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I would love to use Heroku -- its tooling is better than anything else I've used, and integrated CI makes it that much better. However, I run a machine learnin

I would love to use Heroku -- its tooling is better than anything else I've used, and integrated CI makes it that much better. However, I run a machine learning service which requires ~3GB of RAM, which means I have to pay--at minimum--$500/mo on Heroku to get a single "Performance L" dyno. Google charges me somewhere in the neighborhood of $35/mo. I'm OK paying a little more for Heroku's convenience, but not 15x. To any Heroku PMs here, are there plans to allow for custom-sized dynos or additional tiers?

opportune 9y ago
To me that rate almost sounds usurious
- logical42 9y ago
  No affiliation with Heroku but to be honest, that price is basically nothing compared to the salary of an engineer who maintains a system like that.
  - opportune 9y ago
    True but I assume that it is very infrequent that an engineer ever needs to worry about (and manually fiddle with) a 3GB memory allocation anyway.
  - hesdeadjim 9y ago
    The real problem is that their extremely high costs are an enormous barrier to entry for anyone trying to build a product that is more than just a low throughput CRUD app. $35 vs. $500 means that when you are in the bootstrap phase you do not use Heroku. Meaning you do not get used to the very nice quality of life features they have for deployment, CI, etc. Then by the time you have income or an investment switching to Heroku makes even less sense because you've already invested into whatever stack you are using. With the availability of high level tools on AWS and GCE, it does not take that much work to get to a functional system for CI and deployment. My small team of three at my last gig managed to tie Bamboo to a large scale AWS deployment with what amounted to basically a side project worth of effort.
    - ben_jones 9y ago
      Furthermore it's harder for developers to learn these things if they have a pay out of pocket for them. I know a lot of people who'd love to dive into kubernetes but don't feel like dropping $200+ to use it in a semi-production environment on GCP or AWS. The free $50-100 credits these services provide does not last long when the services are presumably designed to be used much more then that!
  - bdcravens 9y ago
    Cloud66 gives you a substantial chunk of what Heroku offers, atop whatever cloud you want. Deployment can be done via a c66 webhook, which you add to Circle/Codeship/Travis etc when your tests pass. Within a few minutes you have Heroku workflow at fraction of cost.
    - simplehuman 9y ago
      Convox is in similar space.
      - bdcravens 9y ago
        Unfortunately Convox's pricing is much higher
        simplehuman 9y ago
        I thought convox was free?
        bdcravens 9y ago
        They have a free tier for a single user. However, for all of the features you get with Cloud66, it looks like you need their $500/mo plan (though those features may not be necessary for many use cases)
  - icebraining 9y ago
    It's a significant portion of a salary of an average sw engineer in my country, and I live in Western Europe.
  - johnfn 9y ago
    Not if it's a side project.
- imightbewrong 9y ago
  The word you're looking for is exorbitant.
oridecon 9y ago
I wish they had some "race to the bottom" price option for small side projects, with free custom domain and letsencrypt support. Something to compete with the $5 VPSs (soon to be the $3 VPSs). Right now I rent a large server to host multiple things because I don't like the limitations of their free tier. There's something very elegant about having all your "apps" isolated and with their own settings but the price must be just right. I really enjoyed using Heroku (for a client) because maintaining my own servers, even for hobby stuff, feels like such a waste of time.
- simplehuman 9y ago
  If you are in the docker world, take a look at cloudron.
- merb 9y ago
  yeah I would love to use Heroku Free/5USD/5€ with a 500k Rows PostgreSQL database and a simple app that is only for 24/7. than it would be a no brainer to use heroku and letsencrypt.
- felicianotech 9y ago
  $3 VPSs?
aub3bhat 9y ago
Exactly my thoughts I am willing to accept the ridiculous pricing for web dynos considering that they provide a load-balancer / SSL / ability to quickly scale up etc. But running worker dynos or CI with same pricing just doesn't makes any sense.
- koolba 9y ago
  And bandwidth.
bdcravens 9y ago
Have you look at Cloud66? Very similar, runs atop your cloud. (not affiliated other than have used the service)
axelfontaine 9y ago
Shameless plug: We at Boxfuse (https://boxfuse.com https://boxfuse.com) offer effortless zero downtime blue/green deployments to AWS for JVM (Spring Boot, Play, Dropwizard, ...), Node.js and Go applications at a much lower total cost than Heroku.
dsy_oi 9y ago
Datacol[1] provides Heroku like dev-UX on Google cloud. We are currently in alpha. [1]: http://datacol.io http://datacol.io
jononor 9y ago
Do you run the worker constantly? If not, there are autoscaling solutions which can shut it down while not in use. Heroku is pay per second, so this can save a lot for bursty/infrequent workloads.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

