15 ms·

The Decline of Heroku

246 points by tacon 6y ago

runningmike 6y ago
The best: https://12factor.net/ https://12factor.net/ legendary. The worst: sold to salesforce. Salesforce smells like enterprise software, no room for fast and simple software hacks using heroku.
- mssundaram 6y ago
  I don't understand the jump from the 12 Factor paradigm to being sold to Salesforce. Can you explain?
  - nemothekid 6y ago
    The guy who coined 12 Factor was the CTO of Heroku. 12Factor, to me at least, was the first blueprint for managing web services.
    - mssundaram 6y ago
      Ah ok, thanks!
vmception 6y ago
What's wrong with Heroku? It hasn't changed much, like the article says, and that's fine. The pricing model isn't ideal but it has a place for some projects.
- tdeck 6y ago
  For me the notorious price tag of Heroku is enough to keep me from using it for new projects, even though I like the Heroku workflow and I think it's perfectly suited for many web apps.
  - watermelon0 6y ago
    Heroku is comparable to AWS Fargate/RDS pricing in many cases, but easier to setup/understand/maintain. IMO it seems reasonably priced in a lot of situations, where we are talking about business use. However, for personal use, if you have a few small (web)apps, it's way too expensive compared to a DigitalOcean or similar VPS. For example, 3 applications with Postgres DBs cost 3x(7+7) = 42$/month, whereas it's entirely possibly to run this on a 5$ DO droplet.
    - tdeck 6y ago
      > it's entirely possibly to run this on a 5$ DO droplet. In fact I do exactly this using Dokku, and have several small apps running in the same $5 droplet.
      - mromanuk 6y ago
        Alternatively, you can scale with caprover, which can deploy to many servers using Docker swarm
    - matt2000 6y ago
      Tip for that situation: Since Heroku runs on AWS, you can just use a single RDS DB instance to serve as the database for a bunch of hobby instances. Really hard to beat the $5/dyno hobby pricing considering the feature set.
      - rurban 6y ago
        Well, the 0$/dyno pricing on Heroku for free projects beats that easily. When Redhat OpenShift threw us out, Heroku was the best place left for free perl hosting. Lots of good places for static hosting, mostly GitHub Pages, but dynamic Heroku is still the place to go.
- willio58 6y ago
  I love Heroku, I still use it to this day for a couple databases. That being said, when a company stops innovating you know it's just a matter of time until they're left in the dust. The thing is, Heroku is currently increasing profits, they could use that money to innovate if they wanted to. They just seem stagnant, which is never appealing as a customer (at least to me).
- Scarbutt 6y ago
  Dynos specs are pretty miserable, need a 4GB dyno? that will be $500/month
  - matt2000 6y ago
    It's 14GB for $500/month. Still pretty expensive though.
- dfox 6y ago
  It is combination of no innovation and the pricing model. The pricing model only ever made sense for hosting RoR applications due to particular sub-optimal performance characteristics of RoR at the time. Ten years ago you could get one meaningful VM instance for the price of one dyno and host anything you want on that but you had to somehow make that work. Today the price of one heroku dyno buys you one or two VMs where you just deploy docker compose or whatever (as long as it does not involve etcd, because then you are outside of the "free/cheap VM instance" category) and are done with it.
- sjfidsfkds 6y ago
  Heroku had developer mindshare 10+ years ago that could, in some alternate universe, have made it end up competitive with AWS/GCP/Azure. Heroku is probably worth a billion dollars, which is impressive, but it could have been a hundred billion. It’s worth asking why that didn’t happen.
- flurdy 6y ago
  > It hasn't changed much, like the article says, and that's fine. I think that is the problem. On the outside it has not changed much and thereby loosing traction and customers. They have added things but apart from pipelines quite a few years ago nothing revolutionary has been added. The only thing I can think of is that they made it harder to use when they changed the pricing for their free tier to be per user and not per app.
ksec 6y ago
Render [1] was started just because Heroku stopped innovating. [1] https://render.com https://render.com
- jokull 6y ago
  Love Render!
- bizzleDawg 6y ago
  I was looking at render as an alternative to heroku the other day and I think that the only thing that made me think that I would definitely stick with heroku for now was the point-in-time restores for heroku postgres, which render seems to lack at present. A point-in-time restore really saved me once (allowed recovery of important data after an accidental delete), but I am interested to know if other think I am over-blowing their significance in a production system? Are there other strategies which make PIT backups less important?
  - anurag 6y ago
    (Render founder) PITR is critical, and it's up there on our 2021 TODOs along with HA Postgres.
    - snake_case 6y ago
      I've been thinking about switching to Render recently, but there's one feature blocking me: the ability to deploy an existing docker image from a private registry [1]. As far as I can tell, you have to connect a repo to deploy a Render service.. and monorepos are not fully supported yet either. Is your 2021 roadmap public, or is Canny your official roadmap? Really interested to see what's coming soon :) [1]: https://feedback.render.com/features/p/deploy-docker-images-from-public-private-registries https://feedback.render.com/features/p/deploy-docker-images-... Btw, I've been working at Canny for the past year and was pleasantly surprised to see your feedback site!
      - adav 6y ago
1123581321 6y ago
Good article. I would say Heroku’s problem is that developers are comfortable with more operational complexity now, fifteen years later, than when it launched. Much of this credit, of course, goes to AWS. Heroku serves an abstraction level that appeals to a smaller share of developers. It has also not grown beyond the Ruby world as much as was hoped for, as indicated by the mention of the Java ecosystem.
- itsjustme2 6y ago
  I use it pretty heavily for node.js apps. Every time I see the newest Rube Goldberg contraption for deploying code, my first thought is trying to figure out why they didn't do something simpler, like Heroku. Being comfortable with complexity isn't a good excuse for making things more complex than they need to be.
  - macando 6y ago
    > Every time I see the newest Rube Goldberg contraption for deploying code, my first thought is trying to figure out why they didn't do something simpler, like Heroku. Same here. After dealing with complexity of building an app the last thing you want is more complexity. And this time of a kind you're not comfortable with. Obviously a lot of people were ready to pay to Heroku to hide that kind of complexity from them.
- ritchiea 6y ago
  Possibly but particuarly on a small team there is a cost to operational complexity even if you're comfortable. If the team could be developing features but is dealing with an infrastructure problem that could easily be dealt with via an abstraction layer then you still lose overall developer productivity. And Heroku was never a great solution once you reached a reasonable level of scale because it became expensive and your Heroku infrastructure became subject to unexpected issues in resource sharing within shared instances. Shared instances are a problem across all cloud providers but pure-AWS-sans-Heroku is easier and has more options to switch to private instances.
- chii 6y ago
KptMarchewa 6y ago
I think Heroku was something contained to US, or maybe even narrower. Never heard or seen EU company hosting on Heroku.
- macando 6y ago
  Ironically, when I first heard the word Heroku my immediate association was "this is something French".
  - ta988 6y ago
    If you translate phonetically from French it means "air at your ass".
    - lioeters 6y ago
      Air au cul..
  - hervature 6y ago
    Why would you think this is French? I can't think of a single French work with a "ku" ending. On the other hand, it is a trope to mimic Japanese speakers by adding "ku" at the end of words.
- ifore 6y ago
  Out of the box you get EU or US hosting. You can do others (eg West Coast US, Japan, Australia -- it's all just AWS regions under the hood) but to do that you have to be in a 'private space' which is effectively a dedicated clone of the Heroku management infrastructure. If you were paying a few hundred dollars per month you're now going to be paying a few thousand. IMO Heroku is shooting itself in the foot with this price structure.
