Setting up a server and database is not hard. Maintaining and scaling it is. I don't want to use my valuable time on these things, so Heroku is worth the cost.

Setting up a server and database is not hard. Maintaining and scaling it is. I don't want to use my valuable time on these things, so Heroku is worth the cost. People who say Heroku is expensive are not in their target market -- businesses who want to avoid their team unnecessarily spending time on infrastructure instead of product. Heroku is much, much cheaper than 1) me spending my time on these things, or 2) hiring a capable engineer to do it for me. It's build vs buy. I'd rather buy. But that's not to say I'm not interested in a Heroku alternative. But it needs to be a *real* alternative. :)