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I think Heroku's aggressive pricing is the main driver behind making them obsolete. I honestly cannot believe Salesforce is so short-sighted with Heroku. Their

I think Heroku's aggressive pricing is the main driver behind making them obsolete. I honestly cannot believe Salesforce is so short-sighted with Heroku. Their approach is "Milk it as much as we can until everyone just abandons it for cheaper solutions/clones". Had they become more competitive in terms of pricing, a large, large chunk of companies would've used them rather than moving to solutions like Kube, etc, or a bunch of Heroku clones which are now taking off as it's being considered a "Sinking Ship". Just see this: https://blog.porter.run/why-companies-move-off-heroku/ https://blog.porter.run/why-companies-move-off-heroku/ The reasons they are suggesting [that companies leave Heroku for] (besides the costs) are a bunch of non-reasons and small nuisances. The main reason is the cost, and the cost issue will become bigger and bigger of an issue as competing solutions get cheaper and cheaper, until Heroku is completely sunk and abandoned. We are still using Heroku and I really hope they would fix the pricing before we bite the bullet and just spend a couple of weeks moving to a cheaper alternative. There's no vendor lock in on 12 Factor Apps you see.

andi999 4y ago
How much do they charge?
- shakna 4y ago
  Heroku's pricing model is absurdly complicated. [0] But for anything nonfree, you're probably going to end up at over $100/mo, even if just by accident. To compare it to one of their current competitors, render [1], for something with all the same features as gave me that $100/mo figure, you're looking at about $15/mo. [0] https://www.heroku.com/pricing https://www.heroku.com/pricing [1] https://render.com/pricing https://render.com/pricing
  - dinvlad 4y ago
    And if we look at some European cloud providers' prices, it becomes painfully obvious that any such services (even incl. Render) built on top of major US cloud providers are excruciatingly overpriced - the markups can be as large as 5x for equivalent compute: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud This combined with something like Doku gives one a sense of what could be possible.
    - hardwaresofton 4y ago
      The thing is that Hetzner is unfortunately still missing some of the low hanging fruit cloud services. I'm building a product that intends to bridge that gap[0] -- but I think it should be done in a way that works for any provider. There are so many other smaller providers out there with decent prices, but that are completely missing the services. It's been getting better recently though! Aiven also just raised a bunch of money, so maybe we'll see a decoupling of services from the same to multiple clouds as they expand as well. [0]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com
    - Mo3 4y ago
      Please stop suggesting Hetzner for every random problem in existence. I've been a happy Hetzner customer for years, BUT 1) They are cheap because they are comparable to a discount supermarket chain 2) They are not a cloud platform 2.1) They offer none of the advanced features available on modern cloud platforms 2.2) It would be almost impossible to build a PaaS like Heroku on Hetzner infrastructure 3) The latency to anywhere outside Europe is pretty bad (regarding EU data centers) and their network is not the best (regarding the whole network) 4) The cheap dedicated server offerings are consumer hardware (and possibly thus are the hosts for the cloud services), and the more expensive server hardware offerings are not necessarily cheaper than other options 5) They have consistent issues with their virtual/cloud offerings that are not remediable due to the aforementioned lack of advanced PaaS functionality There is much more going on behind the scenes of a platform like Heroku than a single dokku instance on a budget host. You are comparing single apples to a global distribution chain of bananas.
      - xena 4y ago
        I use hetzner personally (the OP article is hosted there) and I can't agree more. It's incomparable. You can get the first 90% of Heroku sure, but not any of the other 90% of reliability.
        Mo3 4y ago
