RenderReviews of render.com

I recently decided to try Render.com for my cloud hosting needs. The platform looked promising and offers a free tier, which seemed perfect for my initial requirements. However, my experience took a turn for the worse when I was unexpectedly charged $15 and $4, without any prior notification or explanation. Firstly, the absence of a clear warning or notification about these charges is a significant concern for me. The whole point of opting for a free tier is to explore the service without incurring costs. This experience has led me to question the transparency of Render.com's billing system. Secondly, it's essential for any service to communicate any additional charges clearly to its customers. This is standard practice in the industry, and being charged without warning is not only surprising but erodes trust in the service. To compare, other cloud providers I've used have been transparent about their billing practices, ensuring that I'm aware of any potential charges before they occur. In conclusion, while Render.com may offer a robust set of features, my experience with their billing leaves a lot to be desired. I hope they take steps to improve their communication and transparency, as these are crucial aspects of any service-based business.

Free tier conditions could be made clearer on the pricing page, and the notifications could be improved. PostgreSQL Free tier is not completely free. Your free DB is suspended after 90 days since creation date and then deleted after 14 more days if you don't pay. Basically, they keep your data hostage. You can't even download it after the suspension. I was very disappointed to learn this the hard way. I know that it's my mistake that I didn't read all the conditions of the free plan, but it still feels like kind of a scam. Regarding hosting - the free instances are suspended after some inactivity similar to Heroku. Sometimes it takes about a minute or two to process a simple HTTP request after waking up, so the the other side may time out. Just something to keep in mind as well.

Dirty charging tactics. Give very little warning when free tier is used up, instead would rather bill your card on file. Disgusting fees too for a disgusting platform.

Customer service is so bad they don't reply to my inquiries at all. They also don't have an option to remove your credit card (even though you already don't have any running services).

I've been using the free Web Service plan of Render for the last couple of days, and it works surprisingly well, definitely better than Heroku. They support custom domains (with SSL and without having to connect a credit card), and it just works fast. After 15 minutes of inactivity, your app goes to sleep, but it wakes up way faster than Heroku does. If the free service is this good, who knows how much better the paid ones will be.