- toyg 6y ago
  It’s well-known in Europe too, but business devs in Europe are always more conservative and tighter with money, so Heroku just looks too expensive for most of them. When it’s cheaper to just hire one more guy to look after your infra, than to tie yourself to a single provider, people will do that.
obviouslynotme 6y ago
Heroku has always had a place in my heart. It was, by far, the best way to deploy small apps. One `git push` to deploy. It just worked. The problem is that by the time you grow up and hire multiple people, you very quickly run into a point where hiring a devops guy is cheaper than Heroku. You hit this limit much quicker if you are doing something more complicated than monolith + database. There is also something I like to call the Ruby on Rails dilemma. Rails is a beast when it comes to rapid prototyping and small teams. I don't think anything else comes close. But as your team and system grow, all the conventions that let you speed ahead in the beginning start holding you back. Now you are digging through Rails code and doco trying to find ways to override defaults without destroying everything else. Heroku is the PaaS version of Rails. Small projects are super easy to get going. You don't get a better starting experience. But as you grow, all the conventions of Heroku that helped you launch with ease start becoming month-long expeditions for work-arounds. Worse, Heroku isn't open source. You can't look at the code to understand your issue. It doesn't take long for someone to lose their minds and spend a weekend creating a presentation on the benefits of moving to another platform.
- noodle 6y ago
  I generally speaking agree with this in spirit, and I've been the one in the seat making the Heroku <-> AWS decision. But for the last 3 companies I've made that choice, the decision to move from Heroku to AWS doesn't start to make sense until the ~25 team member size and several years into the life of the company. It doesn't happen all that quickly, at least in my experience. [Edit: so what I'm saying is the characterization of heroku is only good for very tiny teams/projects/etc has not been true for me.] YMMV of course - depends largely on what you're building.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  I agree with you for the Heroku of a decade ago. Now, I'd say Render is the modern version of what Heroku was. It's super easy to use for Rails/Laravel/Node/etc, it doesn't break clustering of Elixir apps and static sites are free.
  - D13Fd 6y ago
mdoms 6y ago
The problem was the laser focus on Ruby on Rails. Outside of the HN bubble no one gives a shit about Ruby.
intellix 6y ago
Need a 2mb Redis instance? 50$ per month
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  FYI: Looks like $60/month for 250 MB and 200 connections. (The smaller instances don't allow many connections, but the $30/month one could work for dev/qa.) https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-redis https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-redis
- waheoo 6y ago
  Where do I sign?
- drusepth 6y ago
  Maybe I'm missing the joke, but the free Redis instances are 25MB.
elbasti 6y ago
Funny story around heroku and pricing. I know a company that used to spend enormous amounts of money on heroku. Like, seven figures a year. The company was growing quickly, billion dollar valuation, raised hundreds of millions, etc etc. One day the company passed the billing threshold that put them in the highest heroku tier, and someone in the org got an email from Heroku. The email was congratulating about all the incredible new customer service they would get now that they were spending more than $X a month (dedicated support 24/7, priority access to new features, that sort of thing). The email made its way to some higher up who...hadn't realized just how much was being spent on heroku. They switched to AWS a few months later. Most expensive support email I've ever seen!
- ericbarrett 6y ago
  Along those lines, a few years ago I joined a company where they had just switched from Heroku to direct-AWS hosting for their infrastructure (to save $$). The devs had gotten used to the ease of Heroku deployments and Kubernetes wasn't yet a thing. So one of the DevOps team reimplemented the Heroku CLI as a massive, self-invoking Go monolith. It had everything from Jenkins scripts to a near-complete Mesos/Marathon client to to local Docker support built in. Many places (especially the CI code) it self-invoked to access other subsystems. Furthermore, it was the dev's self-admitted first Go project (previously he worked in Java). Somehow this spaghetti-behemoth actually worked, and I spent the next year fixing bugs and adding features. We even modularized it enough to support deploys to either Mesos/Marathon or early Kubernetes. It still sticks in my head as an example of where somebody did everything "wrong," yet they still did it, and it ended up being extremely valuable to the company. I think nowadays with k8s being what it is, and with all the tooling around it and increasing industry expertise—not to mention managed offerings—Heroku is going to have a hard time.
  - rektide 6y ago
    huge fan of k8s. drop what you're doing & use a cross-system object-storage/"apiserver" & control-loops to automate everything; embrace desired state management & thank me latter. but, Heroku &al have a lot of value left. there's just not that many folk trying to tame deploys on k8s via gitops. flux2 is the rage, it's all over the alpha geek's efforts[1], but it's usually used by someone carefully authoring a fairly complex Helm file, then building out a significant Flux2 HelmRelease object (ex: [2]). there's a bunch of other tools[3], & i'm frankly not familiar enough. but this idea of having a bunch of source that can deploy itself, simply, is still extremely rare even among the alpha-geek #gitops types. i'm sure some of these tools better match the simplicity of the Heroku model, corresponding branches to environments, which makes so so much sense, but so far i feel like such attempts are still basically unknown. heroku's really simmered it down to something that made extremely natural sense. huge props to that. too too much of this effort had to go into creating buildpacks & supporting language environments very very carefully very actively, that ability to stealth-containerize an app & not even notice is so much of the special sauce that makes this a hard, hard & eternal problem (because langauges/envs keep changing). there's still a lot of ease of use to Heroku that's potentially will be underrated and/or lost by the oncoming generations. i have high respect for how operateable Heroku is. [1] https://github.com/k8s-at-home/awesome-home-kubernetes https://github.com/k8s-at-home/awesome-home-kubernetes [2] https://github.com/onedr0p/home-cluster/blob/main/cluster/apps/media/bazarr/helm-release.yaml https://github.com/onedr0p/home-cluster/blob/main/cluster/ap... [3] https://github.com/weaveworks/awesome-gitops#tools https://github.com/weaveworks/awesome-gitops#tools
macando 6y ago
Heroku is still the best cloud option for your typical developer-hustler-designer setup found in most startups. Compared to other cloud providers their web app is a marvel of user experience. Monitoring, depolyments, scaling, docs, configuration, adding new services...It's all a breeze on Heroku. I dont't want to write scripts to orchestrate containers, I want to easily deploy, scale and monitor my app. I spent 5x more time in AWS EC2 and Beanstalk and it's still daunting. For me, the only downside of Heroku is its high price.
- macando 6y ago
  Why people pay top $$$ for Heroku (taken from StackShare): https://i.imgur.com/DOVjpN1.png https://i.imgur.com/DOVjpN1.png
- busterarm 6y ago
  I have a Terraform stack for running everything in managed Kubernetes on AWS or GKE for less than the cost of a Performance M (or 5 Standard) dynos and it scales much more sanely than Heroku's pricing. Yes, it was a huge up-front investment of time, but it will serve me forever. New startup? I can have the infrastructure that will last us a couple of years up and running in like an hour (that's including setting up CI/CD and code review tooling and monitoring). Most of that time spent making the cloud accounts.
  - ianandrich 6y ago
    This sounds really handy. Have you open sourced it?
    - busterarm 6y ago