        Besides reliability, the moment you need to scale up, you wish you were on Heroku or a real PaaS. Although their pricing model is unacceptable and there’s many better options by now. We too use some Hetzner servers at work for infrequently accessed databases that have no need to be highly available. We recently migrated non-production logging to a Hetzner dedicated with 8TB of HDD. Almost unbeatable price. Choose the right tool for the job. I have nothing against Hetzner, but I’ve been seeing them mentioned dozens of times in unsuitable contexts by now.
  - andi999 4y ago
    While 100$ is a lot of money, it is not so much in business environment, I mean even a cheap software developer costs probably more than 5000$ (full cost calculation) per month. But complicated pricing is a big no-no. I mean everytime you find you need a slightly different plan going again through the purchase department?
    - rowanajmarshall 4y ago
      I think Heroku just got a dead zone in pricing. It's too expensive for a single developer (for comfort at least), but any 'proper' company, even with only a couple of full-time developers, can afford the overhead to set things up in AWS.
      - nicoburns 4y ago
        Disagree on a small company having time to setup AWS. I work in a 2 man team, and that would be about the last thing on our priority list. We spend ~$500/month on Heroku and while that’s a lot more than it would be elsewhere, it’s also non-issue. Heroku’s main problems are: 1. There are now comparable competitors that are cheaper. 2. They seem to have stopped maintaining it properly which is gradually leading a loss of trust.
      - neon_electro 4y ago
        My data point in contrast to your suggestion is a company with more than a dozen developers, and a loose idea of "let's migrate from Heroku to AWS without planning much or actually educating our developers on how to use AWS to be as productive as they were in Heroku"; more than a year later, there was definitely some success to speak of, but there was a lot of realization that some of our systems were just fine on Heroku, and that we didn't have the DevOps talent to help us manage AWS better than Heroku was already helping us.
    - bpicolo 4y ago
      Suffice to say a “cheap” developer costs way more than $6k/year
      - 4y ago
maxehmookau 4y ago
I was never sure about this. Sure, they're more expensive than competitors but for a lot of uses they worked out cheaper than the alternatives in almost every circumstance. We were able to support _hundreds_ of applications, scale up at a moment's notice (applications were _very_ spiky traffic) and we didn't need a single member of infrastructure staff. We had engineers with _some_ backend-heavy knowledge, but nobody who could really get in to the guts of an infrastructure problem. We charged Heroku out at cost to customers on top of our daily rate and it's barely a rounding error except for the largest of projects. Don't get me wrong, the overall issue is that Heroku just isn't actively maintained anymore and that's going to put off new customers (as it should), but for those heavily invested in the platform right now, cost is not a factor that will be pushing them away.
whakim 4y ago
While companies move off Heroku because of the pricing, there's still a huge addressable market there given that the Heroku ecosystem (including all its addons) is much more extensive than other similar services. The OP discusses this (that's what the "magic" is all about). Plenty of folks would be willing to pay the Heroku premium if new features were being actively developed, the addon ecosystem was continuing to expand (and addons were kept up-to-date), and the general reliability of the platform wasn't being questioned.
kramerger 4y ago
But are there any good alternatives to heroku that have a similar approach (i.e. not spinning your own VM) ?
- emilsedgh 4y ago
  Fly.io, Porter, Render, Google Cloud Run, DO Droplets and probably a bunch I'm forgetting.
  - langsoul-com 4y ago
    The magic of heroku was everything just worked from a git push, no need to fuck around with Docker and fly.toml files. Launching laravel app on heroku is magic, git push and done. On render and fly.io? Man I hope you don't suck at Docker cause it took me forever.
    - ryanSrich 4y ago
