11 ms·

Heroku is no longer the hobbyist's friend

160 points by jalada 11y ago

nacho2sweet 11y ago
Ummm if your hobby isn't worth $14 a month to you then why is it worth it for Heroku to support it for nothing? This article is dumb. Remember when domain names cost $75 for 2 years and bottom tier hosting was $35. They are a business. They don't owe anyone shit, it is nice they give anything.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Nobody said they owe hobbyists anything or that it was unethical to charge whatever they do, just that it makes them unappealing to an hobbyist. And the "remember when" is irrelevant. Costs have dropped for everyone, including them.
toomuchtodo 11y ago
Hobbyists rarely pay the bills. Go upmarket or suffer in perpetual purgatory.
- smt88 11y ago
  I imagine MailChimp, WP Engine, and some other services would disagree. It's possible to have a plan that suits hobbyists while still being profitable. In this case, as a PaaS, Heroku may not have been able to offer something like that, but it's not universally true that hobbyists are unprofitable.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Marginal cost. For MailChimp, WP Engine, etc, their code is running regardless. Heroku and other PaaS providers have to commit real resources (RAM, CPU time) that have a much greater cost than running some free work through your existing data pipeline.
    - smt88 11y ago
      It doesn't seem to be a problem for Linode to give me the virtual hardware at a reasonable price. Why would Heroku's software on top of that virtual hardware cost so much more? Is their deployment/management software using that much extra resources?
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        Linode owns the underlying hardware. Heroku is renting it from AWS. When you own your resources, you have more control over your margins (traditionally).
  - programminggeek 11y ago
    No, they wouldn't. They've run the numbers. What they figured out is the cost to acquire a paid user is cheaper by having a free account than by buying a bunch of ads. Free plans or hobbyist plans are really there to get the marketing and cheap customer acquisition, not to power the mainline B2B business. The main business in both cases is likely bolstered by enterprise clients worth 5+ figures a year, but don't likely cost much more than a hobbyist account to maintain. If you only had a hobbyist offering, you'd go out of business. As this post points out, Heroku has a much larger common offering where they should have plenty of profit at scale. Meanwhile, they also benefit from hobbyists saying "oh yeah, Heroku is easy, let's use that!" Heroku is smart, they know what they are doing.
    - smt88 11y ago
      > If you only had a hobbyist offering, you'd go out of business This just isn't true. To mention WP Engine again, they were hobbyist-only at first. You had to contact them specifically to require an enterprise-grade plan.
shostack 11y ago
While my instinctive reaction to Heroku's shift was "ugh, that sucks, how dare they," I have to say I get it. It is hard to build a successful business with that model given their offering. However to the comment about "git push heroku master," someone that is an "early" programmer like myself finds that level of simplification helpful when I'm focusing on things like learning all the other things that could go wrong with my Rails Tutorial app. That said, as I now am at the point of starting to work on projects that I hope to one day be public facing, I'm wondering if there are any recommendations for "Heroku-like" providers with a free tier that stays up 24/7 for super simple Rails and Sinatra apps, perhaps with a DB.
- mmanfrin 11y ago
  AWS. Elastic Beanstalk has pretty similar easy command line tools, and their free tier gives enough for one instance each of ec2, s3, rds and will mostly autoconfigure like heroku does.
  - shostack 11y ago
    Since I'm not at all confident in my abilities to secure things properly yet, am I at any risk of racking up a massive bill from a hacked account if I go with the AWS free tier? Or is that simply not a possibility?
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Enable two factor auth on your AWS account. Chances of fraud quickly approach zero unless your AWS API creds are leaked. You should always be using an IAM account that has only the privileges your application requires.
    - smt88 11y ago
      It's possible. Security on AWS can certainly be tricky. It's safer to use ElasticBeanstalk if you don't feel confident in your security knowledge, since it manages keys and IAM roles for you.
  - 11y ago
TheMagicHorsey 11y ago
Google AppEngine is a good alternative for Python, Go, Java, or PHP web apps.
- pickle27 11y ago
  I disagree - do they still lock you to their db? if they do then you are going to have to do a lot of work if you want to move to a different platform
  - jonwayne 11y ago
    Absolutely not. You can use Cloud Datastore, or you can connect to any database that can communicate over sockets or http, including Cloud SQL. Of note is that Datastore has a free tier, Cloud SQL does not, and Socket usage can incur (some) cost when communicating with other databases. I've seen many Python apps that connect to a free MongoDB instance hosted on Mongolab. (also worth noting that Node.js support for App Engine is currently in beta.) (disclaimer: I work for Google on Cloud Platform)
    - jay_kyburz 11y ago
      Oh, do you mean as a managed VM?
      - jonwayne 11y ago
        Yes.
    - pickle27 11y ago
