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I used to love, love, love Heroku. I would tell everyone about it, and at one point I was probably running 20+ projects on it. I can't quite put my finger on w

I used to love, love, love Heroku. I would tell everyone about it, and at one point I was probably running 20+ projects on it. I can't quite put my finger on why, but I've gradually transitioned everything off it over the past few years. I think it's been a combination of the ease of AWS, along with Heroku's changes to their Dyno pricing, but I never actually sat down and did the math. It just started to feel a little less controllable and a little more than I wanted to pay. To be fair, their database tiers were pretty pricey, so this article is nice news. I'd be curious to hear if others have had a similar experience?

dtech 9y ago
Their database prices are actually similar to AWS RDS Postgres now, and weren't that much higher before, especially with the nice features & interface you get in return. Their dynos are insanely expensive though. A dedicated instance (VPS) with 2.5GB of RAM will set you back $250/month, while a similar EC2 instance will cost <$75/month. It's hard to justify that the Heroku platform makes up for that $175/month/server difference compared to what AWS & co have nowadays.
- ksec 9y ago
  It seems all Startup and other Business moving to the cloud are all AWS. Does anyone still uses Heroku?
- kuschku 9y ago
  > A dedicated instance (VPS) with 2.5GB of RAM will set you back $250/month, while a similar EC2 instance will cost <$75/month. To get actually more data on this, I’ll show a direct comparison – that same instance (Heroku Dyno Performance M) would cost you at Heroku $250/month GCP $24.27/month AWS LightSail $20/month DO $10/month VULTR $10/month Linode $10/month OVH $3.80/month Hetzner $3.67/month Scaleway $3.26/month (Disclaimer: some of the services may differ in price due to different exchange rates and different taxation)
  - phonon 9y ago
    Just to add another data point-- AWS Fargate 1 VCPU, 3 GB RAM 1 CPU = 1*0.00001406*3600*24*30 = $36.44 3 RAM = =3*0.00000353*3600*24*30 = $27.45 Total = $63.89 + bandwidth (I believe dynos come with a generous bandwidth allocation included)
- superplussed 9y ago
  I've always had this impression that AWS puts downward pricing pressure on itself, and periodically reduces its pricing, and that Heroku just swallows up the difference never passing it on to their customers. Would you say that is accurate?
jopsen 9y ago
mostly I'm annoyed by the slow UI... especially if you have many apps. we haven't migrated off yet, but something like k8s might be more attractive, as orchestration would be neat...
Elect2 9y ago
Every time I heard about Heroku, this word came to my mind: expensive.
maxehmookau 9y ago
We still use them pretty exclusively for our large projects. Their higher prices are still massively offset by not hiring a sysops team. They have, however, put a big focus on their enterprise customers recently which has irritated me. That said, even after a few years, we still love them. They're leaders in PaaS, nobody else does as well as they do.
samwillis 9y ago
We use Heroku and only moved to it maybe two years ago. We have quite a spiky tragic pattern, both throughout the day and over the year - scale up 10x at Christmas. Heroku lets us do this super easily with no ops staff - we are a very small team. The only problem we have is pricing for higher RAM dynos, we have quite a memory heavy app and need to use at least the 2.5gig dynos which are a massive jump in price. It’s not so much that we would invest in moving platform yet but it is something I look at every few months. However I do feel that Heroku are over due a price drop on their dynos (or just a ram boost at the same price point) and maybe a few more size options. They seem to be a little behind the market now - obviously a big part of their pricing is the ease of use...
zimbatm 9y ago
It's because they haven't figured out how to keep the same level of experience when scaling past web+worker processes. As soon as you want to split your repo into multiple services the thing falls apart. They should add automatic internal service discovery (withing the same app), and ideally a way to map request path prefixes to different services. That being said, Heroku+CDN (eg: Fly.io) is a fantastic combo for marketing websites. For $7.- / month you get a really nice development and deployment lifecycle. Especially the review apps matter the most to encourage good quality visual content.

dtech 9y ago

Their database prices are actually similar to AWS RDS Postgres now, and weren't that much higher before, especially with the nice features & interface you get in return. Their dynos are insanely expensive though. A dedicated instance (VPS) with 2.5GB of RAM will set you back $250/month, while a similar EC2 instance will cost <$75/month. It's hard to justify that the Heroku platform makes up for that $175/month/server difference compared to what AWS & co have nowadays.

ksec 9y ago
It seems all Startup and other Business moving to the cloud are all AWS. Does anyone still uses Heroku?
kuschku 9y ago
> A dedicated instance (VPS) with 2.5GB of RAM will set you back $250/month, while a similar EC2 instance will cost <$75/month. To get actually more data on this, I’ll show a direct comparison – that same instance (Heroku Dyno Performance M) would cost you at Heroku $250/month GCP $24.27/month AWS LightSail $20/month DO $10/month VULTR $10/month Linode $10/month OVH $3.80/month Hetzner $3.67/month Scaleway $3.26/month (Disclaimer: some of the services may differ in price due to different exchange rates and different taxation)
- phonon 9y ago
  Just to add another data point-- AWS Fargate 1 VCPU, 3 GB RAM 1 CPU = 1*0.00001406*3600*24*30 = $36.44 3 RAM = =3*0.00000353*3600*24*30 = $27.45 Total = $63.89 + bandwidth (I believe dynos come with a generous bandwidth allocation included)
superplussed 9y ago
I've always had this impression that AWS puts downward pricing pressure on itself, and periodically reduces its pricing, and that Heroku just swallows up the difference never passing it on to their customers. Would you say that is accurate?

jopsen 9y ago

mostly I'm annoyed by the slow UI... especially if you have many apps. we haven't migrated off yet, but something like k8s might be more attractive, as orchestration would be neat...

Elect2 9y ago

Every time I heard about Heroku, this word came to my mind: expensive.

maxehmookau 9y ago

We still use them pretty exclusively for our large projects. Their higher prices are still massively offset by not hiring a sysops team. They have, however, put a big focus on their enterprise customers recently which has irritated me. That said, even after a few years, we still love them. They're leaders in PaaS, nobody else does as well as they do.

samwillis 9y ago

We use Heroku and only moved to it maybe two years ago. We have quite a spiky tragic pattern, both throughout the day and over the year - scale up 10x at Christmas. Heroku lets us do this super easily with no ops staff - we are a very small team. The only problem we have is pricing for higher RAM dynos, we have quite a memory heavy app and need to use at least the 2.5gig dynos which are a massive jump in price. It’s not so much that we would invest in moving platform yet but it is something I look at every few months. However I do feel that Heroku are over due a price drop on their dynos (or just a ram boost at the same price point) and maybe a few more size options. They seem to be a little behind the market now - obviously a big part of their pricing is the ease of use...

zimbatm 9y ago

It's because they haven't figured out how to keep the same level of experience when scaling past web+worker processes. As soon as you want to split your repo into multiple services the thing falls apart. They should add automatic internal service discovery (withing the same app), and ideally a way to map request path prefixes to different services. That being said, Heroku+CDN (eg: Fly.io) is a fantastic combo for marketing websites. For $7.- / month you get a really nice development and deployment lifecycle. Especially the review apps matter the most to encourage good quality visual content.