      Exactly. Every HN thread that mentions Heroku always has people responding with the same half dozen Heroku competitors. In reality, none of them are comparable. If I have to touch Docker at all then it’s not comparable to Heroku. If I have to configure a service at all. It’s not comparable. If I have to do anything other than click a button to add a database, make that database HA, and make backups automated, then it’s not comparable. If I have to manually manage things like environment variables (for managed services) instead of the system just doing it for me, then it’s not comparable. If I have to deal with complicated role policies, and access management instead of just saying who can and cannot push, then it’s not comparable. If it takes more than clicking a drop down to resize a service, then it’s not comparable. If I have to go to a third party website to add something like monitoring or logging from that third party, then it’s not comparable.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        You're sort of describing the overall conundrum of the PaaSs starting about 10 years ago. A lot of especially individual developers liked them because, as you say, they were mostly drop-dead simple. The problem is that individual developers mostly don't pay and enterprise app development for good (and bad) reasons has a whole bunch of other requirements which has led a lot of the industry to adopt mostly Kubernetes based container platforms. Which are a lot more powerful and flexible but are also a lot more complex that the original PaaSs envisioned.
hot_gril 4y ago
So the biggest Heroku clone I can think of is Google's App Engine, and it's complicated for no reason. The most comical example is storing/accessing secrets. What should be something like `heroku config set MYSECRET=foo` is instead an entire tutorial on setting up a separate key management system and configuring GAE to use it, which cutting every corner still took me at least 2 hours. It's like this all the way. Postgres is one click on Heroku, a miniature ordeal on GAE. Yeah I can handle it, but why. Maybe I don't have the patience and there's some light at the end of the tunnel. I thought maybe that light was gRPC, but turns out App Engine ironically can't run gRPC services.
- tomc1985 4y ago
  My former employer, a large lumbering fortune 500 trying to play in the agile pool, made extensive use of those specific features...
- digisign 4y ago
  Secrets should not be on the command line, they get logged to history. Instead should be prompted for like a password.
  - psadauskas 4y ago
    Only tangentially related, but if you prefix the command with a space, it doesn't get recorded to history. $ cd $ echo "one" one $ echo "two" two $ echo "three" three $ history | tail -3 10089 cd 10090 echo "one" 10091 echo "three" When you remember to do it, that is.
    - bpeebles 4y ago
      That is the default on many Linuxes' bashes but it's not universal and you can turn it on or off using HISTCONTROL: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Variables.html https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Vari...
    - yencabulator 4y ago
sdklkejflkwjefl 4y ago
Former employee, and you're wrong: pricing had nothing to do with it. In 2017 we went under a feature freeze and no new features were allowed to be worked on. Anyone can look at the Heroku Changelog to verify this yourself (of course features that were in progress still rolled out over some of 2018). We had tons of attrition (without backfill) and even a layoff afterwards. Heroku is probably 1/3 of what it was at its peak around 2014. SFDC gave up on us because we wanted to build a developer platform and they wanted us to build an enterprise platform. We sucked at enterprise features so they gave us the axe.
- emilsedgh 4y ago
  I appreciate you letting us know what happened exactly. This just confirms the basis of my previous comment that this is exactly SalesForce's strategy regarding Heroku: Milk it until it dies.
jrochkind1 4y ago
Contrarily, I think there are many heroku customers who would be happy to keep paying for it if they just kept actively investing in it. Maintaining it and delivering new features necessary to keep up with the changing environment. But, they are not.

