4 ms·

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.

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.