[HN Gopher] Render Raises $50M Series B
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Render Raises $50M Series B
Author : colesantiago
Score : 87 points
Date : 2023-06-20 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (render.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (render.com)
| dreadlordbone wrote:
| When I first saw this on twitter, I thought Render was a cloud
| GPU company.
| uLogMicheal wrote:
| There is a token named Render token for distributed rendering,
| created by the GPU rendering company OTOY. As far as I know
| they had the name first?
| drumhead wrote:
| >delightful
|
| Im seeing a lot of startups using this word, why?? It sounds
| silly, like you're selling me a childrens toy? You're not
| delightful, its not a 50's musical number.
|
| Its just the word dejour.
| normanvalentine wrote:
| Anyone have a sense of their revenue/valuation? Would be
| interesting to get a calibration as we've seen relatively fewer
| raises lately.
| nickromano wrote:
| I migrated from Heroku to Render for a small Django project of
| mine: https://pinnacleclimb.com/
|
| Some things I like about Render vs Heroku since switching:
| - Building the container from the Dockerfile in my repo seems to
| be a lot faster because it keeps all of the image layers cached.
| - I can control the external IPs that have access to my postgres
| database. I usually keep them all off and only let the webapp
| access it internally, and then whitelist an IP as needed. -
| Env groups are nice - if I want to start another service I can
| have it use all the same environment variables vs trying to keep
| them in sync myself.
|
| A couple of years ago they had some multi-hour outages but things
| have been pretty stable since, a couple of the multi-minute
| outages were on me as I was upgrading the database or messing
| around with some configs. https://status.pinnacleclimb.com/
|
| One thing I'd love in the future is some sort of postgres upgrade
| button. They handle minor version updates but to do a major
| version I need to put the app in maintenance mode, dump, restore,
| and swap to the new DB. It would be amazing if that could be
| automated with something like pglogical.
| ygouzerh wrote:
| It seems quite interesting.
|
| I would have definitely proposed it to my company, but
| unfortunately the per-seat pricing is a no-go for us. We are
| having flexible teams, and we often change people per project or
| hire from contractors so the user management can quickly become a
| mess on per-seat projects.
|
| We will end-up creating some shared accounts to save on costs,
| and it will become messy to manage, some people will be denied
| access,... so unfortunately we will need to pass.
| MH15 wrote:
| What's the meaning behind the name "Render"? I've a background in
| graphics tech so to me render is rendering pixels, something that
| Render does not do.
| purvagujar wrote:
| verb: (1) Provide or give (a service, help, etc.); (2) Cause to
| be or become; make.
| dopeboy wrote:
| Power Render user for 18 months now. We are a fan. Congrats
| Anurag and team.
| Sytten wrote:
| I knew when I got hit with the per seat pricing change a few
| months ago that there were preparing a raise and needed to get
| those numbers up. Good for them I guess.
|
| Funny enough I had big VC call me for due diligence (because I
| posted a lot on their forums and they spotted my name) and I
| happily told them how pissed I was with that change and how I
| went from vocal evangelist for the platform to looking for an
| alternative.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| That change really sat poorly with me as well. My brother and I
| have a small pet project that makes zero dollars but we would
| have had to pay $50/month just to allow him access to the
| project on Render.
|
| Still not as _terrible_ as Vercel which straight up doesn't
| deploy if the user isn't a paid org member lol. Now that is
| shameful as shit!
|
| But this pricing change from Render was bad yeah. :(
| Sytten wrote:
| I mean I would have accepted it if they had network
| separation for various environments managed by the same team,
| but they DON'T (anyone telling you its fine to deploy staging
| in the same network as prod should be fired IMO). So you have
| to use different teams and pay X times the seat pricing which
| is ridiculous.
| anurag wrote:
| Network separation within the same team is on our near-term
| list.