      No, but I don't think it's significantly difficult to duplicate either. It's just the sum of my experience w/ various cloud providers and an opinionated/best-practices way to run things. I sell my services and this is a huge enabler in my work. I don't necessarily see the benefit of outside contributors. As an educational tool it also kind of doesn't make total sense without context of how things work in the various cloud services. So while I kind of want to, it's also sort of my competitive edge and interaction with the community is a drain on my time without adding much to my bottom line. That is to say, I've opened pieces of this previously and all it did was bring tons of demands on my time without any paying clients (and I already get enough inbound that I don't need more name recognition). As a side note though, Terraform has probably made more of a difference to my career than any other piece of software. Shoutouts to Hashicorp, really. Consul, Vault and Packer also have been majorly useful but to a lesser degree. They've really put a lot of money in my pocket and that's the best feature any software can have. :D
alphabettsy 6y ago
With Digital Ocean and AWS Lightsail offering “App” platforms Heroku needs to bring greater value to compete. The pricing alone was enough for me to avoid even though my hopes about necessary scale never came to fruition.
- digianarchist 6y ago
  Lightsail has an app platform?
karmakaze 6y ago
Why isn't there a Heroku knockoff that gains traction? Can't someone support the Procfiles (if I recall correctly), undercut prices and still have plenty of room to be excellent?
- flurdy 6y ago
  There are many knockoffs but few gain traction because once they go beyond just basic hosting element as a PAAS to all the millions of things Heroku do behind the scenes they realise they either need to increase prices beyond Heroku or stay as limited knock-off. I don't know of another PAAS that directly supports Procfiles, Buildpacks etc but I don't think they are the parts is what prevents people from migrating anyway.
  - karmakaze 6y ago
    Both statements don't make sense to me. If a PAAS doesn't directly support Procfiles, Buildpacks, etc then it's not a clone. And not supporting these files would be precisely a great reason to not migrate, how/when would you want to make that investment into some other configuration/deployment definition that you can depend on existing beyond the cheaper hosting company you're considering using.
rkalla 6y ago
Has there ever been an analysis of why Heroku was (and still is) so DAMN expensive? Just a bad pricing model or something unmagical about their environment?
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swyx 6y ago
i keep hearing extravagant claims about how much revenue Heroku brings in post acquisition and the best this article does is "hundreds of millions" - does anyone have better information than that? perhaps from salesforce public statements?
jonmorehouse 6y ago
disclaimer: I've been building https://www.powertools.dev/ https://www.powertools.dev/ for about 10 months. We let folks ship apps to AWS/GCP with a single command. After talking to >200 founders, basically every startup wants the Heroku developer experience but AWS is just giving way too many credits for anyone else to compete. Some companies literally aren't paying a dime on cloud hosting until year 2.
- zomglings 6y ago
  How would one install powertools to try it out? All links off the main landing page take me to an "under construction" page. The "under construction" page gave me a mild case of nostalgia for 90s Geocities. :) Edit: nevermind, found the installation shell script right in front of my nose on frontpage! Edit 2: I think you have issues hosting your installation script: curl https://powertools.dev/install.sh gives a 301 response. curl -L https://powertools.dev/install.sh returns the landing page (I think - didn't look too closely at whatever HTML it downloaded).
thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago
I still recommend that most startups use Heroku. Engineers always complain about speed and price. If you start comparing ec2 micros to Heroku dynos you already don't understand what Heroku offers. Generally I will see small to medium startups that hire 3 devops engineers who barely have the bandwidth to setup a fully fledged deployment system e.g. pipelines, red/green light deployments, backups, stability etc This all works from the get go with Heroku. Most developers scale resources too early and don't go for easy wins like slow queries and any other latency related problems. How many times have you seen developers recommend upgrading from Ruby to Go because of speed? When all they had to do was add some partial indexes or something to their database. I've shown non technical CEO's in small startups to scale, rollbacks, view logs and restart their servers themselves. I will always pull aside CEO's and tell them that their engineers want the best for the company, but that is only from their vantage point, the likely don't even know the companies inner financials, so how can they tell you something is "cheaper". Focus on your companies core competencies first, get users, make money then let your engineers build their dream devops setup. (If your startup does some mega processing jobs like ML then yeah you will want to use something like EC2)
- aledalgrande 6y ago
  Totally agree. My team has the main API made with Rails. Running on Heroku, with 2M active users, on 4 performance dynos. What does it take? Caching, Redis and async processing (Heroku/AWS). No devops. And we can still deploy with a button.
- drusepth 6y ago
  Yeah, moving to AWS would save me ~50% in monthly costs (around 5k/mo) and I have friends constantly offering to do the grunt work to move over for free, but when you factor in the price of a devops guy (IMO needed on AWS but not needed on Heroku), Heroku still pays for itself. I recommend most startups use Heroku. It takes a _huge_ scale to make moving to ec2 make sense in most cases.
  - danielheath 6y ago
    I have a side project on AWS. It took me about a day to set everything up so I could boot a new blank instance & install everything in ~10 minutes. Everything runs on the instance; a nightly job backs up the database to s3. Deploying new code takes 15-20 seconds; if I want logs I can ssh in and look at them. The old ways of doing things work better than ever in 2021, thanks to cheap vertical scaling.
vemv 6y ago
Lately I was thinking that probably something like 80% of what developers really seek in a solution in this space, whether it's based on k8s, Heroku, serverless, VPS, Chef, Terraform, whatever, is the deployment tool/experience. Everything else is just extras and doesn't affect much the core value proposition. We want deploys that are reliable, transparent, that can roll back in face of issues, that support gradual blue/green strategies, etc. That's what makes an overall 'platform' good or bad. Surprisingly, that specific problem isn't very often isolatedly tackled: too often is coupled to a whole platform, a pervasive set of assumptions (you use containers/dynos/VPSs/etc). AWS CodeDeploy seems to fit the bill well. But AWS being AWS (with a history of leaving certain products neglected) I just don't trust the implementation itself. I cannot see its changelog, issue tracker, assess its internal quality, etc. So I would really love to see some open-source CodeDeploy clones, with a scope as small as possible and the highest possible internal quality. It could be a game changer.
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tflinton 6y ago
Just going to drop a plug for my open source pet project: https://beta.akkeris.io/ https://beta.akkeris.io/
philip1209 6y ago
Some providers are rolling out http/3 support and heroku still hasn’t supported http/2.
forgingahead 6y ago
Heroku is certainly "expensive" if your comparison is "I can make it at home for nothing". But our time has a price as well, and honestly the only thing young companies or projects should be doing is spending time getting customers and revenue. Deployment ops is a later stage activity. When you tip over that threshold from "default dead", that is, non-revenue focused activity won't kill your company in 6 months, then and only then do I think it makes sense to switch over from Heroku to something else. I still use Heroku all the time, and recommend it to clients who are starting out as well. (Just like how I recommend buying a $10 theme for design instead of wasting money fiddling with a designer/design team). You need to determine product market fit, pricing, and distribution first.
devops000 6y ago
I have switched from Heroku to Cloud66 + Digital Ocean and it’s great. I have the same ease of use of Heroku but at a fraction of cost
- ashconnor 6y ago
  Digital Ocean App Platform and Render are both easy to use and a lot cheaper than Heroku.
slig 6y ago
