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Removal of Heroku free product plans

• josephcsible 4y ago
  I wonder how many companies that pay for Heroku are only doing so because their employees previously used the free tier for personal projects at home.
• FBISurveillance 4y ago
  Summary: * Announcing Public roadmap launch - we'll probably see what they are working on. * Discontinue free product plans and delete inactive accounts. Rest of it: corpspeak.
• sergiotapia 4y ago
  Heroku was a cornerstone of my toolbox back in 2015 but these days I wouldn't use them. They have been stained by Salesforce. It's unfortunate. :(
• mkrishnan 4y ago
  Actually this is a good decision. Instead of squeezing paying customers to fund the free users, it's better to stop the free plan and offer better service to playing users. There are lots of free hosting plans now a days like every cloud vendor offers some kind of free plans.
• okpx 4y ago
  There goes my army of Discord bots
• countspongebob 4y ago
  Transparency on direction.
• cmg 4y ago
  > Starting October 26, 2022, we will begin deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year. Starting November 28, 2022, we plan to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data services. We will be sending out a series of email communications to affected users. Sad to see this, but not surprised after the Salesforce purchase. Heroku was a great place for hobbyists and tiny one-off projects. What's a good alternative?
  • tf2_pyro 4y ago
    fly.io i think - never tried it but HN feedback has been pretty positive on it
    • aarondf 4y ago
      I have tried it and found it to be really really good. It's a little more DIY than Heroku, but not by too much. They are moving really fast too, hiring people to focus on specific use cases (Laravel, Rails, etc.) If you're making heavy use of Heroku addons, you'll probably miss that quite a bit.
    • shepherdjerred 4y ago
      I've tried it for a small project. It's about as easy to use as Heroku.
    • mcintyre1994 4y ago
      Fly is really good. If you go over the free tier limits by under $5 they don't charge too, which gives a bit more flexibility on hobby projects.
    • intelVISA 4y ago
      It has potential, the VMM is a bit Rusty...
      • tptacek 4y ago
        Ok, that was terrible.
        • intelVISA 4y ago
          my apologies, seeing modern VMMs actually get used for once always hits different.
          • tptacek 4y ago
            OK, but if you do it again we're converting to QEMU.
• tf2_pyro 4y ago
  Pretty frustrated by this. I run a UAT instance on heroku free which I will now need to start paying for effectively doubling my cloud cost. Think i will migrate to fly.io instead which I guess is what they want to happen
  • jeromegv 4y ago
    That's correct, they do not want people getting service and not paying for it.
• Shank 4y ago
  > Starting October 26, 2022, we will begin deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year. Inactive for over a year? That's really interesting, because I was a paid Heroku customer for multiple years, but am no longer. I don't even have resources running, but I do have a few apps sitting in the dashboard. I guess I'm fair game for culling, despite being a paid customer in the past and not taking up very many resources. > Starting November 28, 2022, we plan to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data services. I understand this from a business perspective, but wow this sucks. There's a lot of projects hosted on Heroku that are just SPA-like demos of OSS tools -- things like theme demos for static site generators and the like. Sure, these are all good candidates for the myriad of other hosts that exist, but I'm sure that a lot will go down and linkrot will creep into the OSS ecosystem. Not a lot of people are eager to migrate projects off on someone else's schedule. I wish Salesforce the best of luck with Heroku, but this sounds like a "we care about the numbers" move. I hope this means that they actually invest in their product.
  • dangus 4y ago
    I don't wish Salesforce the best of luck with anything.
  • turtlebits 4y ago
    I haven't used Heroku in a while, but don't they rely on git? You shouldn't be losing anything specific to re-deploying your service. Otherwise, they have no obligation to maintain/run anything that isn't being paid for.
  • mepiethree 4y ago
    Late November is a crazy timeline. I have my personal website, wedding website, and tons of other projects on Heroku free stuff. So now it’s $7-$16/mo per app… thousands of dollars per year. Which is a reasonable price, I guess. It was probably entitled of me to think I could host so many websites for free. …except now I have to migrate them in fucking 2 months of weekends or everything will be deleted?! Thanks for ruining my weekend plans, Salesforce
• buf 4y ago
  This is good news for existing paying Heroku users. This is good news for Fly, Render, etc. This is bad news for Heroku in the long term. Free tiers are a gateway to users.
  • samwillis 4y ago
    > This is good news for existing paying Heroku users. I don't think it is, as a paying customer the free instances are such a useful part of the offering enabling us to have a free staging environment and test branches. As a small business, the free instances offset the excessive cost of Heroku.
    • buf 4y ago
      I wonder if this means they will explicitly remove review apps.
• aeyes 4y ago
  Link to the public roadmap: https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130 https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130 Blog post says "Salesforce has never been more focused on Heroku's future." but this looks like they are just keeping the lights on by deprecating and keeping security up to date. Which isn't bad if the product has reached maturity but I wonder if these really are the most important features users ask for. Why does the feedback link on the blog post go to a personal LinkedIn page? What is wrong with these companies?
  • countspongebob 4y ago
    We are doing more than keeping the lights on. Purpose of the public roadmap (which just launched, we'll need some time to really get it right, I'm sure) is to show what we are working on. Any comment on the work around github integration safety as an example? Watching for feedback here, but it's nice to know when I'm getting reachouts on product feedback directly who is touching base. Linked-in is great for that. But also, if you want to provide feedback we launched the roadmap on github if that's your preference. Trying to cover both kinds of customers.
    • aeyes 4y ago
      You are honestly trying to tell me that a developer-focused company has no better way to get user feedback? Issue tracker? Idea tracker (check this as an example: https://circleci.canny.io/ https://circleci.canny.io/)? Customer support? Email?
    • snowwolf 4y ago
      My wish list: * HTTP/2 (3?) (on the roadmap) * a refresh of the dyno line-up - at least pass on some of the cost savings of removing/supporting free tier by reducing dyno pricing or preferably bumping specs * auto-scale for all dyno tiers * rebuild security team with reputable lead * edge / multi region active-active DX * edge ssl termination * iterate on chat ops (underrated feature) * more metrics * more alerting (e.g. crashed apps) * better user/access team management (default app roles) * enhanced secrets management in env (2 layers of env view/roles - config vs secrets) * DDOS protection * Treat CI env vars as secrets!
• rngname22 4y ago
  Would be great if they define inactive - I have a production site that's been running unchanged for probably 6-8 years that I throw on my portfolio but haven't really done any work on. Not even sure anymore how I'd set up my dev env. Won't be the biggest loss if it gets deleted but wouldn't like it. Other than seeing my credit card get billed, I'm about as inactive as it gets. I don't know if some of my resources are paid but others are free? (saw someone else talking about free instances of postgres in the comments here), I literally don't remember how the whole 'dyno' systems and add-on systems work anymore, just know that I'm paying for the webserver node or whatever. So won't be surprised if the DB or caching or something just shuts off.
  • ebiester 4y ago
    Inactive likely means not paying.
• aarondf 4y ago
  Fly.io has a dedicated process for moving off of Heroku. Auth via Heroku and they'll launch your app onto Fly. They also have a free tier. The process: https://fly.io/launch/heroku https://fly.io/launch/heroku The docs: https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/speed-up-a-heroku-app https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/speed-up-a-heroku-app I haven't used it [the Heroku -> Fly process] myself, but it's been around for quite some time!
