The problem wasn't that they used Heroku. It's that they didn't exercise the sort of thrift possible with a website that has no users, and I'd wager that they

The problem wasn't that they used Heroku. It's that they didn't exercise the sort of thrift possible with a website that has no users, and I'd wager that they didn't really know how to since they were a tenderfoot. I made similar mistakes as a beginner, paying too much for too little for things I didn't know I didn't need. Heroku saves a lot of time for the 1-2 dynos ($25-50/mo) you need to vet your idea. With free Cloudflare SSL termination and a $5/mo t2.micro Postgres database, what else do you need? For comparison, my somewhat popular forum with 257 online users at the moment and 300k req/day runs on 2 dynos. $50/mo for the application servers + a deploy/config solution is nothing.