Thank to the Heroku pricing back in the day, I learned how to host and manage my little setup on my own on Linode. Recently I've moved to K8S on Digital Ocean and I could not be happier.
dchess 6y ago
I haven't seen anyone mention: dokku [1], but I've had good luck using dokku droplets on digital ocean for a simple Heroku alternative. [1] https://github.com/dokku/dokku https://github.com/dokku/dokku
- rcarmo 6y ago
  Even simpler: https://github.com/piku/piku https://github.com/piku/piku
  - rcarmo 6y ago
    Hi! Not sure why this was downvoted, since it was both on-topic and indeed simpler (I'm the creator).
aledalgrande 6y ago
I don't buy this, of course if you run the NYT infrastructure you don't go for Heroku. Heroku is still the best for smaller projects (and medium sized depending on the type of the workload) and devs that are not fully devops. Sure, if you have a previous project where you can copy pasta your Terraform and Kubernetes setup from, you can start your infra just as fast, but otherwise heroku app:create and git push heroku master is still way faster to start hustling. Everyone compares invoices between e.g. AWS and Heroku, but do they ever take into account the cost of the ops team when they switch to AWS? If the bill was 7 figures on Heroku with no devops, how many senior devops does it take to get the same spend with AWS? How about productivity loss if deploying is not as easy as it was before? I think saying something is dead because it doesn't work in all use cases is not fair.
elliotlarson 6y ago
I started messing with Heroku back when they were trying to be an online Rails editor. When they started getting more seriously into hosting I was relieved to have a company dedicated to making Rails hosting easy. But, every time I tried to host a professional project with them I ended up leaving early on because of slow performance, high pricing, and the fact that their system had limits that there was always some third party around to help solve for a fee. The fees add up. I started rolling my own configurations with Chef. It was painful. Then I tried Ansible, and it was easier to use, but I was still responsible for devops. I've come to realize that I will never be good at devops. I'm spending all of my time in application code. It just isn't what I do. And, most of my professional projects really don't have scale issues. They're mostly apps with small user bases that run great on a couple of servers. There's a sweet spot for Heroku here. Yeah, they're still slow, they still have limitations, they're still expensive... but on the low end of their price scale, it's hard to beat not having to worry about devops. (Saw a reference to https://render.com https://render.com in the comments. Maybe I'll give them a try.)
zackbloom 6y ago
In 2014 I started a company, and chose Heroku as the easiest way to get my (Go) code running in the cloud. Last year I started a company, and to my surprise, Heroku was still the easiest way to get my (Go) code running in the cloud. I fully expected to be on a more 'modern' platform, but virtually every other provider requires at a minimum a Docker config. Docker has its purposes, but I can literally push an arbitrary Go/Python/Ruby/Node/etc. repo to Heroku, and it will be hosted on the Internet successfully. It's still SO much faster. As a comparison, I did need to get one project running with Docker and it legitimately took 16+ hours of developer time to get source control authentication working as a part of the build process. None of that delay is a huge issue when you have limitless engineering resources, but for someone starting from scratch Heroku remains (bizarrely) the fastest tool out there.
- weird-eye-issue 6y ago
  "took 16+ hours of developer time to get source control authentication working as a part of the build process" Probably best you stick with Heroku
  - jgwil2 6y ago
    I hope getting the opportunity to be a prick was worth the downvotes.
whakim 6y ago
This article didn't make any sense to me. I didn't even see any actual numbers suggesting Heroku's revenues or userbase are stagnating/declining! The main arguments for Heroku's "decline" instead seem to be (1) cost; and (2) Kubernetes. But Heroku has always been aimed at organizations that want to trade time/money for ease of use along across a narrow(er) set of functions. Those are not the kind of orgs who use Kubernetes or want to devote man/hours (or employees) to devops. I think the "actual" argument is that Heroku isn't "cool" anymore.
practicalpants 6y ago
Heroku is supposed to be easy for launching prototypes yet it's a PITA for Django, one of the most popular prototyping frameworks, since they never bothered to build native static file support (their "whitenoise" suggestion creates really crappy performance, so you're forced to setup a whole new static server). Heroku basically exploded in popularity for support of beginner programmers, so idk why they are intent on alienating that group.
- 252452d 6y ago
  I had a client that forced me to deploy a Django project on Heroku. That being my only experience, maybe that's why I never understood and still doubt the value proposition of Heroku.
- ifore 6y ago
  nginx buildpack + python buildpack == nginx to serve static content and gunicorn for the python backend. Of course you now have to know how to set up an nginx config file so it does take away somewhat from the "just works" simplicity of Heroku. Although even whitenoise is still ok if you're going to set it up with a CDN as the frontend for your static assets. If you want simplicity then you do it using one of the CDN addons. Whitenoise is not a limitation of the heroku platform, it's really a symptom of suboptimal documentation.
- toyg 6y ago
  Most projects will run with cloudflare in front, which takes care of static caching.
brylie 6y ago
DigitalOcean App Platform is a compelling alternative to Heroku with the simplicity of Buildpacks and reasonable pricing. https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/ Are there other PaaS providers with Buildpacks support?
- echan00 6y ago
  I use heroku for the majority of my projects. I tried DO app platform a few months ago, it was garbage. I wasted an entire day migrating my heroku rails app to DO only to come to realization I am much better off paying for heroku
  - nikon 5y ago
    Agree +10000
macrael 6y ago
Heroku is fighting full fledge CI and full fledged CI is getting better faster than Heroku
wilsonfiifi 6y ago
To everyone complaining about the cost of Heroku hosting and wishing they could have something similar but cheaper, consider sponsoring or contributing to the Dokku Kubernetes scheduler [0]. You get a similar deployment workflow to Heroku and the scalability of K8. [0] https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes
villgax 6y ago
Its not going anywhere, I'm yet to see something as accessible for link a GitHub repo & forget kind of a solution
rolandm 6y ago
I can recommend CapRover as a Heroku alternative: https://caprover.com https://caprover.com
flurdy 6y ago
I love Heroku. But I hardly use it anymore. For personal use it was excellent way to spin up an app and see if it is useful etc. That part I had to stop doing because they changed the free-tier pricing model. So I had to sunset most apps, keep a couple on the free-tier and Hobby-tier, but with no room to add new apps. For work use it is useful for demos and some small apps. But the main problem has always been scaling Heroku apps beyond a single monolith. Most work projects split and scale across a lot of apps/services etc and that stack part was never easy with Heroku. So for my personal apps I now have an overkill of a K8s cluster (or 2, maybe 3...) that I chuck all my new apps in. As someone with k8s skills that is ok, but obviously I know that Heroku did 1000% other things in the background that I now have to do myself, and pay for...
SergeAx 6y ago
One word: Salesforce.
mleonhard 6y ago
The article misses the point. Heroku is for small companies. If they try to get enterprise customers, they will become too complicated like AWS and lose focus on their small customers. Heroku is important for innovation in our society. Greed-focused Silicon Valley VCs would pump it full of money and destroy it. I hope Salesforce doesn't do that. Heroku is perfect as it is. Let's not mess it up.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
metta2uall 6y ago
I'd just want a PaaS with easy-to-use rate limiting and caching (e.g. for some routes use Redis if unauthenticated otherwise go to the backend, for other routes cache forever)
vlucas 6y ago
Vercel is the new Heroku. Same ease of use, MUCH better architecture and cost structure.