| swyx wrote:
| huge congrats to the Render team! especially raising a big round
| at a time when many VC insiders are saying things like the
| "series B and above market is closed".
|
| I particularly remember the mad flurry by "cloud distro" startups
| to capitalize on Heroku essentially shutting down their free tier
| last year. It's an infrequent thing but I think having a playbook
| for how to respond when a major competitor churns up their own
| users on a silver platter is super helpful for future reference.
|
| anything you'd call out as particularly helpful to you in the
| "post heroku wars" period? looking for specific principles i can
| extrapolate to other similar situations
| anurag wrote:
| no magic sauce; the most helpful thing was just staying up
| despite the massive influx of users and getting even better at
| fighting platform abuse. This may be very specific to what we
| do as a cloud provider.
| MikeTheRocker wrote:
| I'm loving this post Heroku era of cloud. So exciting!
| swyx wrote:
| i mean its also particularly churny. there's no "one standard
| way to do things" anymore. every framework/open source app
| launch now has to include instructions for like 4 different
| deploy targets because people can barely even standardize on
| helm charts much less how to orchestrate containers without
| k8s/docker compose (every newroku startup seems to want to
| reinvent the docker compose file, render included)
|
| not complaining, innovation is good etc, but it doesnt come
| with out its costs to DX
| villgax wrote:
| I'd rather stay with Supabase+Hugging Face API endpoints or just
| straight up raw dog it with DO/Lambda/Banana.dev
| gardnr wrote:
| It looks economical to raw dog it with banana.dev:
| $.00207968/second for a 40GB A100.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I don't understand how any of these cloud wrapper companies will
| make their VC money back. Doesn't Vercel only have ~$25 million
| in ARR yet is somehow valued at $2.5 billion [0]?
|
| If a company is using Vercel to start up, they're pretty good for
| what you get, but eventually AWS (which Vercel wraps) will win
| out in pricing, even counting hiring devops/cloud/backend
| engineers.
|
| [0] https://getlatka.com/companies/vercel
| swyx wrote:
| latka is crap seo bloatsite. google should ban them.
|
| rauchg disclosed their revenue trends recently
| https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1667995063216148480 i learned
| later that this interview was done in nov 2022
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Looks like I can't see the tweet? Also, this lines up with
| Latka's figures as well, $24 million in 2022, and even with
| $50 million in 2023, that's still quite low for a $2.5
| billion valuation, and that's if they don't raise further,
| thereby increasing their valuation.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| A way out for them would be to run their own infrastructure
| down the line which would allow them to pocket the (insane)
| margins the cloud providers currently make.
| pirsquare wrote:
| FWIW Render is moving most of their infrastructure from GCP to
| AWS https://twitter.com/anuraggoel/status/1670863526272077825
| verdverm wrote:
| We left AWS for a similar reason and more. The grass always
| looks greener on the other side, especially when you are mad.
| paulgb wrote:
| Hard to blame them. Google shutting down Domains, instead of
| rolling it into Cloud Domains, seems like a harbinger of what
| they're planning for Cloud. Why offload it when they have a
| natural product to put it under, unless they're also planning
| to shut down that product?
| anurag wrote:
| (Render CEO) We're going to be hybrid and multi-cloud for the
| foreseeable future. We're reducing our reliance on GCP for some
| things, but I don't expect us to ever be AWS-only.
| mtkd wrote:
| Have used Render for a few months to run some heavy worker
| scripts I wanted to place quickly -- it's a solid service but
| some of the UX is a bit rough and nearest DC to UK is Frankfurt
| although that turned out to not be an issue
|
| There is a lot they are getting right
| [deleted]
| ksajadi wrote:
| When I hear about a raise, especially this large, my initial
| thoughts are, "great! they must be doing something right", then I
| remember all those startups that raised mega rounds and ended up
| selling me as a customer down the river, either by the way of
| selling to someone like Google and writing an "amazing journey"
| blog post or just lock me in and jack up prices (I'm looking at
| you Customer.io).
