I was expecting that because that's what Heroku does, but I don't see anything about it on the pricing page (even in the fine print). So either it's a great deal, or highly deceptive marketing
Edit: Argh, you have to click a [?] and then click through to another page where they explain that. I think they've lost my business; that's sketchy as hell.
If that had just been up-front on the main pricing page I would have become a (small) paying customer, buying the $7 plan and moving off of Heroku. But now Render has lost my trust, so I've deleted my account.
If you're taking feedback, the PostgreSQL listing also felt somewhat deceptive; you see $0 in huge text, but it's not until you expand the details and read the fine print that you see "$0 for first 90 days". That similarly felt like a bait-and-switch, though at least that one didn't require me to go to a totally different page to get the full story.
IMO, all the limitations of each one of these $0 plans should be up-front on the big, main card. You have some limitations listed there - "100 GB/month bandwidth included", "SSD disks for $0.25/GB per month", "1 GB SSD storage included", etc - which implies to the reader that those are all of the limitations. But then, the most important limitation in each case gets buried. That's what feels intentionally deceptive.
Re: Postgres, what we actually want is to offer perpetually free Postgres where multiple free customers can use the same underlying instance to make the economics work. The 90-day limit is a stopgap to make sure we're not bleeding money from thousands of tiny, barely used PG instances.
Your point around the limitations is well articulated and valid. The last thing we want is to be deceptive, even unintentionally.
I was expecting that because that's what Heroku does, but I don't see anything about it on the pricing page (even in the fine print). So either it's a great deal, or highly deceptive marketing
Edit: Argh, you have to click a [?] and then click through to another page where they explain that. I think they've lost my business; that's sketchy as hell.
If that had just been up-front on the main pricing page I would have become a (small) paying customer, buying the $7 plan and moving off of Heroku. But now Render has lost my trust, so I've deleted my account.