      cool I didn't know that - thanks for the info!
    - jay_kyburz 11y ago
      > also worth noting that Node.js support for App Engine is currently in beta. Is this public? I have been waiting to hear this for ages! Great News. I am planning a switch to node simply so I can run the same code on the front and back end. I was not looking forward to learning how to administer a server.
brandur 11y ago
Regarding the fifth point on SSL, I agree, but I'd recommend investigating a combined Heroku and Cloudflare stack as I've described here: https://brandur.org/fragments/cloudflare-ssl https://brandur.org/fragments/cloudflare-ssl You can stay on the free tier of Cloudflare and the hobby tier of Heroku and get full encryption on your custom domain (and without worrying about getting certs issued). This is how I run my more important hobby apps. And regarding the lack of novelty of `git push heroku master` — I'd argue that it's still surprisingly valuable even in modern times. Sure you can do it yourself using a dozen different techniques these days, but as a hobbyist I want to be building apps and not maintaining personal infrastructure. (Disclaimer: I used to work at Heroku.)
- beeboop 11y ago
  Great to know, thanks for mentioning it.
savant 11y ago
A reasonable option for hobbyists is Dokku[1], a single-server heroku clone. I'm also pretty excited about Convox[2], and would definitely recommend that early adopters check it out. I get that people are frustrated with heroku's pricing, but at the end of the day I think that if your side project isn't worth the money you spend on it's hosting, maybe you should look into other side projects? If it's truly not a money-making project, not needing to scale it or have it up 24/7 seems like a reasonable trade-off to not paying for it's hosting. The number of tools and resources Heroku provides is quite significant, and developing/deploying/maintaining similar solutions is certainly not cheap or easy. Especially at scale. Disclaimer: I'm one of the Dokku maintainers. - [1] http://progrium.viewdocs.io/dokku/ - [2] http://convox.com/
- cynix 11y ago
  Any plans for FreeBSD support?
  - savant 11y ago
    We largely just orchestrate docker - there is a bit of glue around nginx of course - but I don't see why we couldn't support FreeBSD. Arguably the biggest blocker is actually getting a running BSD instance - I'm going to say I've never successfully installed FreeBSD, though the last time I tried was 10+ years ago - and then potentially creating a `docker` binary that uses Jails but responds as if it's docker. As it's open source, I definitely wouldn't mind helping someone investigate FreeBSD support :) EDIT: Looks like there is already docker on FreeBSD, https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker . I assume you guys have bash, so this should more or less work...
- lexcorvus 11y ago
  Correcting grammar and spelling errors—especially in public—is always a tough call: upon judging that an error is systematic and not a simple typo, do you help the writer avoid the error in perpetuity—even if it embarrasses them a little, and even if you'll probably get downvoted for being pedantic or offtopic? In this case, I've determined the downsides are worth the possibility of sparing the author a lifetime of error. So, without further ado: s/it's hosting/its hosting/g
PascalW 11y ago
Heroku indeed used to be very generous. I totally get why they are making these changes, it's hard to sustain this in the long run. That said; for hobby stuff I've switched to a cheap VPS plus Dokku [0] and haven't looked back. Works with Heroku buildpacks and even runs custom Dockerfiles if you need anything fancy. Hardly requires any maintenance. There's a couple of alternatives like Deis [1] and Flynn [2] that offer more advanced features, but they're much more complex and way overkill for my pet projects. [0] http://progrium.viewdocs.io/dokku/ http://progrium.viewdocs.io/dokku/ [1] http://deis.io/ http://deis.io/ [2] https://flynn.io/ https://flynn.io/
- cynix 11y ago
  If only these things supported FreeBSD…
  - felixgallo 11y ago
    you don't need those things if you have freebsd, because you already have jails and, e.g., https://github.com/iocage/iocage https://github.com/iocage/iocage .
    - cynix 11y ago
      Thanks. I've been using ezjail, but will take a look at iocage. What I really want, though, is the Heroku-style push-to-deploy workflow that things like Dokku seems to offer.
- sotojuan 11y ago
  Dokku + a $5 or $10 Digital Ocean droplet is a great combo.
  - joshmn 11y ago
    I love Dokku, but DOs performance has tanked so hard, and is slowly becoming a haven for spam and "hackers". So many better alternatives. Current favorites (in no specific order): OVH (don't judge, their performance is wicked, just don't expect support), RAMNode, BuyVM, Vultr, 6sync, SparkNode.
smt88 11y ago
The good news is that, as others have mentioned, there are options for hobbyists that are inexpensive, sometimes free, and sometimes better than Heroku itself.
lolsal 11y ago
I think it's still pretty friendly to hobbyists (throw up a quick Flask app for a demo, etc), but it's probably no longer very friendly to 'get everything for free'ists (like 24/7 compute, >512MB ram, etc). The benefit to me of using something like Heroku is not because I get more CPU/RAM than an equivalently priced Linode instance - the value is in not having to manage a Linode instance at all. I'd also argue that git-pushing to Heroku is still a lot less friction than dealing with docker images or chef/puppet scripts.
- danneu 11y ago
