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My biggest beef with them is that they’re so feature frozen that they threw a billion person country off rather than update billing. India recently passed a cr

My biggest beef with them is that they’re so feature frozen that they threw a billion person country off rather than update billing. India recently passed a credit card tokenisation law that needs changes in an invoicing system, and Heroku sent me an email saying my 10 paid production apps would all just be shutdown because they’d rather just drop support for Indian customers. I happened to be working at Fly.io at the time, so had a clear alternative, but the way Heroku handled this really sucks.

aerovistae 5y ago
Well, if it was going to be a large, time-consuming, costly upgrade that was only for one country - and if they had a real minimum of customers from that country - it's a fairly sensible business calculation.
- japhyr 5y ago
  The problem is, this fits the pattern with what Heroku has been doing for years now. Whatever works and keeps working, they're happy to steer you towards. Whatever isn't working, they're just kind of hands up in the air letting things stagnate.
- sudhirj 5y ago
  That's the kind of cost-benefit analysis that's lazy on Heroku's part though, and doesn't properly track brand damage or even attempt to think about second order effects. The country has a huge developer population, massive internet penetration among the entire economic range and fast moving fintech scene. This is the kind of cost benefit that signals an inability to change or adapt rather than a projection of the real benefits. Stripe handled it transparently, as did many other payment gateways — the changes were somewhat in the vein of European 3DS / SCA changes anyway, and it's quite possible that the EU will adopt similar measures — not to mention that adding flexible invoice payment options allows customers to use many more international payment methods. The sad thing is instead of seeing the benefits the change would unlock it looks like Heroku focussed on the cost of doing it and gave up.
yunohn 5y ago
> they’d rather just drop support for Indian customers. Heroku and Firebase used to be my go-tos for quick deployments - disappointing to see them fall so far after acquisitions… I’ll check out fly.io - been meaning to amidst their top-notch blog posts.
spookthesunset 5y ago
That India banking regulation really threw a wrench in a lot of businesses. Our company had to do a mad scramble to support it, and what we came up with was a worse customer experience than before. It will take some time for us to make billing as easy to use as it was before the regulation kicked in.
- bastawhiz 5y ago
  I work at Stripe. We hustled too. But frankly, the scope of PDE that needs to be located in India is pretty small. If I was a company whose whole business was making it easy to deploy and manage software, I would be thoroughly embarrassed that I couldn't spin up a twelve factor app with a year of notice.

aerovistae 5y ago

Well, if it was going to be a large, time-consuming, costly upgrade that was only for one country - and if they had a real minimum of customers from that country - it's a fairly sensible business calculation.

japhyr 5y ago
The problem is, this fits the pattern with what Heroku has been doing for years now. Whatever works and keeps working, they're happy to steer you towards. Whatever isn't working, they're just kind of hands up in the air letting things stagnate.
sudhirj 5y ago
That's the kind of cost-benefit analysis that's lazy on Heroku's part though, and doesn't properly track brand damage or even attempt to think about second order effects. The country has a huge developer population, massive internet penetration among the entire economic range and fast moving fintech scene. This is the kind of cost benefit that signals an inability to change or adapt rather than a projection of the real benefits. Stripe handled it transparently, as did many other payment gateways — the changes were somewhat in the vein of European 3DS / SCA changes anyway, and it's quite possible that the EU will adopt similar measures — not to mention that adding flexible invoice payment options allows customers to use many more international payment methods. The sad thing is instead of seeing the benefits the change would unlock it looks like Heroku focussed on the cost of doing it and gave up.

yunohn 5y ago

> they’d rather just drop support for Indian customers. Heroku and Firebase used to be my go-tos for quick deployments - disappointing to see them fall so far after acquisitions… I’ll check out fly.io - been meaning to amidst their top-notch blog posts.

spookthesunset 5y ago

That India banking regulation really threw a wrench in a lot of businesses. Our company had to do a mad scramble to support it, and what we came up with was a worse customer experience than before. It will take some time for us to make billing as easy to use as it was before the regulation kicked in.

bastawhiz 5y ago
I work at Stripe. We hustled too. But frankly, the scope of PDE that needs to be located in India is pretty small. If I was a company whose whole business was making it easy to deploy and manage software, I would be thoroughly embarrassed that I couldn't spin up a twelve factor app with a year of notice.