We're sorry. I hope we're clearly expressing what's happening here: either we do flat pricing globally, so that people deploying in cheaper regions subsidize those deploying in more expensive ones, or we reflect our cost basis in our prices and let our customers (and prospective customers, like you) make their own choices.
In your specific situation: it really just is the case that Brazil soaks us on import fees. Getting machines in racks in Brazil is just crazy expensive. We're going to keep doing it! Brazil has too many good sandwiches. But the idea behind building a new public cloud on our own hardware is for us to be around for the long haul, and flat low global pricing is not a "long haul" decision.
(It wasn't a long haul decision last year, either, but building a billing system capable of expressing this stuff is a nightmare from which we have not yet fully awoken. It turned out to be a shockingly hard problem.)
There are going to be cases where places like Hetzner make a lot sense compared to us. We hope you get your thing launched and find success wherever you end up. Some of our stuff, like LiteFS, you can take with you! :)
I think the change makes sense, even though I have workloads running on the regions that got the steepest price changes. I'd rather have more granular pricing than a blanket increase. The why now also makes sense - there was a technical limitation that doesn't exist anymore.
I was expecting a larger grace period from announcement to price change though.
You got it right when you started charging for stopped volumes - you overcommunicated and gave users estimates for a few months before you started charging.
Smoothing the increase over the next 4 months was nice.
A couple of nits as well:
- AFAIK prices increased in all but two regions. The announcement could be clearer or more direct regarding this.
- The pricing page could have a clearer from/to. I have to click on the example toggle to know how much machines cost before the change.
In your specific situation: it really just is the case that Brazil soaks us on import fees. Getting machines in racks in Brazil is just crazy expensive. We're going to keep doing it! Brazil has too many good sandwiches. But the idea behind building a new public cloud on our own hardware is for us to be around for the long haul, and flat low global pricing is not a "long haul" decision.
(It wasn't a long haul decision last year, either, but building a billing system capable of expressing this stuff is a nightmare from which we have not yet fully awoken. It turned out to be a shockingly hard problem.)
There are going to be cases where places like Hetzner make a lot sense compared to us. We hope you get your thing launched and find success wherever you end up. Some of our stuff, like LiteFS, you can take with you! :)