  • Kye 4y ago
    Fly was the subject of a front-page story a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31390506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31390506
  • bradgessler 4y ago
    Please let me know in the replies what you'd like to see at Fly that would make it as good, if not better, than Heroku. I recently started working at Fly to focus on making Rails & Ruby app deployments awesome, and of course Heroku set that benchmark almost a decade ago. I can't promise I'll get to everything, but I can promise that it will help me better prioritize what I should be focusing on to make Fly better for ya'll.
    • sammy2255 4y ago
      Better Frontend UI. I feel like everything is CLI
    • 5fnheluzdj 4y ago
      On the top of my list is being able to use a local repository and providing no credit card.
      • okpx 4y ago
        +1
      • Spivak 4y ago
        CC’s are an abuse prevention tool and essentially a proxy for real names since lots of companies ban “privacy” cards. Would you be willing to instead turn other proof like a government id with face recognition to auth it? Because yeah it sucks but Heroku is shutting down their free tier because of abuse so it's not a theoretical problem. Anyone who has even more lax requirements will get run over as well.
• aluminussoma 4y ago
  Heroku has had severe security and service outages over the past year. A long time ago, Heroku was talked about in positive terms. More recently, I've only heard negative things about them and plans to migrate off. They poisoned their brand.
• craigkerstiens 4y ago
  This is a sad day. Pricing changes are always hard, and having been through some of the earlier pricing changes at Heroku you can't make everyone happy. But, so many developers deployed their first app on Heroku and was a staple for so many bootcamps. Without it I'm confident we'd have less developers in the world. It is still one of the gold standards for developer experience. Years after its heyday companies and tools talk about and try to emulate that experience. I recall polling on twitter a few months back which the key feature was: - git push heroku master - Heroku add-ons - Heroku Postgres - Review apps And the reality is any one of those could standard on their own. But put together, Heroku simply lets you forget about ops and focus on shipping, and shipping is king. I fully get it's a business, but can't help but feel this is the writing on the wall for the future. Gonna pour one out tonight for Heroku. Edit: And may be trying to figure out how to offer free Postgres databases, cause shutting down databases with 3 months notice feels pretty short. Not sure if that means deleting the data itself or what, but ouch.
  • freeformz 4y ago
    It would be a poor business decision to exclude boot camp students from the upcoming student plan(s). That obviously doesn’t cover all types of learning/getting started though. I too mourn the loss of free, but also think it is the right decision for the times.
    • craigkerstiens 4y ago
      > If you want a Heroku trial, please contact your account executive or reach us here. Maybe I'm over skeptical here, but I don't see this being an easy thing for a bootcamp study to acquire or deal with.
      • koolba 4y ago
        Why even bother with contacting an account executive? It's $7 per dyno per month for the cheapest hobby tier. That's peanuts compared to any fees for a paid bootcamp. Heck, with inflation, that barely buys a bag of peanuts. Plus the students would have an incentive to learn about shutting down unused resources that would pay dividends if they ever deploy to AWS. It'd be like a home economic lesson for hosted services. $7/mo and access to a payment method might be a stopper for someone in the third world. But it's a private company, not a charity. Somebody else can solve that problem for the truly deserving. I think it's incredible they've provided free services for over a decade and would love to know what percent of their free compute resource have simply be hijacked by crypto miners, torrent downloaders, and VPNs. It's got to be enormous and the simple requirement of a payment card would add enough KYC to eliminate all of them.
• codegeek 4y ago
  Finally, the Salesforce blow. It was a matter of time. I have never used Heroku personally but came across so many people who absolutely loved it. Great example of a large company buying an awesome product and destroying it.
• ChrisArchitect 4y ago
  Well damn. 3 months to figure out what to do with all my 'hobby' apps eh. Hm.
  • bobx11 4y ago
    Because Salesforce has been internally talking about killing off heroku for quite some time, I've been trying alternatives and found many (eg. DigitalOcean, Render) support buildpacks already, so should be a very easy transition.
• thinkingkong 4y ago
  Heres the roadmap. Mostly seems like minor improvements and research so it will be interesting to see how the roadmap changes over time. Overall it feels strange. Next chapter feels more like a “our incredible journey” less of a bold goal. Also really want to make everyone realize it’s Salesforce Heroku now. https://github.com/heroku/roadmap/issues https://github.com/heroku/roadmap/issues
• typest 4y ago
  Heroku’s loss is Replit’s gain. They’re making everything so easy, I expect them to basically be able to pick up this slack in helping make deployments simple.
• joshstrange 4y ago
  So their next chapter is obscurity followed by shutting down? It was clear even before their horribly bungled GitHub security incident that Heroku was on life support at best and it's been a long time since "Heroku" was the answer to "What PaaS should I use?". The beancounters took control a while back and are sucking all they can out of it before they discard it's empty shell. Having Heroku as your PaaS provider seems like a bad business decision at this point. You are just begging to have the rug pulled out from under you.
  • coffee_beqn 4y ago
    What is the PaaS people use today? Just big cloud is too powerful or are there still niche companies that make life easy for startups like Heroku used to?
    • joshstrange 4y ago
      Fly.io is one I've looked at a few times but hasn't been exactly what I wanted to normally I just use AWS, Firebase, or a DO droplet. Supabase is something I've been interested in as well but I haven't played with it yet either.
    • mapcat 4y ago
      Railway is super easy to get started. Render and Fly are good options too
    • akprasad 4y ago
      I've been experimenting with Render (render.com) and like it so far.
    • malyk 4y ago
      porter is another
    • appliku 4y ago
      If you are doing Django or Python https://appliku.com https://appliku.com Free tier for deployments + AWS Free tier = year or free and convenient hosting
• willio58 4y ago
  Really sad end for Heroku. They never could find a balance between the free tiers they offered and their overly-expensive paid tiers. Now they're entering purgatory before they are ultimately shut down for good. They had the markings of a long-lasting company in this space but corporate mismanagement has led to this drawn out death for the company. Salesforce buying the company made a few rich, but it really did turn out to be the nail in the coffin everyone said it would be. :(
  • clairity 4y ago
    heroku was great but their free pricing was almost too good. and once you were out of the free range, their pricing jumped too steeply. they should have had a much more gradual ramp-up as your app got bigger and needed more resources, more of a geometrically rising pricing curve rather than a discontinuous one (but not like the overly complicated aws pricing, by the nanosecond on 15 different dimensions).
  • no_wizard 4y ago
    Counter point seems to be Slack, which has become better (in my opinion) after the Salesforce Acquisition. I think the struggle is that Salesforce has never historically offered a platform as a service business that is agnostic to its end goal. I imagine the idea of acquiring Heroku was to make it easy to spin up new Salesforce apps, but I don't know that ever materialized in the way they were hoping.
    • ubertaco 4y ago
      > Counter point seems to be Slack, which has become better (in my opinion) after the Salesforce Acquisition. ...which was only finalized about a year ago, and "phase one" of Salesforce's several-steps-plan that culminates in screwing up an acquisition is usually needlessly tinkering with pricing and packaging, which just happened recently [0]. The next step, if past patterns are predictors, will be an attempt to bundle Slack into their existing SKUs, then work on integrating Slack with their nightmare CRM codebase/dev-env, and then from there it's all downhill as velocity abruptly halts, the ratio of time spent doing meaningful work vs. time spent doing compliance busy-work stalls out completely, and the brain-drain begins. [0] https://slack.com/blog/news/pricing-and-plan-updates https://slack.com/blog/news/pricing-and-plan-updates
• duxup 4y ago
  Why did Salesforce buy Heroku if they're just going to sort of wind it down?
