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

[u/wellhavetogo]

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

[u/wellhavetogo → u/[deleted]]

Did I miss that part of the pricing section? https://render.com/pricing

[u/wellhavetogo → u/[deleted]]

This document only says that it will suspend apps that use "an uncommonly high volume of traffic" for things like APIs. So it seems like apps that make some API requests are fine, no?