Without knowing more about why Railway was banned, it's hard to say how we would prevent it. Render uses GCP, AWS, and now, our own hardware [1]; GCP is mostly a historical artifact; we started using AWS for most things after dealing with poor customer and sales support from GCP a few years ago.
> also, I can't help but imagine if instead of render, it was Apple's account which could've been auto-banned (Render is almost a billion dollar company or series-B, I am not sure)
I believe you mean Railway.
Render (a $1.5B company) has been hosting customers on GCP since 2018, and has never been banned.
Render does not require a Dockerfile or understanding containers. It can also detect your runtime and deploy your app without ever generating a Dockerfile.
The one redeeming feature of this failure is staged rollouts. As someone advertising routes through CF, we were quite happy to be spared from the initial 25%.
I work at Render (render.com); we have over 4 million developers on the platform, and we've migrated many large (and small) Heroku customers over because of our more modern capabilities and scalable pricing.
I shared your post with Render's engineering team and it got a lot of love because we know the struggle and can truly empathize because of our own Heroku-accelerated growth. What Fly and Render are doing is hard, but someone needs to do it.
If the market is big enough to support AWS/GCP/Azure as $N00B businesses each, it’s not a leap to imagine a future where both Fly and Render are incredibly successful, loved, and independent businesses spanning decades. Let's keep at it.
(Render founder) I'd love to understand why you think this is the only outcome. Render has positive gross margin and a clear path to profitability based on both our growth so far and the tailwinds in this space. I'm also aware of other companies like ours that have grown all the way to IPO or are well on their way.
I'm very explicit both internally and externally that an acquisition is a failure mode for Render. We're building this for the very long term and plan to keep it that way.
(Render founder) We're still on public clouds because even if it doesn't help with margins, it helps us move faster on features our customers want. It's all one big prioritization problem (and lots of little ones too!).
[1] https://x.com/anuraggoel/status/2057245946652901809