The pricing seems kind of high for a "startup" plan. I know there's community support, but anyway.

We're very active about providing as much free support as possible to users over email, github, and IRC. We've collected some great quotes from users about how impressed they are with our responsiveness.

Unfortunately we're a small team and frequently travel to events, etc. So it's expensive for us to guarantee that someone will be around. Obviously we'd like to provide support to as many people as possible at the lowest possible rate, so as we have more people paying for support and economies of scale kick in we hope to be able to drop those prices. In the meantime we need to cover our costs or development will stall

edit: our current prices are also based on the level of support that our most active beta users needed. Now that we're past 1.0 hopefully users will need less help which will also help lower prices. We have a very high bar for support quality and don't want to overextend ourselves to the point where we can't deliver

We designed Flynn to be easy to install and use and for it to take care of itself as much as possible. Users generally get up and running and manage issues on their own.

Most current users (from individual developers to large organizations) haven't needed or wanted commercial support contracts. The offering is there for organizations who need significant help and/or an absolute guarantee that they'll be able to reach us at any hour of the day, every day of the year.

I use Cloud 66, so I'll use that as a comparison in terms of price. Their price is $19/mo for the first server + $9/mo for additional servers. It's a little bit of work to get set up and running.

To compare with Flynn, their current pricing is $74-75/node, which is quite a bit more. However, Flynn appears to offer more 1 on 1 support whereas Cloud66's is extra.

Nonetheless, there's quite a bit of difference. I think the range of $20/node may be reasonable. Anything less, the company would be unable to grow. In fact, especially for early stage startups, I'd probably err on the side of a higher pricing (eg. $30-40).

The paid plan is not for the side project but for funded projects or ones that already have money coming in.

Flynn is also a whole lot easier to get set up. Again, just what I've observed based on an earlier release.

Congrats on 1.0 - how does Flynn compare to say BOSH (see BOSH.io)?

BOSH operates at a lower level, working with VMs. Flynn is higher level and allows deployment and management of applications and databases in containers.

Instead of relying on a lower layer like BOSH, Flynn is self-bootstrapping and self-hosting. It runs everything except the container runner in containers managed by the platform. The same APIs and tools are used to manage user applications and Flynn components.

For more information, check out our Architecture page: https://flynn.io/docs/architecture

You can bring your own lower level infrastructure, like IaaS or bare metal. There is a cloud installer that can spin up a cluster to try out on EC2, Azure, or Digital Ocean, but most production users are using whatever management tools they are comfortable with to deploy and scale Flynn hosts out.

Also, what's the difference to dokku or deis?

Both Dokku and Deis focus on stateless webapps.

Dokku is explicitly single-host. Flynn can run in a single-host configuration but typically deployed in a highly available configuration with three or more hosts.

Flynn is designed to tackle some much bigger problems and supports running and managing highly available databases inside the platform out of the box in addition to stateless web apps.

As Titanous said, BOSH operates at a lower level than Flynn. You could use BOSH to deploy Flynn, hypothetically. A more direct comparison would be Cloud Foundry.

Have you considered adding kubernetes support?

Kubernetes didn't exist when we started, so we ended up building our own scheduling system and management APIs. So it wouldn't really be "adding" support, instead we'd need to switch several layers of the system to be Kubernetes instead of our code.

We're watching Kubernetes, it's possible that doing that change will make sense at some point in the future.

That's what Deis are doing right now with their new version.

Is there a document describing the architecture of a running system? I didn't get from reading the documentation whether I'm spawning processes, containers, or affecting full servers. What comprises a cluster? Can I choose to dedicate a host to run a db, and at the same time run serveral mini-processes without launching every one in a container?

The front that flynn exposes is pleasently simple, but I also want to know what implies every command and how it affect the running environment.

> Is there a document describing the architecture of a running system?

There is an architecture page: https://flynn.io/docs/architecture

Please let me know if anything specific is missing so that we can add it.

> Can I choose to dedicate a host to run a db, and at the same time run serveral mini-processes without launching every one in a container?

You can dedicate specific hosts to specific apps and process types using node tagging, though it looks like we are missing documentation for that. I'll make sure it gets added soon.

You are free to fork multiple processes inside of containers you deploy, there doesn't need to be a 1:1 mapping of container to process.

Thanks, that detail was what I was looking for. I also wanted to understand the flexibility and options that Flynn offers to modify the running environment.

The Configuration and Limits sections of this page might be helpful: https://flynn.io/docs/apps

Let me know if there is something else specific that you are wondering about and I can answer here or get some more docs up.

I follow the instruction got a flynn cluster running, how can I shutdown ?