  • aaronbrethorst 4y ago
    Salesforce bought Heroku more than a decade ago. Company strategies change.
    • petercooper 4y ago
      Consider it was for "just" $212m as well – https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/08/breaking-salesforce-buys-heroku-for-212-million-in-cash/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/08/breaking-salesforce-buys-h... – rather than the ridiculous valuations similar companies would have nowadays. I imagine Salesforce made a fantastic return on it even ignoring any remaining value.
  • yencabulator 4y ago
    Well, it did take them 12 years after the purchase to shut it down.. Apart from that, it sounds like the standard acquihire. Salesforce bought Ruby/Java/etc experts to make their platform(s) more amenable to Ruby/Java/etc developers.
  • countspongebob 4y ago
    We are not "sort of winding it down".
    • simulosius 4y ago
      Well you've done a pretty good job convincing everyone that you do. Good luck trying to get the tooth paste back into the tube.
    • krallja 4y ago
      How are you going to acquire new users?
• 1270018080 4y ago
  Just got the email saying free Dynos and Postgres will be gone. I guess there's no point then?
• Thaxll 4y ago
  "The priority going forward is to support customers of all sizes who are betting projects, careers, and businesses on Heroku" Who in 2022 is actually using Heroku at serious scale? This is a dying service, no one sane want to bet on that.
  • ryantgtg 4y ago
    Substack! They were down - again - a couple days ago, and the message was: > You've requested a page on a website (substack.herokuapp.com) that is on the Cloudflare network. Cloudflare is currently unable to resolve your requested domain (substack.herokuapp.com).
• eropple 4y ago
  Huh. I can't say I'm not a little conflicted on this one. I ran a consultancy in the 2010s peeling sites off of Heroku and onto AWS, so seeing this feels pretty weird to me. As 'craigkierstiens says elsewhere in the thread, it feels a lot like the writing is on the wall. End-of-an-era stuff. Mild plug: these days I'm in devrel at Render now, because I think a modern, thought-out PaaS can target most folks' needs. If you're on Heroku and looking for somewhere to jump to, feel free to email me directly (ed@render.com). Happy to chat informally, to give you a non-sales assessment of whether Render fits your needs, and to help where I can--whether it's Render or to point you somewhere else.
• simonw 4y ago
  An important detail: If you have a free PostgreSQL database running on Heroku it will be deleted three months from today. You'd better be paying attention to their emails! I think this is a particularly tough part of this. Heroku: please consider instead stashing a backup of that data somewhere, so that users who wake up on November 29th and find that their application has vanished can sign in and at least recover their data to migrate it somewhere else.
  • danenania 4y ago
    For small enough DBs, they could even literally just email you the data zipped up as an attachment. I'd guess most hobby projects are a few MB if that. That said, I don't really get the feeling that Heroku is willing to put an ounce of extra effort into this, unfortunately.
    • simonw 4y ago
      That's a great idea. Free databases are limited to 10,000 rows so they are likely to be very small in most cases, would totally fit in an email attachment.
    • creatonez 4y ago
      Email is not actually private in many instances, so this might be an unworkable solution, possibly even a legal minefield too. Maybe encrypt the email attachment with an encryption key that is only accessible behind Heroku's 2-factor login page? Problem is, it would probably still reveal basic metadata and database sizes.
• zippergz 4y ago
  I've barely used Heroku, just playing with it for a day or two when it was in its heyday to see what it was about. But my incredibly anecdotal sense is that Heroku's real sweet spot was apps that started out on the free plan and then grew to be paying customers. Is that not really accurate? I know that's kind of a hard business model because only a tiny percentage of free customers will ever start paying. But do companies that can afford to pay from day 1 really use Heroku?
  • ryantgtg 4y ago
    Also anecdotally, we were on heroku for like 10 years. Started on free tier, and as our hobby project grew, we moved up in tiers (ending at $59/mo - after that any “upgrade” would double our costs). Heroku was great for us. But they didn’t seem to stay competitive with the alternatives.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    That's a style of business that can work for various companies, but it is NOT the type of business that Salesforce, et al want to chase. They want to work with accounts and upsell those accounts. It's an entirely different business model, and isn't really compatible.
• joshfraser 4y ago
  Heroku's business model was getting developers hooked w/ their free plan, and then making up the lost revenue by overcharging them once they needed to scale. This worked because the last thing you want to deal with when your business starts blowing up is moving everything over to a new stack. It's hard to imagine businesses choosing to start with Heroku's overpriced plans w/o first getting hooked with the free samples. On the other hand, I can only imagine the amount of bitcoin mining and DDOS farms that people must try to deploy on their platform every day. It sounds like a never-ending game of cat and mouse. It's remarkable that they offered free accounts for as long as they did.
• Aeolun 4y ago
  Do you ever see an announcement and just wonder how long it’ll be before the ‘this has been an incredible journey’?
• samwillis 4y ago
  This is the next step in the nudge to move off Heroku for us. We obviously use paid instances for production, however we use a Pipeline and the free instances for staging as well as short lived test instances for git branches. We were planning to move off anyway, but this isn't a change that would keep us. A price change to make Heroku competitive would have potentially kept us on board. I don't think Heroku can ever be competitive by remaining a layer on top of AWS.
• petercooper 4y ago
  This is an oddly dour announcement presented in a positive light. The announcement is basically of deprecations and a roadmap where very little is about actual features or improvements (outside of security).
• cnees 4y ago
  Bummer. I’ve found it really convenient, and I’ll consider moving to a paid tier, but they had a DNS outage earlier this week that left my site down, and even though they said it was upstream, it makes me wonder whether I shouldn’t move to a more stable host. Guess I won’t be adding any user facing features for a while as I work out the transition in my spare time.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    You'd think they'd delay this announcement just a bit after having crashed hard. (I believe the "upstream DNS provider" was also Salesforce, so they don't really get to switch blame.)
• evtothedev 4y ago
  Does anyone else find the roadmap to be really uninspiring? Every tasks seems either like housekeeping ("Migrate from Github OAuth to Github App Model") or like far-too-late table stakes ("Support HTTP/2"). What am I supposed to get inspired about on this page? For items that look like they ?might? be exciting, they seem hidden behind vagueness: "Official Cloud Native Buildpacks for Heroku languages" Contrast this with Render's public roadmap: https://feedback.render.com/ https://feedback.render.com/ That has nice, plain english. I know what they're building, and I can start dreaming about what I might build with it.
  • gkoberger 4y ago
    I'm with you, but to play devil's advocate... 1. Heroku already has most of the features on Render's roadmap 2. It's clear Heroku (well, Salesforce) is going all-in on Enterprise, and Enterprise doesn't reward cool new features. They like stability (and jargon-y words).
    • cpursley 4y ago
      Heroku doesn't handle distributed Elixir nor static sites. Render does.
  • countspongebob 4y ago
    Could you jump in on the cloud native buildpack issue above and ask for clarification? Goal of the public roadmap is to gather input and feedback and make it better.
