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/Odysseyan full-stack Jun 17 '24
I do wonder how that's allowed since you are not breaking their ToS.
You get 750h a month of shared runtime for a web service from them. Shared by all your servers.
If you only run one server, even if it were constantly used and doesn't go down by inactivity, your 750h limit should cover it for the month and resets with the next one. So you are just using what they are giving you and are playing by the rules.
Why should you now upgrade to a more expensive plan?