andi999 4y ago

How much do they charge?

shakna 4y ago
Heroku's pricing model is absurdly complicated. [0] But for anything nonfree, you're probably going to end up at over $100/mo, even if just by accident. To compare it to one of their current competitors, render [1], for something with all the same features as gave me that $100/mo figure, you're looking at about $15/mo. [0] https://www.heroku.com/pricing https://www.heroku.com/pricing [1] https://render.com/pricing https://render.com/pricing
- dinvlad 4y ago
  And if we look at some European cloud providers' prices, it becomes painfully obvious that any such services (even incl. Render) built on top of major US cloud providers are excruciatingly overpriced - the markups can be as large as 5x for equivalent compute: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud This combined with something like Doku gives one a sense of what could be possible.
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    The thing is that Hetzner is unfortunately still missing some of the low hanging fruit cloud services. I'm building a product that intends to bridge that gap[0] -- but I think it should be done in a way that works for any provider. There are so many other smaller providers out there with decent prices, but that are completely missing the services. It's been getting better recently though! Aiven also just raised a bunch of money, so maybe we'll see a decoupling of services from the same to multiple clouds as they expand as well. [0]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com
  - Mo3 4y ago
    Please stop suggesting Hetzner for every random problem in existence. I've been a happy Hetzner customer for years, BUT 1) They are cheap because they are comparable to a discount supermarket chain 2) They are not a cloud platform 2.1) They offer none of the advanced features available on modern cloud platforms 2.2) It would be almost impossible to build a PaaS like Heroku on Hetzner infrastructure 3) The latency to anywhere outside Europe is pretty bad (regarding EU data centers) and their network is not the best (regarding the whole network) 4) The cheap dedicated server offerings are consumer hardware (and possibly thus are the hosts for the cloud services), and the more expensive server hardware offerings are not necessarily cheaper than other options 5) They have consistent issues with their virtual/cloud offerings that are not remediable due to the aforementioned lack of advanced PaaS functionality There is much more going on behind the scenes of a platform like Heroku than a single dokku instance on a budget host. You are comparing single apples to a global distribution chain of bananas.
    - xena 4y ago
      I use hetzner personally (the OP article is hosted there) and I can't agree more. It's incomparable. You can get the first 90% of Heroku sure, but not any of the other 90% of reliability.
      - Mo3 4y ago
        Besides reliability, the moment you need to scale up, you wish you were on Heroku or a real PaaS. Although their pricing model is unacceptable and there’s many better options by now. We too use some Hetzner servers at work for infrequently accessed databases that have no need to be highly available. We recently migrated non-production logging to a Hetzner dedicated with 8TB of HDD. Almost unbeatable price. Choose the right tool for the job. I have nothing against Hetzner, but I’ve been seeing them mentioned dozens of times in unsuitable contexts by now.
- andi999 4y ago
  While 100$ is a lot of money, it is not so much in business environment, I mean even a cheap software developer costs probably more than 5000$ (full cost calculation) per month. But complicated pricing is a big no-no. I mean everytime you find you need a slightly different plan going again through the purchase department?
  - rowanajmarshall 4y ago
    I think Heroku just got a dead zone in pricing. It's too expensive for a single developer (for comfort at least), but any 'proper' company, even with only a couple of full-time developers, can afford the overhead to set things up in AWS.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      Disagree on a small company having time to setup AWS. I work in a 2 man team, and that would be about the last thing on our priority list. We spend ~$500/month on Heroku and while that’s a lot more than it would be elsewhere, it’s also non-issue. Heroku’s main problems are: 1. There are now comparable competitors that are cheaper. 2. They seem to have stopped maintaining it properly which is gradually leading a loss of trust.
    - neon_electro 4y ago
      My data point in contrast to your suggestion is a company with more than a dozen developers, and a loose idea of "let's migrate from Heroku to AWS without planning much or actually educating our developers on how to use AWS to be as productive as they were in Heroku"; more than a year later, there was definitely some success to speak of, but there was a lot of realization that some of our systems were just fine on Heroku, and that we didn't have the DevOps talent to help us manage AWS better than Heroku was already helping us.
  - bpicolo 4y ago
    Suffice to say a “cheap” developer costs way more than $6k/year
    - 4y ago

maxehmookau 4y ago

I was never sure about this. Sure, they're more expensive than competitors but for a lot of uses they worked out cheaper than the alternatives in almost every circumstance. We were able to support _hundreds_ of applications, scale up at a moment's notice (applications were _very_ spiky traffic) and we didn't need a single member of infrastructure staff. We had engineers with _some_ backend-heavy knowledge, but nobody who could really get in to the guts of an infrastructure problem. We charged Heroku out at cost to customers on top of our daily rate and it's barely a rounding error except for the largest of projects. Don't get me wrong, the overall issue is that Heroku just isn't actively maintained anymore and that's going to put off new customers (as it should), but for those heavily invested in the platform right now, cost is not a factor that will be pushing them away.

whakim 4y ago

While companies move off Heroku because of the pricing, there's still a huge addressable market there given that the Heroku ecosystem (including all its addons) is much more extensive than other similar services. The OP discusses this (that's what the "magic" is all about). Plenty of folks would be willing to pay the Heroku premium if new features were being actively developed, the addon ecosystem was continuing to expand (and addons were kept up-to-date), and the general reliability of the platform wasn't being questioned.