246 points by tacon 6y ago

The best: https://12factor.net/ https://12factor.net/ legendary. The worst: sold to salesforce. Salesforce smells like enterprise software, no room for fast and simple software hacks using heroku.

mssundaram 6y ago
I don't understand the jump from the 12 Factor paradigm to being sold to Salesforce. Can you explain?
- nemothekid 6y ago
  The guy who coined 12 Factor was the CTO of Heroku. 12Factor, to me at least, was the first blueprint for managing web services.
  - mssundaram 6y ago
    Ah ok, thanks!

vmception 6y ago

What's wrong with Heroku? It hasn't changed much, like the article says, and that's fine. The pricing model isn't ideal but it has a place for some projects.

tdeck 6y ago
For me the notorious price tag of Heroku is enough to keep me from using it for new projects, even though I like the Heroku workflow and I think it's perfectly suited for many web apps.
- watermelon0 6y ago
  Heroku is comparable to AWS Fargate/RDS pricing in many cases, but easier to setup/understand/maintain. IMO it seems reasonably priced in a lot of situations, where we are talking about business use. However, for personal use, if you have a few small (web)apps, it's way too expensive compared to a DigitalOcean or similar VPS. For example, 3 applications with Postgres DBs cost 3x(7+7) = 42$/month, whereas it's entirely possibly to run this on a 5$ DO droplet.
  - tdeck 6y ago
    > it's entirely possibly to run this on a 5$ DO droplet. In fact I do exactly this using Dokku, and have several small apps running in the same $5 droplet.
    - mromanuk 6y ago
      Alternatively, you can scale with caprover, which can deploy to many servers using Docker swarm
  - matt2000 6y ago
    Tip for that situation: Since Heroku runs on AWS, you can just use a single RDS DB instance to serve as the database for a bunch of hobby instances. Really hard to beat the $5/dyno hobby pricing considering the feature set.
    - rurban 6y ago
      Well, the 0$/dyno pricing on Heroku for free projects beats that easily. When Redhat OpenShift threw us out, Heroku was the best place left for free perl hosting. Lots of good places for static hosting, mostly GitHub Pages, but dynamic Heroku is still the place to go.
willio58 6y ago
I love Heroku, I still use it to this day for a couple databases. That being said, when a company stops innovating you know it's just a matter of time until they're left in the dust. The thing is, Heroku is currently increasing profits, they could use that money to innovate if they wanted to. They just seem stagnant, which is never appealing as a customer (at least to me).
Scarbutt 6y ago
Dynos specs are pretty miserable, need a 4GB dyno? that will be $500/month
- matt2000 6y ago
  It's 14GB for $500/month. Still pretty expensive though.
dfox 6y ago
It is combination of no innovation and the pricing model. The pricing model only ever made sense for hosting RoR applications due to particular sub-optimal performance characteristics of RoR at the time. Ten years ago you could get one meaningful VM instance for the price of one dyno and host anything you want on that but you had to somehow make that work. Today the price of one heroku dyno buys you one or two VMs where you just deploy docker compose or whatever (as long as it does not involve etcd, because then you are outside of the "free/cheap VM instance" category) and are done with it.
sjfidsfkds 6y ago
Heroku had developer mindshare 10+ years ago that could, in some alternate universe, have made it end up competitive with AWS/GCP/Azure. Heroku is probably worth a billion dollars, which is impressive, but it could have been a hundred billion. It’s worth asking why that didn’t happen.
flurdy 6y ago
> It hasn't changed much, like the article says, and that's fine. I think that is the problem. On the outside it has not changed much and thereby loosing traction and customers. They have added things but apart from pipelines quite a few years ago nothing revolutionary has been added. The only thing I can think of is that they made it harder to use when they changed the pricing for their free tier to be per user and not per app.

ksec 6y ago

Render [1] was started just because Heroku stopped innovating. [1] https://render.com https://render.com

jokull 6y ago
Love Render!
bizzleDawg 6y ago
I was looking at render as an alternative to heroku the other day and I think that the only thing that made me think that I would definitely stick with heroku for now was the point-in-time restores for heroku postgres, which render seems to lack at present. A point-in-time restore really saved me once (allowed recovery of important data after an accidental delete), but I am interested to know if other think I am over-blowing their significance in a production system? Are there other strategies which make PIT backups less important?
- anurag 6y ago
  (Render founder) PITR is critical, and it's up there on our 2021 TODOs along with HA Postgres.
  - snake_case 6y ago
    I've been thinking about switching to Render recently, but there's one feature blocking me: the ability to deploy an existing docker image from a private registry [1]. As far as I can tell, you have to connect a repo to deploy a Render service.. and monorepos are not fully supported yet either. Is your 2021 roadmap public, or is Canny your official roadmap? Really interested to see what's coming soon :) [1]: https://feedback.render.com/features/p/deploy-docker-images-from-public-private-registries https://feedback.render.com/features/p/deploy-docker-images-... Btw, I've been working at Canny for the past year and was pleasantly surprised to see your feedback site!
    - adav 6y ago

1123581321 6y ago

Good article. I would say Heroku’s problem is that developers are comfortable with more operational complexity now, fifteen years later, than when it launched. Much of this credit, of course, goes to AWS. Heroku serves an abstraction level that appeals to a smaller share of developers. It has also not grown beyond the Ruby world as much as was hoped for, as indicated by the mention of the Java ecosystem.

itsjustme2 6y ago
I use it pretty heavily for node.js apps. Every time I see the newest Rube Goldberg contraption for deploying code, my first thought is trying to figure out why they didn't do something simpler, like Heroku. Being comfortable with complexity isn't a good excuse for making things more complex than they need to be.
- macando 6y ago
  > Every time I see the newest Rube Goldberg contraption for deploying code, my first thought is trying to figure out why they didn't do something simpler, like Heroku. Same here. After dealing with complexity of building an app the last thing you want is more complexity. And this time of a kind you're not comfortable with. Obviously a lot of people were ready to pay to Heroku to hide that kind of complexity from them.
ritchiea 6y ago
Possibly but particuarly on a small team there is a cost to operational complexity even if you're comfortable. If the team could be developing features but is dealing with an infrastructure problem that could easily be dealt with via an abstraction layer then you still lose overall developer productivity. And Heroku was never a great solution once you reached a reasonable level of scale because it became expensive and your Heroku infrastructure became subject to unexpected issues in resource sharing within shared instances. Shared instances are a problem across all cloud providers but pure-AWS-sans-Heroku is easier and has more options to switch to private instances.
chii 6y ago

KptMarchewa 6y ago

I think Heroku was something contained to US, or maybe even narrower. Never heard or seen EU company hosting on Heroku.

macando 6y ago
Ironically, when I first heard the word Heroku my immediate association was "this is something French".
- ta988 6y ago
  If you translate phonetically from French it means "air at your ass".
  - lioeters 6y ago
    Air au cul..
- hervature 6y ago
  Why would you think this is French? I can't think of a single French work with a "ku" ending. On the other hand, it is a trope to mimic Japanese speakers by adding "ku" at the end of words.
ifore 6y ago
Out of the box you get EU or US hosting. You can do others (eg West Coast US, Japan, Australia -- it's all just AWS regions under the hood) but to do that you have to be in a 'private space' which is effectively a dedicated clone of the Heroku management infrastructure. If you were paying a few hundred dollars per month you're now going to be paying a few thousand. IMO Heroku is shooting itself in the foot with this price structure.
toyg 6y ago
It’s well-known in Europe too, but business devs in Europe are always more conservative and tighter with money, so Heroku just looks too expensive for most of them. When it’s cheaper to just hire one more guy to look after your infra, than to tie yourself to a single provider, people will do that.