  Also, once I started accumulating projects on Heroku, I appreciated the consistency across maintaining, managing, and deploying those projects. Meanwhile every time I'd deploy a new project to Linode, I'd use a different deploy script/strategy as I'd learn slightly better ways of doing it. It's much more annoying to do maintenance on my Linode projects I haven't touched in 6+ months, and it turns out I usually don't have the energy to re-credentialize in the idiosyncrasies of each sideproject, so they languish.
mesozoic 11y ago
Salesforce gotta pay for the tallest building in San Francisco somehow.
- BradRuderman 11y ago
  Yes, salesforce has no interest in appealing to the hobbiest developer. They focus purely on enterprise. Even as an SMB customer, I have a terrible experience with them.
glogla 11y ago
The author writes about spinning virtual machine from Linode. There's one cool alternative I found: Hetzner Online[1] leases dedicated hardware that their other customers stopped using or ordered but didn't use, etc. It is in form of reverse auction - unused hardware gets cheaper until someone rents it. You can get i7-3770 server with 2x3 TB disks and 16 GB RAM for 32 EUR per month. That's not much more money than linode, but it is much beefier and just your (but no SSD). If you pay more you can get something like i7-3770 with 32 GB RAM, 2x3 TB disks and 2x240 GB SSD for 65 EUR a month. The servers are in Germany, which might be interesting for Europeans who are wary of US cloud companies. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, I just find their offer cool. [1]: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market/ https://robot.your-server.de/order/market/
- BlackMonday 11y ago
  Was Hetzner not the company that stored the customers password in plaintext a few years back? Since I am not entirely sure on this please correct me if I am wrong. But the prices are nice, thanks for posting this. Would love to use dedicated hardware but suspect that i am too dumb to secure my box good enough and end up in a botnet or as a spam server.
  - ByatchMatch 11y ago
    I've been using them for 5 years and never heard of this. They did start to offer 2 step auth recently.
- jalada 11y ago
  Nice! Great suggestion :)
- smithclay 11y ago
  For many kinds of tiny one-off hobbyist projects, why bother with servers or dynos at all? Couldn't help but wonder if the (valid) cost and performance problems the author has with heroku will end up pushing devs faster to Backend-as-a-Service platforms like Parse, Firebase, or something like Amazon Mobile Hub (Lambda on Rails?). (Note: not affiliated with any of these platforms, etc. Just a lazy mobile developer with lots of things that never make it to the app store.)
rubyn00bie 11y ago
Not to be rude, but these complaints, minus the "increase" are standard Heroku practice. I see no changes-- in fact, what has changed there, anything? They're finally too expensive for you, or you outgrew them? They aren't cheap, and never have been, especially for hobbyists. If you have a hobby, you most likely have more time than money to complete your hobby, so why, why use something like Heroku? The very nature of your activity is to spend your time, not your money, Heroku is only giving you the feeling of savings until you outgrow their nearly worthless free offering. Now you have to spend your time, moving, configuring, and learning an "entirely new" system. Had you done this the first time, you'd have saved money/time. Yeah... "git push" to deploy is easy[1]-- and if you're new to application development it can be nice, but! It also means you have no idea how to configure or run your app (i.e. deploy). It means you're more vulnerable to your vendors quarterly earnings needs (price hikes), it means you're more vulnerable to vendor technology changes (lock-in), it also means if it ever hits the fan-- you're gonna have oodles of downtime while you learn how to do it "right" the first (nth) time. FWIW, it's actually really easy to run a VPS that's stable once you learn how to do it properly. Don't fear it, mate. I've always found it nice since none of my projects ever get substantial traffic, I can usually run some auxiliary service I need (like Gitlab) on it too. A two for one, eh? ... One last thing, if you're running a business Heroku might be the right choice (it's up to you to evaluate the risk/reward). [1] I personally think deploying with Capistrano is a cinch (cap deploy) but it'll take you a lil' bit of effort to set up the first time.
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- nostrademons 11y ago
  Different hobbyists have different reasons for doing their hobby. Some just want to learn new tech, any tech, and for them, learning how to deploy on a VPS is a good use of time. But others would rather focus on frontend dev - it's a hobby, after all, the point is to do what's fun - or solving problems for their friends, or learning about a market. It makes no sense for these people to worry about sysadmin stuff or deployment.
  - 11y ago
ufmace 11y ago
I can certainly see the point where Heroku comes out wildly overpriced for certain types of hobby-scale apps. I've seen several people recommend dedicated servers via Linode or DigitalOcean instead, which has it's own pluses and minuses - gotta maintain the server, but for a pretty low price, you get something powerful enough to run a 24/7 server + database + whatever other odds and ends your app needs, as long as the demands aren't too high. I'm wondering how AWS compares, though - running a dedicated, manually managed EC2 instance or ElasticBeanstalk. Seems like you could get your own server, and still have little barrier to scaling as high as anybody could ever need at the touch of a button. Anybody have much insight on that?