kramerger 4y ago

But are there any good alternatives to heroku that have a similar approach (i.e. not spinning your own VM) ?

emilsedgh 4y ago
Fly.io, Porter, Render, Google Cloud Run, DO Droplets and probably a bunch I'm forgetting.
- langsoul-com 4y ago
  The magic of heroku was everything just worked from a git push, no need to fuck around with Docker and fly.toml files. Launching laravel app on heroku is magic, git push and done. On render and fly.io? Man I hope you don't suck at Docker cause it took me forever.
  - ryanSrich 4y ago
    Exactly. Every HN thread that mentions Heroku always has people responding with the same half dozen Heroku competitors. In reality, none of them are comparable. If I have to touch Docker at all then it’s not comparable to Heroku. If I have to configure a service at all. It’s not comparable. If I have to do anything other than click a button to add a database, make that database HA, and make backups automated, then it’s not comparable. If I have to manually manage things like environment variables (for managed services) instead of the system just doing it for me, then it’s not comparable. If I have to deal with complicated role policies, and access management instead of just saying who can and cannot push, then it’s not comparable. If it takes more than clicking a drop down to resize a service, then it’s not comparable. If I have to go to a third party website to add something like monitoring or logging from that third party, then it’s not comparable.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      You're sort of describing the overall conundrum of the PaaSs starting about 10 years ago. A lot of especially individual developers liked them because, as you say, they were mostly drop-dead simple. The problem is that individual developers mostly don't pay and enterprise app development for good (and bad) reasons has a whole bunch of other requirements which has led a lot of the industry to adopt mostly Kubernetes based container platforms. Which are a lot more powerful and flexible but are also a lot more complex that the original PaaSs envisioned.

hot_gril 4y ago

So the biggest Heroku clone I can think of is Google's App Engine, and it's complicated for no reason. The most comical example is storing/accessing secrets. What should be something like `heroku config set MYSECRET=foo` is instead an entire tutorial on setting up a separate key management system and configuring GAE to use it, which cutting every corner still took me at least 2 hours. It's like this all the way. Postgres is one click on Heroku, a miniature ordeal on GAE. Yeah I can handle it, but why. Maybe I don't have the patience and there's some light at the end of the tunnel. I thought maybe that light was gRPC, but turns out App Engine ironically can't run gRPC services.

tomc1985 4y ago
My former employer, a large lumbering fortune 500 trying to play in the agile pool, made extensive use of those specific features...
digisign 4y ago
Secrets should not be on the command line, they get logged to history. Instead should be prompted for like a password.
- psadauskas 4y ago
  Only tangentially related, but if you prefix the command with a space, it doesn't get recorded to history. $ cd $ echo "one" one $ echo "two" two $ echo "three" three $ history | tail -3 10089 cd 10090 echo "one" 10091 echo "three" When you remember to do it, that is.
  - bpeebles 4y ago
    That is the default on many Linuxes' bashes but it's not universal and you can turn it on or off using HISTCONTROL: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Variables.html https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Bash-Vari...
  - yencabulator 4y ago

sdklkejflkwjefl 4y ago

Former employee, and you're wrong: pricing had nothing to do with it. In 2017 we went under a feature freeze and no new features were allowed to be worked on. Anyone can look at the Heroku Changelog to verify this yourself (of course features that were in progress still rolled out over some of 2018). We had tons of attrition (without backfill) and even a layoff afterwards. Heroku is probably 1/3 of what it was at its peak around 2014. SFDC gave up on us because we wanted to build a developer platform and they wanted us to build an enterprise platform. We sucked at enterprise features so they gave us the axe.

emilsedgh 4y ago
I appreciate you letting us know what happened exactly. This just confirms the basis of my previous comment that this is exactly SalesForce's strategy regarding Heroku: Milk it until it dies.

jrochkind1 4y ago

Contrarily, I think there are many heroku customers who would be happy to keep paying for it if they just kept actively investing in it. Maintaining it and delivering new features necessary to keep up with the changing environment. But, they are not.