"Serverless" Function Providers

This thread is for compiling a list of companies that offer “serverless” functions as a service so that we can compare them and build some free things at the meetups.

This is a “wiki post”, so feel free to click “edit” and update the table.

See also: Host Your Own "Serverless" Functions

Service Languages Free Executions Credit[1]
AWS Lambda js, py, java, c#, rb 1m/month ?
IBM Cloud Functions js, swift, java, go, php, py, .net, rb[2] 5m/month $200
Cloudflare Workers js, rs 100k/day n/a
Netlify Functions[3] js, go 125k/month n/a
Firebase Cloud Functions[4] js, py, go 2m/month $300?
Fastly Edge Compute rs, c, ts none? $50
[add more here]

The table doesn’t include compute time, because it’s complicated. Cloudflare Workers, for example, doesn’t charge for compute time, but there is no logging, so using an external logger probably costs an extra request. (Update: see this logging tip.)

Does anyone know of others that we could add to the table?


[1] How much free credit do you get when you sign up?
[2] They claim to support any language if you use Docker.
[3] Netlify Functions run on AWS Lambda
[4] No outbound network requests on the free plan, and no way to cap billing on the paid plan :-1:

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Not sure if Fastly counts as Serverless, though the term seems to be getting switched out with “Edge Compute”

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That looks interesting.

Recently, we launched Fastly Labs, a hub of big, in-progress projects where developers can find inspiration, and play around with next-generation technology. One of our most exciting projects is Terrarium, our edge computing platform based on WebAssembly. Terrarium can compile a couple of different programming languages to WebAssembly, which is then compiled to fast, safe, native code, and used to power a web service.

They have some examples, including one that fetches the weather from an API and serves HTML. It looks like they also have a key-value store.

Edit: I don’t see a free plan. :frowning:

I’m pretty unhappy with Firebase for tinkering with things. There are dark patterns in the billing scheme. There doesn’t seem to be a way to turn on a billing limit — just an alert. If you happen to be asleep when you get a traffic spike and/or have a bug, too bad. I’d prefer to have most projects just go offline when that happens.

I created a small project there to test something, and kept getting a message that I couldn’t use the network until I added billing information to the project. (I wasn’t making outbound requests.) So I added my payment information. Then I got an email that the plan was automatically upgraded to a higher priced plan that I definitely don’t want. The log messages were very confusing, since I wasn’t making any outbound requests and shouldn’t have needed to add billing. And then I couldn’t find a way to downgrade it, so I just deleted the project without finishing it. :confused:

I wouldn’t use Firebase for a small project, unless I knew that I was going to delete it within a few days. I’d rate it :-1: :-1: :-1: for the billing scheme, and would rather write an express or flask app, and deploy it on a VPS.

It looks like there is a Firebase billing horror story over here:

https://medium.com/icelytics/firebase-database-mysterious-billing-6d06f3fe4d2e

You upload you free app, it becomes next “Flappy Bird” and unless you pull the plug out and delete Firebase project, there is no stopping for the expenses. For me, this was really terrifying.
So my second issue with Firebase billing — there is no way to control expenses or have any details on those. In that respect AWS DynamoDB is superior — you set a threshold of transfer per second that you are willing to pay for (also you can use Lambda to auto scale it), and if you are above the limit, your users have to wait.

Hmmm, interesting. I am generally against bundled stuff like that anyway. So I will join you in avoiding firebase.

Fastly labs looks really cool though.

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I think I’m going to try AWS Lambda and IBM Cloud Functions next. I’m hopeful about IBM, because the basic software is open source, and it looks like you can actually run a cloud function server on your own server if you want.

I’ll probably try Cloudflare Workers again, but the lack of logging tools was frustrating.

Maybe we should add a “pros and cons” list for each service.

Take a look at hook.io and play with it a little. I met the guy who started this and he seemed cool. I don’t remember ever paying them for anything nor entering a credit card. They do seem to have a fees page which I’m seeing for the first time. I don’t really know where free goes to basic at some point.

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