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holografix 11y ago
I for one think it's a good thing Heroku is not joining the herd in a race to the bottom. $7 dollars a month to run a little app? That's less than I spend on coffee each day and I'm glad that money is going towards differentiated and valuable service. I have a couple of toy apps, a personal blog and a "not such a toy" app on Heroku and I have used their services for free for AGES - more than fair enough that they make some money.
- orthoganol 11y ago
  Except it's $14, because I can't remember the last time I built even a trivial app that didn't incorporate background processes somehow (the extra $7). Then it's an extra $20/mo if you want SSL. Which you will most likely want. That $7/mo just became $34/mo. Bye, bye Heroku.
  - joshmn 11y ago
    For something small (assuming it is), you can get away using Unicorn as your Rails server (assuming Rails), you can spawn a worker inside your dyno using before_fork and #spawn. For SSL, you can use CloudFlare as your DNS and take advantage of their SSL feature. While not ideal, does it need to be ideal for a trivial, probably-not-super-high-functioning-hacky-app? There's always Cloud66 — which I've used to great success. I have two servers (e3/32GB/4x250gb enterprise SSDs in HW RAID on nice pipes for less than $100 a month) that I rent, threw vSphere on it, hired a $50/month competent and trusted off-shore sysadmin team, and loaded up a couple VMs. It's not completely ideal, and I understand I'm trading stability for a couple bucks, but in scaling my clients have saved a bunch.
    - savant 11y ago
      Jesus $50 a month? How did you end up finding such a team?
      - joshmn 11y ago
        Off-shore, non-dedicated, two pages a month, max 20 billed hours a month. Nothing spectacular. I mostly just need them to lock things down, no insane hadoop setups or anything like that.
Beltiras 11y ago
For 90$/month I can get 32GB 8C Xeon with 200GB SSD on Hetzner.de. Wonder how much Herokusauce I can run on that?
oso2k 11y ago
Lowendbox is your friend [0]. [0] http://lowendbox.com/ http://lowendbox.com/
- jqm 11y ago
  You do have to be careful though. VPS offering is a pretty easy business to get in, and there are no shortage of people operating out of the proverbial "parents basement". I've had some weird stuff from cheap providers including being down for days with no response, sudden price increases and having them go out of business all the sudden. Even for hobby projects it sucks having to chase people around set everything back up. I have found a couple more bucks a month to deal with a larger company that's it for the long haul to be money well spent.
Harkins 11y ago
Does anyone have screenshots of the database upgrade that the Heroku CLI is pushing? It gave me some technical-sounding warnings about needing to update my database, sounding a lot like the infrequent app stack updates (from Bamboo to Cedar or whatever). It walked me through an upgrade process, bounced app, everything happy. Then the bill came, and they'd added a $50/mo db to my $9/db. Support was shocked, shocked that their tool had told me to install the db. They admitted the $9 plan sufficed for me, didn't fix or refund the unwanted extra plan, and to top it off database backups are still broken. I'd just like to have a screenshot of the misleading sales process they pulled. If anyone sees this, please drop me a line. Meanwhile, I'm checking out Dokku and other alternatives for hosting on VPSs - aside from my little hobby project, I have tens of thousands of dollars of consulting client hosting to start migrating away.
- pvh 11y ago
  Hi there - can you email me at pvh (at) heroku with a link to the ticket where you had a bad experience? This sounds like a bad UX bug that we need to fix, and I will make sure any unintended charges are taken care of. I've also asked the PM for this project to look into what happened here and alerted the head of our support team. I hope you'll consider giving us a chance to make this right for you and a chance to re-earn your trust.
  - Harkins 11y ago
    I've now heard from two other people with the same experience: UI pushed a database upgrade, price was suddenly $50, support gave no help getting back to previous normal. Thank you for your email address, but no. The support ticket was a chance to regain my trust. Any readers: I realize pulling large clients over a single small charge sounds like an overreaction, but client relationships are the health of a consultancy. $50 is a rounding error; partnering witha business willing to mislead for an upsell is an existential risk.
joeevans1000 11y ago
I just found I was being charged by Heroku for a service I never used for 8 months. I emailed them, and they offered me half off this month's bill, and nothing in for the past charges. Granted, I should have been more aware, but I've found Amazon to be extremely forgiving of my mistakes, crediting me for quite a bit of the charges for the few I've made. Given that I didn't actually touch my Heroku account, I actually feel they could have been more helpful. I say this because the big fear of cloud services is that you'll rack up charges you didn't mean to. I think a forgiving attitude for true mistakes is just good business. I'm not interested in Heroku from here on, as a result.

