ips release 168.220.XXX.XXX

    flyctl ips allocate-v4 --shared

Error: Your account has overdue invoices. Please update your payment information: https://fly.io/dashboard/myname/billing

Ok, so now they got my credit card info, because I had to pay 2$.

    flyctl ips allocate-v4 --shared

Error: cannot use a shared ipv4 with wildcard hostnames, please remove those before allocating a shared IP: .XXX

    flyctl certs list
    flyctl certs remove *.XXX
    flyctl ips allocate-v4 --shared

Now it works. Just have to fix my DNS records now. ipv6 or CNAME to the app.fly.dev domain preferred.

I don't like fly too much, because this is the first free hoster, which I have to constantly check for downtimes and restart the app then. Need a 10m cronjob now.

    cd ~/MyAppPath
    if timeout 5 flyctl logs -a myapp | grep -e "Health check on port 8080 has failed|connection error:"
    then
       flyctl apps restart myapp
    fi

All: this was a bug. We're reversing the charges. Everyone affected got an email. The tl;dr:

* The advance notice of the billing change (we announced in October, but only on our community site) slipped, but the billing change didn't. That's not OK! We agree: you get notified before we bill new things to you.

* Ordinarily, we waive invoices less than $5. Our billing code had a bug that let these charges slip through. D'oh.

Same here, have a throw-away app for learning on fly-io. Got charge $75 for this month WITHOUT any email notification. Can't even contact support because you can't have email support for 'Hobby' tier

If you're affected, you can replace dedicated IPv4 addresses with a shared one, or remove them:

    fly ips release $ip
    fly ips allocate-v4 --shared
    fly ips allocate-v6

I had a similar experience last year with them. Went to check the billing/invoices section on my account, there was nothing there about the charge. Usage section to see if I had passed a limit, the section wasn't even working properly and mentioned it was in beta.

Found a few people complaining on their forums about an unexpected charge but with no official resolve.

Since I wasn't hosting anything serious with them, I purged the account and have never thought about them till now.

AWS is also starting to charge for public IPv4 addresses this year. Did something happen with IPv4 markets? I used to think at least cloud providers were hoarding a ton of addresses.

Two main reasons:

* The cost of an IPv4 address in the market is constantly increasing

* We have recessions, so giants are looking for savings and profits by using their market position.

In addition, some providers are making IPv6 available more and more (there is no reason to consider IPv4 granted then), and others built on someone else's infrastructure are starting to be charged, so they pass this cost on to consumers.

That was posted 10 weeks ago. It also mentions that they list the charge for ipv4, but never actually billed for it.

The subject seems editorialized.

It seems they listing the pricing on their pricing page some time around April? The earliest snapshot I found with the pricing / shared IPv4 address stuff is this one: https://web.archive.org/web/20230404222621/https://fly.io/do...