  • sleepyhead 4y ago
    Yeah it was a bit disappointing to see it. For me I was looking for two important features that is essential for a European SaaS company or in the Enterprise segment: 1) No plans to do regional Postgres backups. Today PG backups are transferred out of the database region and to us-east-1. This is problematic for anyone who takes GDPR seriously and unacceptable for any customer with strict compliance requirements. 2) No possibility of wildcard + ACM TLS. We have to implement our own cert automation using Let's Encrypt instead of relying the fully functional Heroku ACM because we also need to use a wildcard cert. This is something that most SaaS vendors would require. Heroku are aware of both these issues. For #1 it seems like they don't care. For #2 it seems like it is a result of legacy infrastructure.
• cfiggers 4y ago
  Speaking as a pure hobbyist with no formal background in programming or computer science, I've learned a ton playing around with free Heroku dynos. That "holy shit, it worked" feeling is a hell of a drug. My proudest achievement so far is a dumb-as-rocks little Clojure program that runs on a schedule in a free Heroku dyno. It sends alerts to a Slack channel when there's updates to a Trello board we use at work. All it does is ping Trello's API, check for changes in the new state against a Postgres Heroku add-on that stores the last seen state, and then send formatted messages based on the diff to a Slack channel for me and the few coworkers of mine who pay attention to it. It starts up hourly in a Heroku free dyno, runs for six or seven seconds (JVM lol) and then goes back to sleep. But I'm super proud of it because it's actually useful and I made it myself instead of relying on Zapier or IFTTT or something like that. It sparks joy for me every time I see that it ran correctly. Now I'll have to find somewhere else to host the little thing, I reckon.
  • solidsnack9000 4y ago
    Well, it's worth asking, how long something like this could remain free. Even that six or seven seconds costs somebody something.
    • TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
      Salesforce reported an almost $20B profit last year. They can afford it to buy developer goodwill.
      • markmark 4y ago
        Maybe all that profit shows that they don't need to buy developer goodwill?
    • Ancapistani 4y ago
      Its costs something, yes - but the fact that effectively the entire professional development community is well aware of Heroku's offerings, have had good experiences with them, and most have direct knowledge of how it all works is also worth something. I'd wager that's worth significantly more than the few seconds of compute most of us have gotten in exchange.
• brundolf 4y ago
  > discontinue free product plans > If you want a Heroku trial, please contact your account executive Uhh. What I never ever would have given Heroku a try if it hadn't been a free place to spin up toy projects. I definitely did not have an "account executive". There's some vague language in here about people abusing the free plans for malicious purposes, but other, much smaller providers don't seem to have that problem. It sounds to me like they've just decided to abdicate the low-end market and go full enterprise, and are trying to hand-wave a justification. RIP Heroku
  • PebblesRox 4y ago
    Right, and stopping fraud doesn't mean you can't grandfather in a bunch of established free plans that don't have any problematic usage patterns.
• decidertm 4y ago
  The public roadmap is a good idea but highlights how stale the product has become. https://github.com/heroku/roadmap/issues https://github.com/heroku/roadmap/issues Only now researching adding Cloud Native Build Packs and HTTP2. This will reaffirm for many the sense that Heroku is being dismantled from within. Feature sunsetting and removal of a free on-ramp doesn't help. If you're looking for a production alternative to Heroku checkout Northflank. https://northflank.com https://northflank.com https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/migrate-from-heroku https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/migrate-from-hero... https://northflank.com/heroku-pricing-comparison-and-reduction https://northflank.com/heroku-pricing-comparison-and-reducti... Comprehensive support for stateful, ephemeral and scheduled workloads. With a generous free developer tier including build, runtime, databases and cron jobs. Always happy to help teams migrate from Heroku. (I'm a Northflank engineer + co-founder)
  • hazzamanic 4y ago
    Is the free plan comparable to heroku? So I could get a free Dyno (equivalent) with postgres dB on Northflank? And you can't scale back down to free once you go paid?
    • decidertm 4y ago
      Yes you can create a service and a postgres db in Northflank's free tier. Once upgraded there isn't a downgrade, nothing stopping you making another free project however!
  • s_severus 4y ago
    I'd like to +1 for Northflank. I've been using it for a few months for smaller projects and experiments, and the dashboard and overall experience has been great. Free tier is good enough to run small apps, and pricing is very competitive. Also got a lot of rapid email support from the Northflank staff when I ran into issues.
  • fomine3 4y ago
    Where can I check what regions are available?
• TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  I keep expecting a droll announcement like this from GitHub, since the Microsoft acquisition. Hopefully, Heroku's cautionary tale will keep them in check.
• Croaky 4y ago
  I've been writing notes on Heroku alternatives (mostly Fly, Railway, Render) at https://croaky-webstack.deno.dev/ https://croaky-webstack.deno.dev/ Maybe something useful in there for others.
• ravivyas 4y ago
  Alternatives - https://Railway.app https://Railway.app - https://fly.io https://fly.io - https://render.com/ https://render.com/ - https://northflank.com/ https://northflank.com/
  • rcarmo 4y ago
    https://github.com/piku/piku https://github.com/piku/piku if you’re self-hosting.
    • throwaway_4ever 4y ago
      It's a little annoying to do it each time, but please always put a disclaimer you're the founder / project-creator when recommending it.
  • stepri 4y ago
    Open source alternative https://dokku.com https://dokku.com
  • grigduta 4y ago
    + https://www.bunnyshell.com/ https://www.bunnyshell.com/
• mtmail 4y ago
  The page requires to login. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/zVx9Ss7 https://imgur.com/a/zVx9Ss7
  • tech234a 4y ago
    It doesn't require a login when accessed using a private browsing window or a browser profile that hasn't been logged into Heroku before.
    • chitowneats 4y ago
      I wonder what purpose this particular dark pattern serves? Edit: Perhaps accounts that authenticate on this page, and that are also taking advantage of free tiers, are being segmented for upsell. It is at least an indicator they are interested enough to read this news.
      • aendruk 4y ago
        I’ve noticed the AWS Forums does this too. In practice it just means I avoid using it.
      • nightpool 4y ago
        Could just be a caching thing? I know most `help.heroku.com` pages are customer-only (as opposed to their public-facing docs at devcenter.heroku.com). Maybe they have a very rare "publicly available" option that doesn't see a lot of testing
• cultofmetatron 4y ago
  fly.io is better anyway. Its a real shame how far salesforce dropped the ball on heroku
  • specialp 4y ago
    Yes Heroku was so far ahead of its time, and they could have been a leader in this field. They didn't even tie it in very well with Salesforce CRM as well which would have gained them cloud business. Free tier is probably the only thing that has kept them relevant. With this move, all I see is Heroku conceding defeat that they have not caught up, and they just want to milk existing larger customers for money.
  • ThePadawan 4y ago
    > Its a real shame how far salesforce dropped the ball on heroku I mean, was there any sign to the opposite? Reading the sentence "Salesforce acquires Heroku" basically reads to me as "Giant megacorp buys trendy internet-y company so their name appears in newspapers positively and they have a department where they can put their employees that are too smart for their current job and would otherwise quit".