obviouslynotme 6y ago

Heroku has always had a place in my heart. It was, by far, the best way to deploy small apps. One `git push` to deploy. It just worked. The problem is that by the time you grow up and hire multiple people, you very quickly run into a point where hiring a devops guy is cheaper than Heroku. You hit this limit much quicker if you are doing something more complicated than monolith + database. There is also something I like to call the Ruby on Rails dilemma. Rails is a beast when it comes to rapid prototyping and small teams. I don't think anything else comes close. But as your team and system grow, all the conventions that let you speed ahead in the beginning start holding you back. Now you are digging through Rails code and doco trying to find ways to override defaults without destroying everything else. Heroku is the PaaS version of Rails. Small projects are super easy to get going. You don't get a better starting experience. But as you grow, all the conventions of Heroku that helped you launch with ease start becoming month-long expeditions for work-arounds. Worse, Heroku isn't open source. You can't look at the code to understand your issue. It doesn't take long for someone to lose their minds and spend a weekend creating a presentation on the benefits of moving to another platform.

noodle 6y ago
I generally speaking agree with this in spirit, and I've been the one in the seat making the Heroku <-> AWS decision. But for the last 3 companies I've made that choice, the decision to move from Heroku to AWS doesn't start to make sense until the ~25 team member size and several years into the life of the company. It doesn't happen all that quickly, at least in my experience. [Edit: so what I'm saying is the characterization of heroku is only good for very tiny teams/projects/etc has not been true for me.] YMMV of course - depends largely on what you're building.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
I agree with you for the Heroku of a decade ago. Now, I'd say Render is the modern version of what Heroku was. It's super easy to use for Rails/Laravel/Node/etc, it doesn't break clustering of Elixir apps and static sites are free.
- D13Fd 6y ago

mdoms 6y ago

The problem was the laser focus on Ruby on Rails. Outside of the HN bubble no one gives a shit about Ruby.

intellix 6y ago

Need a 2mb Redis instance? 50$ per month

redis_mlc 6y ago
FYI: Looks like $60/month for 250 MB and 200 connections. (The smaller instances don't allow many connections, but the $30/month one could work for dev/qa.) https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-redis https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-redis
waheoo 6y ago
Where do I sign?
drusepth 6y ago
Maybe I'm missing the joke, but the free Redis instances are 25MB.

elbasti 6y ago

Funny story around heroku and pricing. I know a company that used to spend enormous amounts of money on heroku. Like, seven figures a year. The company was growing quickly, billion dollar valuation, raised hundreds of millions, etc etc. One day the company passed the billing threshold that put them in the highest heroku tier, and someone in the org got an email from Heroku. The email was congratulating about all the incredible new customer service they would get now that they were spending more than $X a month (dedicated support 24/7, priority access to new features, that sort of thing). The email made its way to some higher up who...hadn't realized just how much was being spent on heroku. They switched to AWS a few months later. Most expensive support email I've ever seen!

ericbarrett 6y ago
Along those lines, a few years ago I joined a company where they had just switched from Heroku to direct-AWS hosting for their infrastructure (to save $$). The devs had gotten used to the ease of Heroku deployments and Kubernetes wasn't yet a thing. So one of the DevOps team reimplemented the Heroku CLI as a massive, self-invoking Go monolith. It had everything from Jenkins scripts to a near-complete Mesos/Marathon client to to local Docker support built in. Many places (especially the CI code) it self-invoked to access other subsystems. Furthermore, it was the dev's self-admitted first Go project (previously he worked in Java). Somehow this spaghetti-behemoth actually worked, and I spent the next year fixing bugs and adding features. We even modularized it enough to support deploys to either Mesos/Marathon or early Kubernetes. It still sticks in my head as an example of where somebody did everything "wrong," yet they still did it, and it ended up being extremely valuable to the company. I think nowadays with k8s being what it is, and with all the tooling around it and increasing industry expertise—not to mention managed offerings—Heroku is going to have a hard time.
- rektide 6y ago
  huge fan of k8s. drop what you're doing & use a cross-system object-storage/"apiserver" & control-loops to automate everything; embrace desired state management & thank me latter. but, Heroku &al have a lot of value left. there's just not that many folk trying to tame deploys on k8s via gitops. flux2 is the rage, it's all over the alpha geek's efforts[1], but it's usually used by someone carefully authoring a fairly complex Helm file, then building out a significant Flux2 HelmRelease object (ex: [2]). there's a bunch of other tools[3], & i'm frankly not familiar enough. but this idea of having a bunch of source that can deploy itself, simply, is still extremely rare even among the alpha-geek #gitops types. i'm sure some of these tools better match the simplicity of the Heroku model, corresponding branches to environments, which makes so so much sense, but so far i feel like such attempts are still basically unknown. heroku's really simmered it down to something that made extremely natural sense. huge props to that. too too much of this effort had to go into creating buildpacks & supporting language environments very very carefully very actively, that ability to stealth-containerize an app & not even notice is so much of the special sauce that makes this a hard, hard & eternal problem (because langauges/envs keep changing). there's still a lot of ease of use to Heroku that's potentially will be underrated and/or lost by the oncoming generations. i have high respect for how operateable Heroku is. [1] https://github.com/k8s-at-home/awesome-home-kubernetes https://github.com/k8s-at-home/awesome-home-kubernetes [2] https://github.com/onedr0p/home-cluster/blob/main/cluster/apps/media/bazarr/helm-release.yaml https://github.com/onedr0p/home-cluster/blob/main/cluster/ap... [3] https://github.com/weaveworks/awesome-gitops#tools https://github.com/weaveworks/awesome-gitops#tools

macando 6y ago

Heroku is still the best cloud option for your typical developer-hustler-designer setup found in most startups. Compared to other cloud providers their web app is a marvel of user experience. Monitoring, depolyments, scaling, docs, configuration, adding new services...It's all a breeze on Heroku. I dont't want to write scripts to orchestrate containers, I want to easily deploy, scale and monitor my app. I spent 5x more time in AWS EC2 and Beanstalk and it's still daunting. For me, the only downside of Heroku is its high price.

