A lot of the comments here are kudos to the dev for his app - which is awesome. But what people are missing is how powerful services like Heroku can be for devs

A lot of the comments here are kudos to the dev for his app - which is awesome. But what people are missing is how powerful services like Heroku can be for devs. I have students that I mentor building projects with Heroku and Rails, and it's amazing to see what they can do. Yes, prices go up when you need to scale out, but getting an idea out in front of people and seeing if people will use the product is so important. Spending weeks implementing a difficult payment gateway and setting up a scalable infrustructure only to find out that nobody cares about what you built is so costly compared to banging something out in a weekend. In 3 days you can prove it. I built http://rendera.heroku.com http://rendera.heroku.com in 1 day and launched it. People liked it enough to convince me to add all sorts of fun things to it. It still runs on the free plan, but if nobody liked it, I could have found that out and moved on to something else. To the OP, nice job!