    • anm89 4y ago
      A shame but not a surprise. Salesforce will be percieved like IBM or Oracle in 10 or 15 years. I already see them that way but it seems like many don't
  • adrr 4y ago
    When companies are acquired by salesforce, do they ever get become better in terms of features, reliability etc? There are more example than just Heroku like Exact Target.
• riskycodes 4y ago
  We pay Heroku thousands of dollars a month for our Staging and Production environments, and one of the reasons we chose them is that we can spin up a toy widget or proof of concept in seconds for free: we probably do a few of those a day, play around with them for a few days or weeks, and then kill them. Now that these toys aren't free, I would guess likely to move them to AWS or GCP (since they're likely to be cheaper), and at that point we might as well migrate the rest of our stuff as well. It's not just goodwill that Heroku generated from this, it's actual revenue.
  • Varqu 4y ago
    As a CTO of a company which has a very similar situation - I can fully agree on that. We already started looking into a possible migration to another cloud provider. The biggest decision point would be a similar developer experience as with git push heroku master.
    • matus_congrady 4y ago
      Would you mind elaborating on what does the "similar developer experience as with git push heroku master" mean for you? I'm a founder at https://stacktape.com https://stacktape.com, and we're trying to provide full power of AWS with a developer-friendly experience, similar to Heroku or serverless framework. Even after doing a ton of research, I'm still not 100% sure which of the Heroku's features are the killer features that the competing PaaS platforms must replicate in order to have the "Heroku-like" experience.
      • Varqu 4y ago
        Sure, what I would expect when deploying a new service / application: 1. Create a new app in the dashboard or command line (in Heroku it's basically a single step: choosing app name and region) 2. git push from my repository (it's a NodeJS app with React frontend) 3. The app builds automatically and gets deployed to prod
      • gregsadetsky 4y ago
        I'm a long time user of Heroku, have built on top of it as a developer, CTO, etc. My gut feeling from reading your homepage is that you're automating a lot of AWS service deployments on my behalf, but not "obfuscating" it that much from me either. Your pricing talks about "Resources" which I assume are either AWS services or instances of those services. The free plan says that a REST api needs 40 resources which seems... like a lot? Is 40 good? bad? :-) Heroku specifically allows you to think of your app == 1 dyno (depending on how much you scale it obviously), not 40 services. I also note that the $290/month team plan talks about unlimited resources but doesn't specify their size/capacity. Heroku has sort of t-shirt sized tiers for dynos (and addons as well, like Postgres). What size of resources are you deploying on my behalf? I do see the value of what you're doing, I'm just not getting a "as easy as Heroku" feeling. It seems potentially more powerful, but also raw-er i.e. this is automated AWS (that I might need to care for / understand), not... "git push heroku master" :-)
• ydnaclementine 4y ago
  No hate toward heroku whatsoever, but have a feeling this decision will get reversed in 5 days
• paulcarroty 4y ago
  Good riddance! Should say: Heroku definitely busted my interest in web dev and "git-push-deploy" magic. Just develop a simple app, put it on Heroku and it's alive! That was so cool in good old days! Thanks for the memories.
• sgmoore 4y ago
  There are 66K thousand forks of https://github.com/nightscout/cgm-remote-monitor https://github.com/nightscout/cgm-remote-monitor and I suspect the vast majority are using the free heroku version, so I would guess there are going to be quite a few unhappy diabetics!
  • Exuma 4y ago
    Oohhh wow
• cdubzzz 4y ago
  Well shit. After the Heroku Dashboard issues I moved my OSS project demo instances and PR reviews process to Fly.io, then Render.com, then Railway, then back to Heroku because it was the only one that had a truly free and well integrated process. Sigh.
  • anurag 4y ago
    What would make the process more integrated on Render?
    • cdubzzz 4y ago
      I should have taken more notes on this... I think my primary issue with Render.com was the shared database for PR previews. The way I am setup on Heroku is I run a demo instance that resets hourly and build PR reviews from the Heroku Dashboard when necessary. All with no cost. The shared database makes the PR reviews effectively useless because of the need for the ongoing demo database. I was also turned off by the default service plan being a non-free one. I got a surprise bill in my first month of testing this because I had not specified the free plan in the service configurations. Also one of the weirdly nice things from Heroku was the ability to run cron jobs for free. Lacking that I had to create a GitHub Action to handle resetting the demo data every few hours. Just an additional pain.
      • anurag 4y ago
        All valid points. I'm not sure this is what you're looking for, but we have Preview Environments[1] where every PR can have its own database. Happy to chat more over email (in profile). [1] https://render.com/docs/preview-environments https://render.com/docs/preview-environments
• pks016 4y ago
  Sad. I'm not from computer science background. I have a few small projects on heroku. Guess I will have to somewhere else.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• coding123 4y ago
  Does Heroku have k8s? I'm still looking for some vendor that can do k8s single node for $5/mo.
  • lkki 4y ago
    civo.com
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• jonplackett 4y ago
  Getting rid of free tier is super short sighted. I always start a project on a free / hobby tier. I’ll have a few going and they’ll be using basically zero resources because they have no visitors except testers and alpha / beta users. When a project is ready - click - I switch to paid and start paying. Probably also add the cloudfront add-on. Maybe a faster database etc If I have to go build the beta version somewhere else (Vercel most likely) I’m not going to switch back to Heroku to host the paid version. I’ve been dealt liking Vercel lately so this is a good excuse to move everting (free and paid) over there.
  • pythonaut_16 4y ago
    Yep, this reads like they want Heroku to quietly die off but don't want to make a hard deprecation announcement.
• The_John 4y ago
  And I just finished migrating my portfolio database from MongoDB Atlas to Heroku pg
• tonyfader 4y ago
  that's a damn shame, just as I was starting to investigate using it more frequently as well...
• major505 4y ago
  And today is the day I will no longer use heroku. There's goes their free tier.
• gavin_gee 4y ago
  all appears like the classic playbook of "Acquisition by a big company who predominantly has an enterprise sales GTM which then kills the self serve channel as they cannot evaluate the value it brings". in a few years said company goes, "why have we lost our acquisition funnel and aren't relevant to the developer community and why is X new service taking share from us?"
• ev0xmusic 4y ago
  Let's go all on Render, Qovery, Flyway, Vercel, Netlify... So many very platforms are waiting for you :D
• driverdan 4y ago
  We're a large Heroku user currently spending $10-20k/month. This change may lead us to switching to another platform. We host a lot of individual apps, many that only need free tier DBs and Redis. This change will roughly double the cost of a basic app on pro dynos + DB + redis, from $25/m to $49/m, with no additional benefit. Heroku is already very expensive. $25/m for 512MB RAM is laughable. At $49/m we could get a decent bare metal server for each of our apps. If this change included a reduction in pricing to better match alternatives it would be fine. If they only eliminated the free tier for dynos but kept free tiers of add-ons that would be fine. But as is this change will significantly increase the cost for anyone using some free resources.
  • cfiggers 4y ago
    Wow, I didn't think about paying customers who supplement their pricey apps with free ones for lower-volume or less-critical functions. This change makes Heroku objectively worse even for shops that are already paying top dollar. Thanks for writing.