macando 6y ago
Why people pay top $$$ for Heroku (taken from StackShare): https://i.imgur.com/DOVjpN1.png https://i.imgur.com/DOVjpN1.png
busterarm 6y ago
I have a Terraform stack for running everything in managed Kubernetes on AWS or GKE for less than the cost of a Performance M (or 5 Standard) dynos and it scales much more sanely than Heroku's pricing. Yes, it was a huge up-front investment of time, but it will serve me forever. New startup? I can have the infrastructure that will last us a couple of years up and running in like an hour (that's including setting up CI/CD and code review tooling and monitoring). Most of that time spent making the cloud accounts.
- ianandrich 6y ago
  This sounds really handy. Have you open sourced it?
  - busterarm 6y ago
    No, but I don't think it's significantly difficult to duplicate either. It's just the sum of my experience w/ various cloud providers and an opinionated/best-practices way to run things. I sell my services and this is a huge enabler in my work. I don't necessarily see the benefit of outside contributors. As an educational tool it also kind of doesn't make total sense without context of how things work in the various cloud services. So while I kind of want to, it's also sort of my competitive edge and interaction with the community is a drain on my time without adding much to my bottom line. That is to say, I've opened pieces of this previously and all it did was bring tons of demands on my time without any paying clients (and I already get enough inbound that I don't need more name recognition). As a side note though, Terraform has probably made more of a difference to my career than any other piece of software. Shoutouts to Hashicorp, really. Consul, Vault and Packer also have been majorly useful but to a lesser degree. They've really put a lot of money in my pocket and that's the best feature any software can have. :D

alphabettsy 6y ago

With Digital Ocean and AWS Lightsail offering “App” platforms Heroku needs to bring greater value to compete. The pricing alone was enough for me to avoid even though my hopes about necessary scale never came to fruition.

digianarchist 6y ago
Lightsail has an app platform?

karmakaze 6y ago

Why isn't there a Heroku knockoff that gains traction? Can't someone support the Procfiles (if I recall correctly), undercut prices and still have plenty of room to be excellent?

flurdy 6y ago
There are many knockoffs but few gain traction because once they go beyond just basic hosting element as a PAAS to all the millions of things Heroku do behind the scenes they realise they either need to increase prices beyond Heroku or stay as limited knock-off. I don't know of another PAAS that directly supports Procfiles, Buildpacks etc but I don't think they are the parts is what prevents people from migrating anyway.
- karmakaze 6y ago
  Both statements don't make sense to me. If a PAAS doesn't directly support Procfiles, Buildpacks, etc then it's not a clone. And not supporting these files would be precisely a great reason to not migrate, how/when would you want to make that investment into some other configuration/deployment definition that you can depend on existing beyond the cheaper hosting company you're considering using.

rkalla 6y ago

Has there ever been an analysis of why Heroku was (and still is) so DAMN expensive? Just a bad pricing model or something unmagical about their environment?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

swyx 6y ago

i keep hearing extravagant claims about how much revenue Heroku brings in post acquisition and the best this article does is "hundreds of millions" - does anyone have better information than that? perhaps from salesforce public statements?

jonmorehouse 6y ago

disclaimer: I've been building https://www.powertools.dev/ https://www.powertools.dev/ for about 10 months. We let folks ship apps to AWS/GCP with a single command. After talking to >200 founders, basically every startup wants the Heroku developer experience but AWS is just giving way too many credits for anyone else to compete. Some companies literally aren't paying a dime on cloud hosting until year 2.

zomglings 6y ago
How would one install powertools to try it out? All links off the main landing page take me to an "under construction" page. The "under construction" page gave me a mild case of nostalgia for 90s Geocities. :) Edit: nevermind, found the installation shell script right in front of my nose on frontpage! Edit 2: I think you have issues hosting your installation script: curl https://powertools.dev/install.sh gives a 301 response. curl -L https://powertools.dev/install.sh returns the landing page (I think - didn't look too closely at whatever HTML it downloaded).

thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago

I still recommend that most startups use Heroku. Engineers always complain about speed and price. If you start comparing ec2 micros to Heroku dynos you already don't understand what Heroku offers. Generally I will see small to medium startups that hire 3 devops engineers who barely have the bandwidth to setup a fully fledged deployment system e.g. pipelines, red/green light deployments, backups, stability etc This all works from the get go with Heroku. Most developers scale resources too early and don't go for easy wins like slow queries and any other latency related problems. How many times have you seen developers recommend upgrading from Ruby to Go because of speed? When all they had to do was add some partial indexes or something to their database. I've shown non technical CEO's in small startups to scale, rollbacks, view logs and restart their servers themselves. I will always pull aside CEO's and tell them that their engineers want the best for the company, but that is only from their vantage point, the likely don't even know the companies inner financials, so how can they tell you something is "cheaper". Focus on your companies core competencies first, get users, make money then let your engineers build their dream devops setup. (If your startup does some mega processing jobs like ML then yeah you will want to use something like EC2)

aledalgrande 6y ago
Totally agree. My team has the main API made with Rails. Running on Heroku, with 2M active users, on 4 performance dynos. What does it take? Caching, Redis and async processing (Heroku/AWS). No devops. And we can still deploy with a button.
drusepth 6y ago
Yeah, moving to AWS would save me ~50% in monthly costs (around 5k/mo) and I have friends constantly offering to do the grunt work to move over for free, but when you factor in the price of a devops guy (IMO needed on AWS but not needed on Heroku), Heroku still pays for itself. I recommend most startups use Heroku. It takes a _huge_ scale to make moving to ec2 make sense in most cases.
- danielheath 6y ago
  I have a side project on AWS. It took me about a day to set everything up so I could boot a new blank instance & install everything in ~10 minutes. Everything runs on the instance; a nightly job backs up the database to s3. Deploying new code takes 15-20 seconds; if I want logs I can ssh in and look at them. The old ways of doing things work better than ever in 2021, thanks to cheap vertical scaling.

vemv 6y ago

Lately I was thinking that probably something like 80% of what developers really seek in a solution in this space, whether it's based on k8s, Heroku, serverless, VPS, Chef, Terraform, whatever, is the deployment tool/experience. Everything else is just extras and doesn't affect much the core value proposition. We want deploys that are reliable, transparent, that can roll back in face of issues, that support gradual blue/green strategies, etc. That's what makes an overall 'platform' good or bad. Surprisingly, that specific problem isn't very often isolatedly tackled: too often is coupled to a whole platform, a pervasive set of assumptions (you use containers/dynos/VPSs/etc). AWS CodeDeploy seems to fit the bill well. But AWS being AWS (with a history of leaving certain products neglected) I just don't trust the implementation itself. I cannot see its changelog, issue tracker, assess its internal quality, etc. So I would really love to see some open-source CodeDeploy clones, with a scope as small as possible and the highest possible internal quality. It could be a game changer.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tflinton 6y ago

Just going to drop a plug for my open source pet project: https://beta.akkeris.io/ https://beta.akkeris.io/

philip1209 6y ago

Some providers are rolling out http/3 support and heroku still hasn’t supported http/2.

forgingahead 6y ago

Heroku is certainly "expensive" if your comparison is "I can make it at home for nothing". But our time has a price as well, and honestly the only thing young companies or projects should be doing is spending time getting customers and revenue. Deployment ops is a later stage activity. When you tip over that threshold from "default dead", that is, non-revenue focused activity won't kill your company in 6 months, then and only then do I think it makes sense to switch over from Heroku to something else. I still use Heroku all the time, and recommend it to clients who are starting out as well. (Just like how I recommend buying a $10 theme for design instead of wasting money fiddling with a designer/design team). You need to determine product market fit, pricing, and distribution first.

devops000 6y ago

I have switched from Heroku to Cloud66 + Digital Ocean and it’s great. I have the same ease of use of Heroku but at a fraction of cost

ashconnor 6y ago
Digital Ocean App Platform and Render are both easy to use and a lot cheaper than Heroku.

slig 6y ago

Thank to the Heroku pricing back in the day, I learned how to host and manage my little setup on my own on Linode. Recently I've moved to K8S on Digital Ocean and I could not be happier.