160 points by jalada 11y ago

Ummm if your hobby isn't worth $14 a month to you then why is it worth it for Heroku to support it for nothing? This article is dumb. Remember when domain names cost $75 for 2 years and bottom tier hosting was $35. They are a business. They don't owe anyone shit, it is nice they give anything.

icebraining 11y ago
Nobody said they owe hobbyists anything or that it was unethical to charge whatever they do, just that it makes them unappealing to an hobbyist. And the "remember when" is irrelevant. Costs have dropped for everyone, including them.

toomuchtodo 11y ago

Hobbyists rarely pay the bills. Go upmarket or suffer in perpetual purgatory.

smt88 11y ago
I imagine MailChimp, WP Engine, and some other services would disagree. It's possible to have a plan that suits hobbyists while still being profitable. In this case, as a PaaS, Heroku may not have been able to offer something like that, but it's not universally true that hobbyists are unprofitable.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Marginal cost. For MailChimp, WP Engine, etc, their code is running regardless. Heroku and other PaaS providers have to commit real resources (RAM, CPU time) that have a much greater cost than running some free work through your existing data pipeline.
  - smt88 11y ago
    It doesn't seem to be a problem for Linode to give me the virtual hardware at a reasonable price. Why would Heroku's software on top of that virtual hardware cost so much more? Is their deployment/management software using that much extra resources?
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Linode owns the underlying hardware. Heroku is renting it from AWS. When you own your resources, you have more control over your margins (traditionally).
- programminggeek 11y ago
  No, they wouldn't. They've run the numbers. What they figured out is the cost to acquire a paid user is cheaper by having a free account than by buying a bunch of ads. Free plans or hobbyist plans are really there to get the marketing and cheap customer acquisition, not to power the mainline B2B business. The main business in both cases is likely bolstered by enterprise clients worth 5+ figures a year, but don't likely cost much more than a hobbyist account to maintain. If you only had a hobbyist offering, you'd go out of business. As this post points out, Heroku has a much larger common offering where they should have plenty of profit at scale. Meanwhile, they also benefit from hobbyists saying "oh yeah, Heroku is easy, let's use that!" Heroku is smart, they know what they are doing.
  - smt88 11y ago
    > If you only had a hobbyist offering, you'd go out of business This just isn't true. To mention WP Engine again, they were hobbyist-only at first. You had to contact them specifically to require an enterprise-grade plan.

shostack 11y ago

While my instinctive reaction to Heroku's shift was "ugh, that sucks, how dare they," I have to say I get it. It is hard to build a successful business with that model given their offering. However to the comment about "git push heroku master," someone that is an "early" programmer like myself finds that level of simplification helpful when I'm focusing on things like learning all the other things that could go wrong with my Rails Tutorial app. That said, as I now am at the point of starting to work on projects that I hope to one day be public facing, I'm wondering if there are any recommendations for "Heroku-like" providers with a free tier that stays up 24/7 for super simple Rails and Sinatra apps, perhaps with a DB.

mmanfrin 11y ago
AWS. Elastic Beanstalk has pretty similar easy command line tools, and their free tier gives enough for one instance each of ec2, s3, rds and will mostly autoconfigure like heroku does.
- shostack 11y ago
  Since I'm not at all confident in my abilities to secure things properly yet, am I at any risk of racking up a massive bill from a hacked account if I go with the AWS free tier? Or is that simply not a possibility?
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Enable two factor auth on your AWS account. Chances of fraud quickly approach zero unless your AWS API creds are leaked. You should always be using an IAM account that has only the privileges your application requires.
  - smt88 11y ago
    It's possible. Security on AWS can certainly be tricky. It's safer to use ElasticBeanstalk if you don't feel confident in your security knowledge, since it manages keys and IAM roles for you.
- 11y ago

TheMagicHorsey 11y ago

Google AppEngine is a good alternative for Python, Go, Java, or PHP web apps.

pickle27 11y ago
I disagree - do they still lock you to their db? if they do then you are going to have to do a lot of work if you want to move to a different platform
- jonwayne 11y ago
  Absolutely not. You can use Cloud Datastore, or you can connect to any database that can communicate over sockets or http, including Cloud SQL. Of note is that Datastore has a free tier, Cloud SQL does not, and Socket usage can incur (some) cost when communicating with other databases. I've seen many Python apps that connect to a free MongoDB instance hosted on Mongolab. (also worth noting that Node.js support for App Engine is currently in beta.) (disclaimer: I work for Google on Cloud Platform)
  - jay_kyburz 11y ago
    Oh, do you mean as a managed VM?
    - jonwayne 11y ago
      Yes.
  - pickle27 11y ago
    cool I didn't know that - thanks for the info!
  - jay_kyburz 11y ago
    > also worth noting that Node.js support for App Engine is currently in beta. Is this public? I have been waiting to hear this for ages! Great News. I am planning a switch to node simply so I can run the same code on the front and back end. I was not looking forward to learning how to administer a server.