  • gkoberger 4y ago
    +1, same for us. We spent tens of thousands of dollars a month on Heroku, and still get nickel and dimed for free repos. Including my own personal side projects. I like being in one ecosystem, and rather than just move free repos somewhere else, we're going to just move everything.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
  • jensneuse 4y ago
    If you're looking for a platform where you can run small experiments on free tier backends, we'd love to have you on our platform. We're looking to provide Serverless backends including SQLite-based storage for free: https://wundergraph.com/cloud-early-access https://wundergraph.com/cloud-early-access
    • driverdan 4y ago
• danjac 4y ago
  Chapter 11?
  • krallja 4y ago
    …you think Salesforce is going into bankruptcy because Heroku is getting rid of its one good on-ramp? Slack _alone_ is enough to keep Salesforce profitable for decades to come.
    • riekus 4y ago
      Salesforce is having a hiring stop and doing all sorts of weird stuff such as targeting smb with 'easy salesforce' self service. This feels like a company that is trying to lift numbers somehow short term.
  • fomine3 4y ago
    lol, this is a response for this a bit obfuscated first announce https://blog.heroku.com/next-chapter https://blog.heroku.com/next-chapter
• pyb 4y ago
  Not sure how Heroku is hoping to attract new customers without a free tier ? Do they think their reputation will suffice?
  • riekus 4y ago
    Salesforce reputation? Have you worked with their ecosystem? Their pardot marketing platform van only use date fields in YYYYMMDD, no way to convert this to a European format. And i can drum up like a 100 of these insane things we have to work with on a daily basis. I work in the Salesforce ecosystem, and love my job but funny enough I fucking hate Salesforce in so many ways.
    • Mandatum 4y ago
      yyyyMMdd is international? Or do you mean MMddYYYY?
      • riekus 4y ago
        Maybe it is international but no European interpret dates like that and it is really confusing. This also doesn't happen in the SF platform, there they convert dates like it should.
• bluedino 4y ago
  I can't remember what book it was that was I reading, working through some language/framework of the month. They had you register an account on GitHub, and then on Heroku. You'd push the chapter's exercise up there, deploy it, and then never look at it again. I always wondered how many millions of repos/apps were out there because of stuff like that.
  • therockspush 4y ago
    Guilty, when I was learning django I probably orphaned like 20 or 30 myself.
  • kenforthewin 4y ago
    Free apps will shut down after periods of no traffic, so these kinds of projects aren't costing compute, but i suppose there's some overhead in storage.
    • itake 4y ago
      There is some compute cost with supporting infra migrations for them.
    • recursv_thnkng 4y ago
      Not sure how sophisticated their traffic monitoring has become but to avoid this it used to be as simple as having the dyno ping itself. Doesn't avoid the hard cap on hourly compute though.
      • jrochkind1 4y ago
        Do you think people working on tutorials that have them deploy a chapter's exercise to heroku, to never look at it again, are setting up things to have the dyno ping itself?
• arihant 4y ago
  They mention abuse as one of the reasons to kill all 3 free products. Wouldn't just turning off free dynos, and making $7 as the new $0, have solved that? Why kill all three and take the minimum to $31 and make sure next generation will see you as rackspace? It appears the decision is taken by people who don't really understand the product beyond what they see in Excel.
• arberx 4y ago
  Since the Salesforce acquisition the life has been sucked out of Heroku and the product has suffered. Sad day for the service.
  • linuxhansl 4y ago
    Heroku never made any money before the acquisition. Don't get me wrong, Heroku is (was?) great, but in the end at some point you have to stop losing money.
• The_John 4y ago
  And I just finished migrating my portfolio database from MongoDB Atlas to Heroku pg
  • sdf4j 4y ago
    And still you are in a better place now
• moe 4y ago
  Friends don't let friends buy Salesforce (or Oracle) has been common sense in engineering circles for at least a decade. It seems founders should adopt a similar stance: Friends don't let friends get bought by Salesforce. I wonder if James et al regret having fed their baby to the devil. Surely a better buyer could have been found, one that doesn't destroy everything they touch. But no blame here. They had their well-deserved payday and we shall remain grateful for all the good patterns, ideas and years of solid service they contributed to our craft. R.I.P. Heroku!
• pdntspa 4y ago
  Welp, back to cheapo DO droplets for my personal site I guess
• highwaylights 4y ago
  This sounds very much like Salesforce wants to shutter Heroku, but draw out whatever blood might be left in the stone first. Without a free tier you're essentially drawing a line under your uptake and saying no to new customers. That means providing existing infrastructure to larger customers who are going to feel increasingly squeezed by this. On one hand, I get that they want to get some value out of it before shutting it down, but I have such fond memories of the old Heroku from back in the early cloud days that it still makes me a bit sad - even if it's a very different company today.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    You never ever shutter services in the Enterprise world if you can avoid it. So you turn off the free ones, eventually turn off the "spin up for new customers" feature, and support the existing as long as you think you need to. The whole point of Enterprise is to keep it running forever so they keep paying without having to think about it.
• mark_l_watson 4y ago
  I think they will support the $7/month hobby demos, right? Google and Oracle can afford to provide a free micro VMS, smaller companies like Heroku can not. Google and Oracle probably get good value for letting people have free, never expires, micro VMSs.
  • icodestuff 4y ago
    That was sarcastic, right? Heroku is owned by Salesforce. Pretty sure they can afford just about anything Oracle can.
    • mark_l_watson 4y ago
      Not sarcastic, I forgot. I am not sure I will ever use them again but I used to find their $7/month plan useful.
• brad0 4y ago
  TBH I'm surprised that it took this long to move to this! Back when Heroku first arrived, PaaS was a new idea. It was available ~2009, well before services like AWS Lambda existed. This was such a paradigm shift that no one knew what to think of it. It takes time to build trust around such a big shift. The best way to do this is to offer to try it for free. Hence, the Free Tier. People tried it, and were blown away by how easy it was to build services. It was so much easier than managing hosts directly. Fast forward to today. Engineers are generally comfortable with higher-level services. They know what to expect. So the free tier is used as as part of the funnel to onboard new customers. Back in 2010, that funnel had a /lot/ of customers going in! Here in 2022, that funnel may be basically zero. On top of that, the free tier costs heroku to run. Cutting off the free tier is in Heroku's best interest. It saves them money and allows them to focus on their current customers. But it does mean that there's no growth in the product any more, unless they offer something new.
  • diminish 4y ago
    cutting free plans signals the fading growth moment for an old star(tup).
    • anm89 4y ago
      And they made a big press release today on how they are "focusing on the future".
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • joshstrange 4y ago
    > Back in 2010, that funnel had a /lot/ of customers going in! Here in 2022, that funnel may be basically zero. That's not because 12 years passed, it's because Heroku didn't innovate or even keep abreast of the competition in that timeframe. > Cutting off the free tier is in Heroku's best interest. It saves them money and allows them to focus on their current customers. It cuts off the only onramp they had for entry developers or developers who can't afford to pay their ridiculous prices (I mean come on, $25/mo for 512MB of ram? Is this a joke? It was expensive but understandable when they launched and has only gotten worse while the product has not improved which competitors have blazed past them). > But it does mean that there's no growth in the product any more, unless they offer something new. I won't hold my breath, it seems clear they are life support at this point.
• brundolf 4y ago
  Why don't other (smaller!) providers with free tiers, like render.com, have a problem with "fraud and abuse"?