dchess 6y ago

I haven't seen anyone mention: dokku [1], but I've had good luck using dokku droplets on digital ocean for a simple Heroku alternative. [1] https://github.com/dokku/dokku https://github.com/dokku/dokku

rcarmo 6y ago
Even simpler: https://github.com/piku/piku https://github.com/piku/piku
- rcarmo 6y ago
  Hi! Not sure why this was downvoted, since it was both on-topic and indeed simpler (I'm the creator).

aledalgrande 6y ago

I don't buy this, of course if you run the NYT infrastructure you don't go for Heroku. Heroku is still the best for smaller projects (and medium sized depending on the type of the workload) and devs that are not fully devops. Sure, if you have a previous project where you can copy pasta your Terraform and Kubernetes setup from, you can start your infra just as fast, but otherwise heroku app:create and git push heroku master is still way faster to start hustling. Everyone compares invoices between e.g. AWS and Heroku, but do they ever take into account the cost of the ops team when they switch to AWS? If the bill was 7 figures on Heroku with no devops, how many senior devops does it take to get the same spend with AWS? How about productivity loss if deploying is not as easy as it was before? I think saying something is dead because it doesn't work in all use cases is not fair.

elliotlarson 6y ago

I started messing with Heroku back when they were trying to be an online Rails editor. When they started getting more seriously into hosting I was relieved to have a company dedicated to making Rails hosting easy. But, every time I tried to host a professional project with them I ended up leaving early on because of slow performance, high pricing, and the fact that their system had limits that there was always some third party around to help solve for a fee. The fees add up. I started rolling my own configurations with Chef. It was painful. Then I tried Ansible, and it was easier to use, but I was still responsible for devops. I've come to realize that I will never be good at devops. I'm spending all of my time in application code. It just isn't what I do. And, most of my professional projects really don't have scale issues. They're mostly apps with small user bases that run great on a couple of servers. There's a sweet spot for Heroku here. Yeah, they're still slow, they still have limitations, they're still expensive... but on the low end of their price scale, it's hard to beat not having to worry about devops. (Saw a reference to https://render.com https://render.com in the comments. Maybe I'll give them a try.)

zackbloom 6y ago

In 2014 I started a company, and chose Heroku as the easiest way to get my (Go) code running in the cloud. Last year I started a company, and to my surprise, Heroku was still the easiest way to get my (Go) code running in the cloud. I fully expected to be on a more 'modern' platform, but virtually every other provider requires at a minimum a Docker config. Docker has its purposes, but I can literally push an arbitrary Go/Python/Ruby/Node/etc. repo to Heroku, and it will be hosted on the Internet successfully. It's still SO much faster. As a comparison, I did need to get one project running with Docker and it legitimately took 16+ hours of developer time to get source control authentication working as a part of the build process. None of that delay is a huge issue when you have limitless engineering resources, but for someone starting from scratch Heroku remains (bizarrely) the fastest tool out there.

weird-eye-issue 6y ago
"took 16+ hours of developer time to get source control authentication working as a part of the build process" Probably best you stick with Heroku
- jgwil2 6y ago
  I hope getting the opportunity to be a prick was worth the downvotes.

whakim 6y ago

This article didn't make any sense to me. I didn't even see any actual numbers suggesting Heroku's revenues or userbase are stagnating/declining! The main arguments for Heroku's "decline" instead seem to be (1) cost; and (2) Kubernetes. But Heroku has always been aimed at organizations that want to trade time/money for ease of use along across a narrow(er) set of functions. Those are not the kind of orgs who use Kubernetes or want to devote man/hours (or employees) to devops. I think the "actual" argument is that Heroku isn't "cool" anymore.

practicalpants 6y ago

Heroku is supposed to be easy for launching prototypes yet it's a PITA for Django, one of the most popular prototyping frameworks, since they never bothered to build native static file support (their "whitenoise" suggestion creates really crappy performance, so you're forced to setup a whole new static server). Heroku basically exploded in popularity for support of beginner programmers, so idk why they are intent on alienating that group.

252452d 6y ago
I had a client that forced me to deploy a Django project on Heroku. That being my only experience, maybe that's why I never understood and still doubt the value proposition of Heroku.
ifore 6y ago
nginx buildpack + python buildpack == nginx to serve static content and gunicorn for the python backend. Of course you now have to know how to set up an nginx config file so it does take away somewhat from the "just works" simplicity of Heroku. Although even whitenoise is still ok if you're going to set it up with a CDN as the frontend for your static assets. If you want simplicity then you do it using one of the CDN addons. Whitenoise is not a limitation of the heroku platform, it's really a symptom of suboptimal documentation.
toyg 6y ago
Most projects will run with cloudflare in front, which takes care of static caching.

brylie 6y ago

DigitalOcean App Platform is a compelling alternative to Heroku with the simplicity of Buildpacks and reasonable pricing. https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/ Are there other PaaS providers with Buildpacks support?

echan00 6y ago
I use heroku for the majority of my projects. I tried DO app platform a few months ago, it was garbage. I wasted an entire day migrating my heroku rails app to DO only to come to realization I am much better off paying for heroku
- nikon 5y ago
  Agree +10000

macrael 6y ago

Heroku is fighting full fledge CI and full fledged CI is getting better faster than Heroku

wilsonfiifi 6y ago

To everyone complaining about the cost of Heroku hosting and wishing they could have something similar but cheaper, consider sponsoring or contributing to the Dokku Kubernetes scheduler [0]. You get a similar deployment workflow to Heroku and the scalability of K8. [0] https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes https://github.com/dokku/dokku-scheduler-kubernetes

villgax 6y ago

Its not going anywhere, I'm yet to see something as accessible for link a GitHub repo & forget kind of a solution

rolandm 6y ago

I can recommend CapRover as a Heroku alternative: https://caprover.com https://caprover.com

flurdy 6y ago

I love Heroku. But I hardly use it anymore. For personal use it was excellent way to spin up an app and see if it is useful etc. That part I had to stop doing because they changed the free-tier pricing model. So I had to sunset most apps, keep a couple on the free-tier and Hobby-tier, but with no room to add new apps. For work use it is useful for demos and some small apps. But the main problem has always been scaling Heroku apps beyond a single monolith. Most work projects split and scale across a lot of apps/services etc and that stack part was never easy with Heroku. So for my personal apps I now have an overkill of a K8s cluster (or 2, maybe 3...) that I chuck all my new apps in. As someone with k8s skills that is ok, but obviously I know that Heroku did 1000% other things in the background that I now have to do myself, and pay for...

SergeAx 6y ago

One word: Salesforce.

mleonhard 6y ago

The article misses the point. Heroku is for small companies. If they try to get enterprise customers, they will become too complicated like AWS and lose focus on their small customers. Heroku is important for innovation in our society. Greed-focused Silicon Valley VCs would pump it full of money and destroy it. I hope Salesforce doesn't do that. Heroku is perfect as it is. Let's not mess it up.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

metta2uall 6y ago

I'd just want a PaaS with easy-to-use rate limiting and caching (e.g. for some routes use Redis if unauthenticated otherwise go to the backend, for other routes cache forever)

vlucas 6y ago

Vercel is the new Heroku. Same ease of use, MUCH better architecture and cost structure.