brandur 11y ago

Regarding the fifth point on SSL, I agree, but I'd recommend investigating a combined Heroku and Cloudflare stack as I've described here: https://brandur.org/fragments/cloudflare-ssl https://brandur.org/fragments/cloudflare-ssl You can stay on the free tier of Cloudflare and the hobby tier of Heroku and get full encryption on your custom domain (and without worrying about getting certs issued). This is how I run my more important hobby apps. And regarding the lack of novelty of `git push heroku master` — I'd argue that it's still surprisingly valuable even in modern times. Sure you can do it yourself using a dozen different techniques these days, but as a hobbyist I want to be building apps and not maintaining personal infrastructure. (Disclaimer: I used to work at Heroku.)

beeboop 11y ago
Great to know, thanks for mentioning it.

savant 11y ago

A reasonable option for hobbyists is Dokku[1], a single-server heroku clone. I'm also pretty excited about Convox[2], and would definitely recommend that early adopters check it out. I get that people are frustrated with heroku's pricing, but at the end of the day I think that if your side project isn't worth the money you spend on it's hosting, maybe you should look into other side projects? If it's truly not a money-making project, not needing to scale it or have it up 24/7 seems like a reasonable trade-off to not paying for it's hosting. The number of tools and resources Heroku provides is quite significant, and developing/deploying/maintaining similar solutions is certainly not cheap or easy. Especially at scale. Disclaimer: I'm one of the Dokku maintainers. - [1] http://progrium.viewdocs.io/dokku/ - [2] http://convox.com/

cynix 11y ago
Any plans for FreeBSD support?
- savant 11y ago
  We largely just orchestrate docker - there is a bit of glue around nginx of course - but I don't see why we couldn't support FreeBSD. Arguably the biggest blocker is actually getting a running BSD instance - I'm going to say I've never successfully installed FreeBSD, though the last time I tried was 10+ years ago - and then potentially creating a `docker` binary that uses Jails but responds as if it's docker. As it's open source, I definitely wouldn't mind helping someone investigate FreeBSD support :) EDIT: Looks like there is already docker on FreeBSD, https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker . I assume you guys have bash, so this should more or less work...
lexcorvus 11y ago
Correcting grammar and spelling errors—especially in public—is always a tough call: upon judging that an error is systematic and not a simple typo, do you help the writer avoid the error in perpetuity—even if it embarrasses them a little, and even if you'll probably get downvoted for being pedantic or offtopic? In this case, I've determined the downsides are worth the possibility of sparing the author a lifetime of error. So, without further ado: s/it's hosting/its hosting/g

PascalW 11y ago

Heroku indeed used to be very generous. I totally get why they are making these changes, it's hard to sustain this in the long run. That said; for hobby stuff I've switched to a cheap VPS plus Dokku [0] and haven't looked back. Works with Heroku buildpacks and even runs custom Dockerfiles if you need anything fancy. Hardly requires any maintenance. There's a couple of alternatives like Deis [1] and Flynn [2] that offer more advanced features, but they're much more complex and way overkill for my pet projects. [0] http://progrium.viewdocs.io/dokku/ http://progrium.viewdocs.io/dokku/ [1] http://deis.io/ http://deis.io/ [2] https://flynn.io/ https://flynn.io/

cynix 11y ago
If only these things supported FreeBSD…
- felixgallo 11y ago
  you don't need those things if you have freebsd, because you already have jails and, e.g., https://github.com/iocage/iocage https://github.com/iocage/iocage .
  - cynix 11y ago
    Thanks. I've been using ezjail, but will take a look at iocage. What I really want, though, is the Heroku-style push-to-deploy workflow that things like Dokku seems to offer.
sotojuan 11y ago
Dokku + a $5 or $10 Digital Ocean droplet is a great combo.
- joshmn 11y ago
  I love Dokku, but DOs performance has tanked so hard, and is slowly becoming a haven for spam and "hackers". So many better alternatives. Current favorites (in no specific order): OVH (don't judge, their performance is wicked, just don't expect support), RAMNode, BuyVM, Vultr, 6sync, SparkNode.

smt88 11y ago

The good news is that, as others have mentioned, there are options for hobbyists that are inexpensive, sometimes free, and sometimes better than Heroku itself.

lolsal 11y ago

I think it's still pretty friendly to hobbyists (throw up a quick Flask app for a demo, etc), but it's probably no longer very friendly to 'get everything for free'ists (like 24/7 compute, >512MB ram, etc). The benefit to me of using something like Heroku is not because I get more CPU/RAM than an equivalently priced Linode instance - the value is in not having to manage a Linode instance at all. I'd also argue that git-pushing to Heroku is still a lot less friction than dealing with docker images or chef/puppet scripts.

danneu 11y ago
Also, once I started accumulating projects on Heroku, I appreciated the consistency across maintaining, managing, and deploying those projects. Meanwhile every time I'd deploy a new project to Linode, I'd use a different deploy script/strategy as I'd learn slightly better ways of doing it. It's much more annoying to do maintenance on my Linode projects I haven't touched in 6+ months, and it turns out I usually don't have the energy to re-credentialize in the idiosyncrasies of each sideproject, so they languish.

mesozoic 11y ago

Salesforce gotta pay for the tallest building in San Francisco somehow.