  • tpetry 4y ago
    They all have the problem, but they invest the time and knowledge to find more and more of them. They know that a free tier is vital for getting developers on their platform. Heroku is already a big name. They are bought by salesforce. They just don‘t care anymore.
• gkoberger 4y ago
  We pay Heroku many, many tens of thousands of dollars a year. And I still use free dynos, both personally and at work. For example, throwing up a quick app for testing (where I'm happy with dynos that sleep or are limited per-repo). By pushing us off the Heroku ecosystem for some stuff, we might as well just move everything. The only reason we even use Heroku now is because I used it for free over a decade ago. I get why they made this decision, and I'm excited for Fly.io, Render, etc who can run the same playbook Heroku did 15 years ago. But also a bit sad, from a nostalgic standpoint. Many of us are here because of Heroku's free tier, and I'm very thankful for it.
  • copperx 4y ago
    Probably free plans have tons of overhead. If this results in drastically lower prices, I'm all for it.
    • distrill 4y ago
      it won't
    • toyg 4y ago
      It won't. It's a typical move from a business stuck in a death spiral, desperately searching for profits by blindly slashing expenses.
      • MuffinFlavored 4y ago
        Is Heroku stuck in a death spiral? Source needed?
        • the_sleaze9 4y ago
          All it would take is a quick google... Heroku stock price is down roughly %50 from less than a year ago. Death spiral? I don't know. But slashing costs is certainly not indicative of Heroku having a super awesome fun time.
• wutangisforever 4y ago
  I don't get why heroku would do this, it's killing any customer who would start off small and scale up. I mean how much money could they possibly be losing from hobby dynos etc...
  • tptacek 4y ago
    They're telling you why: having a free tier means allocating a lot of resources to fraud and abuse, which are rampant in hosting, especially now that you can convert hosting dollars almost directly to cash. It's a big problem, and I have every reason to believe they're being forthright about why they've made this decision.
    • tzs 4y ago
      OT: your HN profile says: > All comments Copyright © 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2018, 2023, 2031 I'm curious. If you were to continue that sequence would the continuation be: A. 2044, 2065, 2099, 2154, 2242 B. 2044, 2065, 2099, 2154, 2243 C. Something else?
      • tptacek 4y ago
        My HN test is an IQ test that I, myself, cannot pass.
        • pvg 4y ago
          The future ones (2023, 2031, ...) are primes in lunar arithmetic in base 4 written in base 4, of course. https://oeis.org/A171122 https://oeis.org/A171122
    • bombcar 4y ago
      You can still offer a "free tier for existing customers" and call it "development" or something. This lets people who are already known/paying to spin up test instances, without having to go through purchasing, which leads eventually to more paid usage.
• acejam 4y ago
  The fact that this guy routinely asks for you to send feedback to his personal LinkedIn page says it all.
• m3nu 4y ago
  For hosting simple open source apps there is also https://www.pikapods.com https://www.pikapods.com. Not free forever, but fairly cheap at around $1.5/month for the typical app. I'm a founder and we specifically don't focus on running custom apps, but a moderated selection that also gets updates and optimizations. Like an app store for open source web apps.
• anotherfounder 4y ago
  I hate the corporate speak of 'Next Chapter', 'Public Roadmap' - just be direct and confident enough to say upfront that you are removing the free tier, instead of hiding it in the blog post. Come on, Bob!
• outworlder 4y ago
  Another entry for https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
• miki123211 4y ago
  I wonder if crypto mining was one of the reasons why the had to shut the free tier down. Other platforms offering free computing resources, whether as a coding platform, as a CI/CD service, or in any other way, suffered from that kind of abuse. People working at both Sourcehut and Replit indicated that, and if these (relatively) small platforms had that kind of trouble, I can't imagine what the people at Heroku had to go through.
• joshstrange 4y ago
  IF we want to take them at face-value that this is because of fraud and abuse (a trust/respect they have not earned IMHO, or rather they lost many years ago) then this a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Otherwise it's some stupid MBA finding a way to save some money which will ultimately only speed up Heroku's demise. Either way the writing is on the wall. The Heroku that delighted us all is long dead and the product is on life support at this point to eek some more money from people who haven't already moved on to greener pastures. It's really say to be honest, Heroku felt like magic and was amazing for a number of years and then just stopped being relevant, coasted, and hemorrhaged talent. The downfall started before Salesforce IIRC but at this point it's clear the heart of Heroku is dead and gone. I'm sure the other PaaS that have innovated, moved with the times (fly.io/render/etc) are popping bottles today at this news.
  • shostack 4y ago
    I don't understand this sentiment sometimes. There may be fraud and abuse. There may also be a material cost to a company whose detailed financial situation I'm assuming you are not purvey to. Someone doesn't need to be "a stupid MBA" to have made this decision (in fact my guess would be it involved many cross functional and leadership perspectives given its nature). Also, this is quite possibly something necessary for the future continued health of the business and the jobs it supports. If so, I'd consider it anything but stupid.
    • joshstrange 4y ago
      Salesforce made 4.34B in gross profit in 2021, they aren't hurting for money and the "health of the business" seems perfectly fine. I'm sure someone got a raise for cutting this program, it will save the company some money in the short term, and that person will have left to screw up another company before the chickens come home to roost. It's a tale as old as time and something we've seen enough times to notice the signs.
      • ubertaco 4y ago
        This is Salesforce we're talking about, the company that pledged not to do any layoffs during the pandemic, then announced that they were laying off 1000 people literally the day after announcing what they called "the best quarter in company history." [0] Worst of all? Many of the people who worked at Salesforce found out they were laid off _by reading the news article_ (source: I worked at Salesforce at the time, and there was a _lot_ of commotion internally to try to track down which managers had the audacity to give the laid-off employees advance notice before the public announcement, and lots of internal all-hands-meeting outrage directed at people who dared to "break trust" by telling reporters that they had been laid off). [0] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/salesforce-announces-layoffs-quarterly-revenue-tops-billion/story?id=72650370 https://abcnews.go.com/Business/salesforce-announces-layoffs...
• badotnet 4y ago
  For those who are interested in a free PostgreSQL on Heroku, drop me a mail (adrien at stackhero dot io) and I'll send you an invitation for a new PostgreSQL add-on that is free :)
• m3nu 4y ago
  For hosting simple open source apps there is also https://www.pikapods.com https://www.pikapods.com. Not free forever, but fairly cheap at around $1.5/month for the typical app. I'm a founder and we specifically don't focus on running custom apps, but a moderated selection that also gets updates and optimizations. Like an app store for open source web apps.
• wilg 4y ago
  I always wished I could pay Heroku like $50/mo for a "side project" plan where it was easy to spin up small apps and databases. I don't need it to be free, I just need it to be kind of easy and painless to spin up a bunch of random side projects. Some kind of limit is fine.
  • xavdid 4y ago
    This is my problem as I'm evaluating competitors. I have a few tiny services that don't need constant uptime (the heroku sleep and wait-to-wake was perfectly fine). Most places charge per-service and it's not clear that I can have 8 services that mostly sleep (and use less total uptime than a single always-on service). I'm fine to pay a bit to keep these running, but $7 / service / month doesn't make sense for little toys (an actual business is a very different story)
• bilsbie 4y ago
  Wouldn’t a free tier be good advertising? Get people hooked and upgrade them?
