Welcome to June — a good time to reflect on what we’ve been working on recently.
We’ve started rolling out design updates to the Runway UI. If you log in now, you’ll notice a new unified navigation bar at the top and a cleaner footer. Everything related to your account — including your profile, password changes, session management, and the legal bits like the data protection agreement — is now always available in the top-right menu.
More updates to the list and detail pages for your apps and services are in the works and will be released incrementally as they’re ready and reviewed.
Runway is making progress toward multi-region availability. We’ve completed the initial steps to refactor our control plane and are now working on the backend changes needed to support regional deployments of your apps and services.
We’ve also published a page outlining our vision for regional expansion and how we choose infrastructure providers: 👉 Location
It includes our commitment to a sovereign European footprint — without relying on U.S. hyperscalers. No specific timelines yet (small team, you know how it is), but it’s actively happening.
Both the CLI and UI now indicate the region your apps are running in — currently: Berlin (ber1).
Last month, we published a short piece on cloud billing. If you missed it, here’s the link: DDoS, $98k, and a Firebase Bill: A Cautionary Tale
After publishing, a friend asked: “How would this work on Runway?”
The answer is simple: There’s no good reason to charge absurd prices for egress traffic or to make pricing models needlessly complex. The real reason that happens is lock-in — free credits lure you in, and eventually you’re hit with a big bill.
As a small company, sure — we could charge more, or even charge for everything. But traffic isn’t that expensive, and we don’t to punish people for being successful or for making small mistakes. We’d rather build long-term trust and grow with our users. TL;DR — Your bill would have been your storage used.
That’s one of the core principles of Runway: we want to be the platform for you, no matter where you are on your journey.
We’ve spent a fair bit of time this month revisiting billing — especially the classic “build vs. buy” debate. Some things have changed since we started down this path, and we’ll likely need to shift course a bit.
But as always, software is still software — full of bugs, full of trade-offs. Picking between two imperfect options is rarely fun. It’s probably my least favorite part of being a founder, but it’s part of the job.
Besides that, we’ve made progress on buildpacks and are working on deeper stats for services (PostgreSQL metrics, for example), alongside the ongoing UI improvements.
Thanks for reading — we hope you’re enjoying the updates. As always, feel free to reach out and let us know what you think!