BradRuderman 11y ago
Yes, salesforce has no interest in appealing to the hobbiest developer. They focus purely on enterprise. Even as an SMB customer, I have a terrible experience with them.

glogla 11y ago

The author writes about spinning virtual machine from Linode. There's one cool alternative I found: Hetzner Online[1] leases dedicated hardware that their other customers stopped using or ordered but didn't use, etc. It is in form of reverse auction - unused hardware gets cheaper until someone rents it. You can get i7-3770 server with 2x3 TB disks and 16 GB RAM for 32 EUR per month. That's not much more money than linode, but it is much beefier and just your (but no SSD). If you pay more you can get something like i7-3770 with 32 GB RAM, 2x3 TB disks and 2x240 GB SSD for 65 EUR a month. The servers are in Germany, which might be interesting for Europeans who are wary of US cloud companies. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, I just find their offer cool. [1]: https://robot.your-server.de/order/market/ https://robot.your-server.de/order/market/

BlackMonday 11y ago
Was Hetzner not the company that stored the customers password in plaintext a few years back? Since I am not entirely sure on this please correct me if I am wrong. But the prices are nice, thanks for posting this. Would love to use dedicated hardware but suspect that i am too dumb to secure my box good enough and end up in a botnet or as a spam server.
- ByatchMatch 11y ago
  I've been using them for 5 years and never heard of this. They did start to offer 2 step auth recently.
jalada 11y ago
Nice! Great suggestion :)
smithclay 11y ago
For many kinds of tiny one-off hobbyist projects, why bother with servers or dynos at all? Couldn't help but wonder if the (valid) cost and performance problems the author has with heroku will end up pushing devs faster to Backend-as-a-Service platforms like Parse, Firebase, or something like Amazon Mobile Hub (Lambda on Rails?). (Note: not affiliated with any of these platforms, etc. Just a lazy mobile developer with lots of things that never make it to the app store.)

rubyn00bie 11y ago

Not to be rude, but these complaints, minus the "increase" are standard Heroku practice. I see no changes-- in fact, what has changed there, anything? They're finally too expensive for you, or you outgrew them? They aren't cheap, and never have been, especially for hobbyists. If you have a hobby, you most likely have more time than money to complete your hobby, so why, why use something like Heroku? The very nature of your activity is to spend your time, not your money, Heroku is only giving you the feeling of savings until you outgrow their nearly worthless free offering. Now you have to spend your time, moving, configuring, and learning an "entirely new" system. Had you done this the first time, you'd have saved money/time. Yeah... "git push" to deploy is easy[1]-- and if you're new to application development it can be nice, but! It also means you have no idea how to configure or run your app (i.e. deploy). It means you're more vulnerable to your vendors quarterly earnings needs (price hikes), it means you're more vulnerable to vendor technology changes (lock-in), it also means if it ever hits the fan-- you're gonna have oodles of downtime while you learn how to do it "right" the first (nth) time. FWIW, it's actually really easy to run a VPS that's stable once you learn how to do it properly. Don't fear it, mate. I've always found it nice since none of my projects ever get substantial traffic, I can usually run some auxiliary service I need (like Gitlab) on it too. A two for one, eh? ... One last thing, if you're running a business Heroku might be the right choice (it's up to you to evaluate the risk/reward). [1] I personally think deploying with Capistrano is a cinch (cap deploy) but it'll take you a lil' bit of effort to set up the first time.

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nostrademons 11y ago
Different hobbyists have different reasons for doing their hobby. Some just want to learn new tech, any tech, and for them, learning how to deploy on a VPS is a good use of time. But others would rather focus on frontend dev - it's a hobby, after all, the point is to do what's fun - or solving problems for their friends, or learning about a market. It makes no sense for these people to worry about sysadmin stuff or deployment.
- 11y ago

ufmace 11y ago

I can certainly see the point where Heroku comes out wildly overpriced for certain types of hobby-scale apps. I've seen several people recommend dedicated servers via Linode or DigitalOcean instead, which has it's own pluses and minuses - gotta maintain the server, but for a pretty low price, you get something powerful enough to run a 24/7 server + database + whatever other odds and ends your app needs, as long as the demands aren't too high. I'm wondering how AWS compares, though - running a dedicated, manually managed EC2 instance or ElasticBeanstalk. Seems like you could get your own server, and still have little barrier to scaling as high as anybody could ever need at the touch of a button. Anybody have much insight on that?

