Productivity - Setup Guide

How to set up Fly.io

Otto's honest, no-fluff walkthrough. Every step here is what we'd actually do if we were sitting at your keyboard. Real gotchas first, real steps second, and a link to the personalized version at the bottom.

Read these before you start

• The free tier was killed September 2024. Old accounts with the "3 free VMs" baseline had to migrate; new accounts pay from cent one (with $5/month hobby credit on most plans that offsets small workloads) [source: community.fly.io announcement, fly.io/blog/tightening-our-belts].
• Fly Postgres is "you run it, we help." Backups, HA, and upgrades are your responsibility unless you use the paid managed tier. Compare to RDS or Supabase where the operator handles it.
• Fly had multiple platform incidents and capacity issues in 2023-2024 that hit users hard. Reliability has improved but is not AWS-tier yet.
• Multi-region deploys require your app to handle write-after-read consistency (leader/replica routing); not automatic.
• IPv4 addresses cost $2/month per dedicated IPv4 (shared IPv4 is free); accidentally allocating multiple adds up.

The 7-step setup

1. 1

   Create your Fly.io account

   Sign up at the link below. Free tier available - no card required. Use your business email so you can invite teammates later.

   Open Fly.io signup
2. 2

   Complete the initial onboarding

   Skip the marketing questionnaires when you can. Fill only the fields that actually configure the product - name, timezone, your first workspace or project. If Fly.io pushes you into a setup wizard, take it - it usually accelerates the first productive session.

3. 3

   Connect your existing tools

   Wire Fly.io into the rest of your stack. The integrations that most people set up first: GitHub Actions (deploy on push), Docker Hub, container registries, Upstash (Redis), Tigris (S3-compatible), Sentry, Datadog, Grafana Cloud, Neon (Postgres), Supabase (Postgres), Terraform provider, Nix builds for reproducibility.. Do these before importing data - clean integration first, data second.

4. 4

   Import your existing data (only what you'll actually use)

   Do NOT bulk-import everything. Import the last 30 days of the ONE workflow you're moving over first. Prove it works. Then import more. Big-bang migrations are how Fly.io deployments die in month 3.

5. 5

   Set up your first real workflow

   Pick the single most-frequent task you'll do in Fly.io - the daily-driver workflow. Configure it end-to-end. Use it live for a week. Do not touch any other feature yet. Adoption failure comes from teams trying to use everything on day one instead of the one thing that actually pays.

6. 6

   Add your team (if applicable) and set access

   Once your solo workflow works, invite one teammate at a time. Watch them use it. The friction points you missed are the ones they hit. Fix those before scaling to more users. Never invite 20 people at once - you'll get 20 confused people and 0 useful feedback.

7. 7

   Compound with the right pairings

   Recommend Fly.io for developers building latency-sensitive apps, multi-region SaaS, or full-stack apps that outgrew Heroku or Render. Recommend Vercel or Netlify for frontend-heavy Next.js apps. Recommend Railway for simpler PaaS with a friendlier free-ish tier. Recommend Hetzner for bare-metal cost efficiency, or AWS/GCP when the client needs managed services.