|
| That's why I always look for profitable companies that have built
| a business around solid foundations rather than raising external
| capital in round B, C, D all the way to Z.
|
| If you want to see how those companies *really* were doing, look
| at their stock prices after they go public. Very few go up or
| even stay flat. Most of them crash right after the stock
| handcuffs come off and the investors have passed the bucket to
| the general public. I even have an anti-portfolio of public
| companies with investors who wouldn't shut up for a minute about
| how amazing they are doing, when they were private companies. All
| of them have done considerably worse than the market average or
| any basket of tech companies, even excluding the big five.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Raising during this downturn time on a business that is not AI
| nor crypto is fairly amazing though.
| anurag wrote:
| Hi folks, I'm the founder and CEO at Render. With this raise, the
| company is doubling down on making the cloud delightful for
| growing software teams who don't want to think about
| infrastructure.
|
| We're looking for great people to join our team! See
| render.com/careers for all open roles.
| efields wrote:
| Am I reading that right that the healthcare benefit only covers
| a single _dependent_?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| From the careers page:
|
| > 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid
| dental and vision coverage for you and all your dependents.
| FSAs available too.
| schreiaj wrote:
| First off, congrats.
|
| Second, have you guys had a chance to revise your hiring
| pipeline? When I spoke to your recruitment team a bit over a
| year ago they were asking for 8 straight hours on a zoom call
| as part of the software engineering interview. I had to drop
| out of the process because fitting that in was exceptionally
| difficult. (They did offer to split it into 5 and 3 but I still
| couldn't fit that in). They remarked they were looking to
| update that process a bit.
|
| The above aside - I remember thinking everyone I spoke to there
| was pleasant and enjoyed working there. I was sad to have to
| drop out.
|
| Best of luck moving forward.
| Djle wrote:
| [flagged]
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| > 8 straight hours on a zoom call
|
| I know this is my entitled Big Tech worker bias, but...
| surely there should be a lunch break?
| schreiaj wrote:
| Not mentioned in the emails I had. They did suggest
| splitting it into 5 and 3 hour chunks but I couldn't fit it
| into my schedule (between work and my other half's health
| issues, I had to move around a lot due to several days of
| ER visits)
| umach wrote:
| I lead the engineering team and we've reworked our
| interview process a lot in the last year - it's much
| shorter and can still be split into multiple days. In
| addition, we are very aware that everyone has different
| personal constraints and we do our best to accommodate
| them. Please just let us know and we can likely make it
| happen.
| joshmanders wrote:
| What exactly is going on where you need such long zoom
| meetings?
|
| 8 hours is insane, do you compensate people for this
| time?
| schreiaj wrote:
| Oh, I had to drop out of the process last year and have
| since found somewhere I'm actually really enjoying. I
| mostly wanted to follow up so if someone in my network
| asked me I could give them the most up to date
| information possible. I'd feel really bad if I was giving
| out of date information. I'm glad you've updated your
| process.
| anurag wrote:
| Thank you. I agree that ask was a bit much for a lot of
| candidates; we updated our engineering interviews to be
| shorter and more manageable a few months ago.
| seagreen wrote:
| Do you have thoughts on the Heroku->Render dynamic? Is there a
| name for it? I've seen it enough now to recognize a solid
| pattern for a successful business:
|
| 1. Company starts to do X, makes it a wonderful experience
|
| 2. Users love it, it's successful
|
| 3. Company stop treating users well
|
| 4. New company steps into make X a wonderful experience again,
| with the advantage that _the market is pre-validated_.
|
| How much of an advantage is it to know that users want what
| you're creating? Do you have any tips, like ways to reassure
| people you won't follow the same dynamic as the original
| company?
| anurag wrote:
| A subtle distinction is that it's not Heroku treating users
| poorly -- it's Salesforce, and it's not the same people who
| were at the company even just ~2 years ago.