opportune 9y ago

To me that rate almost sounds usurious

logical42 9y ago
No affiliation with Heroku but to be honest, that price is basically nothing compared to the salary of an engineer who maintains a system like that.
- opportune 9y ago
  True but I assume that it is very infrequent that an engineer ever needs to worry about (and manually fiddle with) a 3GB memory allocation anyway.
- hesdeadjim 9y ago
  The real problem is that their extremely high costs are an enormous barrier to entry for anyone trying to build a product that is more than just a low throughput CRUD app. $35 vs. $500 means that when you are in the bootstrap phase you do not use Heroku. Meaning you do not get used to the very nice quality of life features they have for deployment, CI, etc. Then by the time you have income or an investment switching to Heroku makes even less sense because you've already invested into whatever stack you are using. With the availability of high level tools on AWS and GCE, it does not take that much work to get to a functional system for CI and deployment. My small team of three at my last gig managed to tie Bamboo to a large scale AWS deployment with what amounted to basically a side project worth of effort.
  - ben_jones 9y ago
    Furthermore it's harder for developers to learn these things if they have a pay out of pocket for them. I know a lot of people who'd love to dive into kubernetes but don't feel like dropping $200+ to use it in a semi-production environment on GCP or AWS. The free $50-100 credits these services provide does not last long when the services are presumably designed to be used much more then that!
- bdcravens 9y ago
  Cloud66 gives you a substantial chunk of what Heroku offers, atop whatever cloud you want. Deployment can be done via a c66 webhook, which you add to Circle/Codeship/Travis etc when your tests pass. Within a few minutes you have Heroku workflow at fraction of cost.
  - simplehuman 9y ago
    Convox is in similar space.
    - bdcravens 9y ago
      Unfortunately Convox's pricing is much higher
      - simplehuman 9y ago
        I thought convox was free?
        bdcravens 9y ago
        They have a free tier for a single user. However, for all of the features you get with Cloud66, it looks like you need their $500/mo plan (though those features may not be necessary for many use cases)
- icebraining 9y ago
  It's a significant portion of a salary of an average sw engineer in my country, and I live in Western Europe.
- johnfn 9y ago
  Not if it's a side project.
imightbewrong 9y ago
The word you're looking for is exorbitant.

oridecon 9y ago

I wish they had some "race to the bottom" price option for small side projects, with free custom domain and letsencrypt support. Something to compete with the $5 VPSs (soon to be the $3 VPSs). Right now I rent a large server to host multiple things because I don't like the limitations of their free tier. There's something very elegant about having all your "apps" isolated and with their own settings but the price must be just right. I really enjoyed using Heroku (for a client) because maintaining my own servers, even for hobby stuff, feels like such a waste of time.

simplehuman 9y ago
If you are in the docker world, take a look at cloudron.
merb 9y ago
yeah I would love to use Heroku Free/5USD/5€ with a 500k Rows PostgreSQL database and a simple app that is only for 24/7. than it would be a no brainer to use heroku and letsencrypt.
felicianotech 9y ago
$3 VPSs?

aub3bhat 9y ago

Exactly my thoughts I am willing to accept the ridiculous pricing for web dynos considering that they provide a load-balancer / SSL / ability to quickly scale up etc. But running worker dynos or CI with same pricing just doesn't makes any sense.

koolba 9y ago
And bandwidth.

bdcravens 9y ago

Have you look at Cloud66? Very similar, runs atop your cloud. (not affiliated other than have used the service)

axelfontaine 9y ago

Shameless plug: We at Boxfuse (https://boxfuse.com https://boxfuse.com) offer effortless zero downtime blue/green deployments to AWS for JVM (Spring Boot, Play, Dropwizard, ...), Node.js and Go applications at a much lower total cost than Heroku.

dsy_oi 9y ago

Datacol[1] provides Heroku like dev-UX on Google cloud. We are currently in alpha. [1]: http://datacol.io http://datacol.io

jononor 9y ago

Do you run the worker constantly? If not, there are autoscaling solutions which can shut it down while not in use. Heroku is pay per second, so this can save a lot for bursty/infrequent workloads.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]