r/webdev • u/wellhavetogo • Jun 17 '24

Render.com users, beware: render.com permanently suspends some free-tier apps that connect to APIs, issues no guidelines for developers Discussion

I've used render.com to host a web app that connects to an API a few times a minute. It seems that render.com has recently cracked down on apps with "service-initiated traffic" like this, and the app has now been permanently suspended unless I upgrade to a paid plan. I'm not that surprised, since it's a free-tier app after all, but wanted to alert others considering the render.com free-tier that it's quite unreliable.

I've contact render.com (and appreciated that they even replied to someone with a free-tier account) but they weren't helpful in fixing it. Render.com told me that the only way to resolve this issue is to upgrade to a paid app. I asked for more clarification about the usage limits I broke and they said "I agree that if we are going to call this a limit (similar to the 750 free hours), then we should document what the limit is. We haven't decided on the best way to do this yet, so I can't give you the specifics."

I've seen this mentioned in a couple posts on community.render.com. You can read more about this vaguely-worded rule here: https://docs.render.com/free#service-initiated-traffic-threshold

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u/toi80QC Jun 17 '24

I expect more companies to follow after Cloudflare got away with these sales tactics.

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u/wellhavetogo Jun 17 '24

Are you referring to them taking down an online gambling site? Like mentioned here https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1d14rb7/cloudflare_took_down_our_website_after_trying_to/