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holografix 11y ago

I for one think it's a good thing Heroku is not joining the herd in a race to the bottom. $7 dollars a month to run a little app? That's less than I spend on coffee each day and I'm glad that money is going towards differentiated and valuable service. I have a couple of toy apps, a personal blog and a "not such a toy" app on Heroku and I have used their services for free for AGES - more than fair enough that they make some money.

orthoganol 11y ago
Except it's $14, because I can't remember the last time I built even a trivial app that didn't incorporate background processes somehow (the extra $7). Then it's an extra $20/mo if you want SSL. Which you will most likely want. That $7/mo just became $34/mo. Bye, bye Heroku.
- joshmn 11y ago
  For something small (assuming it is), you can get away using Unicorn as your Rails server (assuming Rails), you can spawn a worker inside your dyno using before_fork and #spawn. For SSL, you can use CloudFlare as your DNS and take advantage of their SSL feature. While not ideal, does it need to be ideal for a trivial, probably-not-super-high-functioning-hacky-app? There's always Cloud66 — which I've used to great success. I have two servers (e3/32GB/4x250gb enterprise SSDs in HW RAID on nice pipes for less than $100 a month) that I rent, threw vSphere on it, hired a $50/month competent and trusted off-shore sysadmin team, and loaded up a couple VMs. It's not completely ideal, and I understand I'm trading stability for a couple bucks, but in scaling my clients have saved a bunch.
  - savant 11y ago
    Jesus $50 a month? How did you end up finding such a team?
    - joshmn 11y ago
      Off-shore, non-dedicated, two pages a month, max 20 billed hours a month. Nothing spectacular. I mostly just need them to lock things down, no insane hadoop setups or anything like that.

Beltiras 11y ago

For 90$/month I can get 32GB 8C Xeon with 200GB SSD on Hetzner.de. Wonder how much Herokusauce I can run on that?

oso2k 11y ago

Lowendbox is your friend [0]. [0] http://lowendbox.com/ http://lowendbox.com/

jqm 11y ago
You do have to be careful though. VPS offering is a pretty easy business to get in, and there are no shortage of people operating out of the proverbial "parents basement". I've had some weird stuff from cheap providers including being down for days with no response, sudden price increases and having them go out of business all the sudden. Even for hobby projects it sucks having to chase people around set everything back up. I have found a couple more bucks a month to deal with a larger company that's it for the long haul to be money well spent.

Harkins 11y ago

Does anyone have screenshots of the database upgrade that the Heroku CLI is pushing? It gave me some technical-sounding warnings about needing to update my database, sounding a lot like the infrequent app stack updates (from Bamboo to Cedar or whatever). It walked me through an upgrade process, bounced app, everything happy. Then the bill came, and they'd added a $50/mo db to my $9/db. Support was shocked, shocked that their tool had told me to install the db. They admitted the $9 plan sufficed for me, didn't fix or refund the unwanted extra plan, and to top it off database backups are still broken. I'd just like to have a screenshot of the misleading sales process they pulled. If anyone sees this, please drop me a line. Meanwhile, I'm checking out Dokku and other alternatives for hosting on VPSs - aside from my little hobby project, I have tens of thousands of dollars of consulting client hosting to start migrating away.

pvh 11y ago
Hi there - can you email me at pvh (at) heroku with a link to the ticket where you had a bad experience? This sounds like a bad UX bug that we need to fix, and I will make sure any unintended charges are taken care of. I've also asked the PM for this project to look into what happened here and alerted the head of our support team. I hope you'll consider giving us a chance to make this right for you and a chance to re-earn your trust.
- Harkins 11y ago
  I've now heard from two other people with the same experience: UI pushed a database upgrade, price was suddenly $50, support gave no help getting back to previous normal. Thank you for your email address, but no. The support ticket was a chance to regain my trust. Any readers: I realize pulling large clients over a single small charge sounds like an overreaction, but client relationships are the health of a consultancy. $50 is a rounding error; partnering witha business willing to mislead for an upsell is an existential risk.

joeevans1000 11y ago

I just found I was being charged by Heroku for a service I never used for 8 months. I emailed them, and they offered me half off this month's bill, and nothing in for the past charges. Granted, I should have been more aware, but I've found Amazon to be extremely forgiving of my mistakes, crediting me for quite a bit of the charges for the few I've made. Given that I didn't actually touch my Heroku account, I actually feel they could have been more helpful. I say this because the big fear of cloud services is that you'll rack up charges you didn't mean to. I think a forgiving attitude for true mistakes is just good business. I'm not interested in Heroku from here on, as a result.