|
| With Render, I'd rather show than tell. As an interesting
| data point, we've now existed as an independent entity longer
| than Heroku did, and we're truly just getting started.
| the_bear wrote:
| That's an interesting thought. Any company that raises money
| from VCs will ultimately either fail or end up publicly
| traded (via IPO or acquisition), and at that point it's just
| a matter of time before they start squeezing their users.
|
| I wonder what the ideal time is in a company's arc to start
| their eventual replacement. Render just raised a series B
| which probably means they're still many years away from step
| 3, so it's probably too early. But maybe when they're raising
| a series C or D, it's time to start thinking about making
| their replacement.
|
| I feel like Stripe is entering that territory right now. Not
| that they're worse than alternatives, but they no longer have
| that "wonderful experience" magic because they've started to
| turn on the maximize shareholder value engine.
| mr90210 wrote:
| Congrats on the effort you and your company have been putting
| on Render.
|
| Good luck
| franciscop wrote:
| As far as suggestions go, I moved from Heroku to Render but I'm
| again looking for an alternative. There was something that
| Heroku had that I'm strongly missing in Render: shared credits,
| for projects that have low usage.
|
| I have _many_ tiny-usage projects, I'll say "10" but really
| many more. The thing is, even if you put their usage
| (resources, network, disk, etc) together it's still a "small"
| project equivalent, something that could run (capacity-wise) on
| a single VPS easily for $20-30/month. But the way Render is
| structured, even if I get 10 requests/month on each of them, I
| need to pay that _per project_. Which adds up quickly when you
| have many small projects as a hobby.
|
| So I'm wondering if something like what Heroku had where
| there's a shared pool of 2000 credits that I can use among my
| projects as they get used by people, and when one of them
| becomes more popular then I can "upgrade" it to have a proper
| full-instance for each of its parts while keeping the rest of
| them in the pool.
|
| If I wasn't so bad at devops, here the equivalent is I'd rent a
| mid-size VPS and have one folder/project, and I would be able
| to have them all hosted in that server with a lot of capacity
| to spare for $20-30/total. The way I have it now, if I wanted
| to host the same thing with Render, it'd be $250+/month only
| for my active projects. Heck, I think even my Raspberry Pi
| would be able to run all of these projects of mine properly
| (again, capacity-wise, I def love Render for its easiness of
| use).
| RileyJames wrote:
| Yep, same situation. Looked into render. I liked what I saw
| (and spun up a trial). But it was going to be expensive for a
| bunch of low usage projects.
|
| I ultimately went with a large-ish droplet from DO with dokku
| installed. It's been great, for the many small sites use
| case. It doesn't scale, but that's fine. When projects get
| traction the intention is to move them.
|
| Which one has, and is now on AWS. But if we'd been on render
| I wouldn't have moved it. I'd just spin up its own db and
| scale up the processes.
| adparadox wrote:
| I had the exact same problem with Render, but I wouldn't
| expect them to handle this situation because I'm guessing
| it's kind of an edge case? I ended up using a DigitalOcean
| Droplet + CapRover to do this, and then wrote a giant article
| detailing all my steps in case that's useful:
| https://alldjango.com/articles/serve-multiple-django-
| sites-f....
| tomwojcik wrote:
| I don't think that's an edge case. I'm addicted to creating
| new side projects and I think there's more of 'us'. These
| projects usually don't get any traction but I like that
| they work, they are there, accessible globally.
|
| I'm hosting a few using portainer and cloudflared on
| Synology NAS. This way everything is free, I have unlimited
| HDD and 10GB RAM. I keep running into some small issues and
| the CPU is terrible, but it works. :) Most of the time...
| Which is enough for me.
|
| https://github.com/tomwojcik/homeserver-traefik-portainer
|
| You just need to create a stack (in portainer) that has
| access to the git repo and select the compose file. That's
| more or less it.
