Why we built another PaaS
Vercel, Railway, Render, Fly. The world has plenty of PaaS already. Here's why we still bothered.
There are a lot of platform-as-a-service products out there. Some of them are very good. So why build another one?
Three reasons.
First: latency. The big PaaS providers run their default workloads in us-east-1 or eu-west-1. For a developer in Jakarta, that's ~250ms of round trip on a good day. For our users — people building products for SEA users — that's a non-starter. Dockfly runs in Singapore today, with Frankfurt and US-East scheduled before the year is out.
Second: pricing. Existing PaaS pricing is set in USD with US/EU benchmarks. A side project that costs $20/mo for a US dev costs three hours of minimum-wage work for an Indonesian junior. We're not saying the existing prices are wrong — they're priced for the market they target. We just want to target a different market.
Third: support. When something goes wrong with your deploy, you want help in the language you think in. We answer support in English and Bahasa Indonesia, with native speakers on call.
None of this is a knock on the great work the existing PaaS teams have done. We use them, we admire them, and we steal good ideas from them every day. But the regional gap is real, and someone needs to fill it. So we are.