| adverbly wrote:
| Congrats on your funding round!
|
| I was very impressed by render when I was investigating hosting
| platforms, but if I'm being honest I got scared away by the
| postgres pricing(free for only 90 days:
| https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases).
|
| Question: After some more research, I noticed that even among
| competitors there aren't really any "always free" options(e.g.
| even AWS directly only offers 1 year free for RDS). What is it
| that makes free-tier postgres so uncompetitive in comparison to
| hosted compute? Is it because dedicated disk is more expensive
| than shared cores?
| fnimick wrote:
| > even among competitors there aren't really any "always
| free" options
|
| https://supabase.com/pricing (not affiliated, but a happy
| user)
| moralestapia wrote:
| Hi @anurag, congrats on this funding round!
|
| I'd like to give it a shot but I often don't get past HR
| because I'm in (theoretical) CS and lack "real world
| experience". Which is lame because the stuff I've done from my
| trench is amazing (source: trust me, lol).
|
| Anyway, I'm really good on the backend, creating high
| performance REST APIs, documenting them, etc... and know a
| great deal of postgres.
|
| I also have a good intuition for what's going to stick or not
| in the field. I was doing AWS ~15 years ago, back when you had
| to use an ugly SOAP interface to get things done, but I saw the
| potential and created the first automated cluster of
| bioinformatic tools in there. Right now, I'm betting on Rust,
| WASM, V8 isolates, and everything that has to do w/ lightweight
| function execution.
|
| If that sounds good for render's mission, I'll be glad to take
| part in it.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| AWS had a SOAP API? What timeline are we in again?
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yup, it was a PITA to set up but, when you managed to,
| having a computer in the cloud that you just "created" with
| some code felt like magic.
| samrolken wrote:
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/usin
| g...
| anurag wrote:
| Render's second engineer (who's still here and doing really
| well) had no prior professional experience in software and
| was entirely self-taught. I encourage you to apply!
| Tade0 wrote:
| I was always of the impression that this is an extremely crowded
| space.
|
| What does Render bring to the table that's new?
| sergiotapia wrote:
| It's not crowded at all. There's four big kahunas I see
| competing:
|
| - Render
|
| - Railway
|
| - Northflank
|
| - Fly
|
| From easiest to hardest, in the sense of Heroku like to AWS
| like, I would scale them like so: Heroku
| ------------------------------AWS Render Railway
| Northflank Fly
|
| Render is definitely the easiest, most friendly and predictable
| of the four.
| subpixel wrote:
| Is Netlify not in there somewhere? I guess I'm not sure what
| Netlify is focused on.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I don't consider them or vercel part of this type of
| hosting. Those two are strictly javascript/node, or so it
| appears to me.
|
| I don't see how you would host a Phoenix project in Vercel.
| cpursley wrote:
| I'm a fan of render. As easy to set up as Heroku. Runs
| distributed Elixir like a charm.
| ksajadi wrote:
| Like the text based diagram, clever! I'd place Cloud 66 in
| the middle.
| franciscop wrote:
| This feels like an extremely _sparse_ space as a user. There
| was Heroku, which was the undisputed hero when launched and for
| many years, until they got acquired and things started going
| down and down. Then currently AFAIK there's Fly and Render, and
| very few alternatives.
|
| AWS/GCS is not in the same space, they are a lot lower level.
| For someone like me I'd hate having to move to AWS/GCS, I just
| want to code my project locally, git push and it's live, no
| fumble with devops stuff. Also Firebase etc is a bit too high
| level for what I like, I still like to build the project
| locally and have it run on my computer fully.
| joshmanders wrote:
| > until they got acquired and things started going down and
| down.
|
| In Heroku's defense, much of what we know and love them for
| was started before Salesforce acquired them, but then was
| accelerated and launched while under Salesforce. They just
| got very stagnant after a while and focused more on
| Salesforce integrations and that lately.
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