• slg 4y ago
  Unlike most of their competitors, I don't think I have ever heard of someone migrating to Heroku. Seemingly the only people who are still using it are using it because they started with it, usually with their free product. I'm no expert or anything, but it seems like a bad idea to cut off that funnel of future customers by eliminating that free product.
  • xtracto 4y ago
    I never 'got' what heroku was all about , but i have been working with linode, aws and similar for more than 10 years. I find it pretty easy to spin something up in aws Otoh i know of a medium company (500 employees) that started in heroku and is moving to aws. Apparently they got to the top tier of the DB , and they've stumbled with several limitations by some lack of access .
    • gtirloni 4y ago
      Heroku is great for small teams but it's expensive. It also offered automation that wasn't easily available anywhere else 15 years ago. It's a different story in 2022.
  • pawelkomarnicki 4y ago
    I used to start my projects on Heroku because the first few iterations of the prototype can run on the free dynos, then hobby tier for the first production, better database when needed, and so on — slowly growing as it should be. Now I will either replace it by some DigitalOcean droplet or Fly.io or Railway.app or whatnot. Whichever makes most sense for the growth of the project. I am pretty sure some of my clients will stay on Heroku just because it's easier and they already pay for most services (so no free tier already) but it means NO NEW clients are coming to Heroku from me.
    • mterrel 4y ago
      If you're looking at alternatives, you might check out Adaptable.io. There's a free tier that includes the database.
• A7med 4y ago
  The free plan probably brought 90% of their customers, watch them bring it back after few months
• desireco42 4y ago
  This is an end of an era. Rails which kind of is reviving a little bit, it was a huge driver of Heroku success, they were amazing service for reasonable amount. I had paid services on them and it wasn't trivial but it was for Heroku so it was OK. I don't know, they will go back to free at some point but it will be too late.
• Atlas-Marbles 4y ago
  https://caprover.com https://caprover.com Is a great open-source alternative that seeks to offer Heroku-like functionality. You just need to host it on your VPS, which is far cheaper than paying for Heroku (From their docs: "Heroku charges 250USD/month for their 2gb instance, the same server is 5$ on Hetzner!").
• TheGoodBarn 4y ago
  One sad use-case is a few days ago I was able to one click deploy a dyno for an ESPN Fantasy Football discord bot that runs daily. I didn't have to configure a thing and was able to have this cool thing added to our discord. Now overnight it's just gone.
• j-rom 4y ago
  This is really disappointing. I've used Heroku for many years to build out small proof-of-concept apps. It was one of the first platforms that I used to make my small projects public. Sad to see the free tier go.
• chuckgreenman 4y ago
  Heroku's final chapter was being acquired, we are now entering the afterword. It was revolutionary when it was introduced and for a long while after that - but their mistake was getting sold to Salesforce, they can't even make a competent CRM, of course they can't innovate a developer experience platform.
• wikitopian 4y ago
  You are ungrateful for the free candy and want to complain about getting locked in the van that you chose to get into. Entitled millennials.
• MoroCode 4y ago
  This seems like a pretty bad idea and one thats going to choke Heroku's growth. The only realistic reason one would actually build on Heroku is that they started with the free tier and decided it would take too much time to switch to anything else. I get the reasoning behind wanting to reduce the amount of time the engineering team spends trying to prevent abuse of the free tier but there are much better strategies to go about it then remove it all together. Sounds like Salesforce basically wants to milk Heroku and squeeze as much profit out of it before its completely dead
• jannikarndt 4y ago
  I visited their pricing page many times, thinking "this is awesome, I SHOULD pay something for it". But the difference between the free dyno and free postgres to the 16$/month-version is so minuscule that it never made sense. I think you need a lower threshold to upsell from "free".
• dang 4y ago
  We've changed the url from https://blog.heroku.com/next-chapter https://blog.heroku.com/next-chapter to one that has more specific information and isn't a CPR (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=corporate%20press%20release%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Exuma 4y ago
  I grow tired of watching my favorite services self destruct. I have yet to see even a single service that lasts without destroying itself by either selling out or something similar.
• adam_gyroscope 4y ago
  For folks looking for a free Postgres offering, check out bit.io (I'm the founder/CEO) - we're super easy to use. And if you migrate from heroku and mention HN we'll get you a $5 credit if you go pro.
• kasia66 4y ago
  Check out https://www.cloud66.com/ https://www.cloud66.com/ you can run your applications on all major cloud providers including bare metal + native support for MySQL, Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch, MemcachD + handy features to deploy and manage your apps and team.
• cdubzzz 4y ago
  > Open source programs: If you are a maintainer on an open-source project, and would like to request Heroku support for your project, contact the Salesforce Open Source Program office at ospo-heroku-credits@salesforce.com. Both the text version of this email (ospo-heroku-credits@salesforce.com) and the mailto it actually links (ospo@salesforce.com) appear to be invalid. I tried both and got: > We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact ($GROUP) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group.
  • jrochkind1 4y ago
    classy! I was just about to write an email too, I guess I won't... yet?
    • cdubzzz 4y ago
      Yeah. I did some Internet sleuthing and found a potential contact for the Salesforce Open Source Program Office and reached out. We'll see if they get back.
      • jrochkind1 4y ago
        So, after contacting Bob Wise via Linked In (as he graciously invited readers of his blog post to do!), I constructed a concise but hopefully persuasive email about why they might want to sponsor me, to eventually successfully get this form response... > Thank you for reaching out to ospo-heroku-credits@salesforce.com in reference to requesting Heroku Credits for qualified and selected Open Source Programs. > We are in the process of finalizing the selection criteria and will contact you when we are ready to start the process; we anticipate this as no later than Dreamforce. > In the meantime, should you have any questions or feedback, please do not hesitate to contact us via the above email address. ["above email address" not sure what it means, the email was sent from a personal email address, which i won't share on HN] So... not yet, in fact! I had to look up what/when is "Dreamforce", looks like Sep 20-22.
        • 4y ago
• shadowgovt 4y ago
  I just got a JavaScript game working on a heroku instance recently, and it looks like I'll be hunting down another hosting option. Sucks, but it happens sometimes.
• thebiglebrewski 4y ago
  Will there be any way to easily download or back up existing apps and their data stores? Something like Google Take Out. Otherwise I'm going to have a lot of apps to go through and see if there's anything important in before this date...
• peterallport 4y ago
  Sad Day. Heroku has had security incidents, serious outages, and contrary to rest of industry eliminated any free/growth tiers w/o serious platform improvements. Was a long term paying customer. Bye bye https://twitter.com/peteallport/status/1562874753429303298 https://twitter.com/peteallport/status/1562874753429303298
• peterallport 4y ago
  Sad day. Heroku has had security incidents, serious outages, and contrary to rest of industry eliminated any free/growth tiers w/o serious platform improvements. Was a long term paying customer. Bye bye https://twitter.com/peteallport/status/1562874753429303298 https://twitter.com/peteallport/status/1562874753429303298
• niklasmerz 4y ago
  First Netlify and now Heroku. I need to migrate some things which is very sad.
  • alexflashdrive 4y ago
    We're here to help: https://qoddi.com https://qoddi.com
• rubyist5eva 4y ago
  This is the end of an era - no reason to really use Heroku anymore. One of the best things about it was being able to "grow into" the pricing. Looks like I'm looking at fly.io now.
• TillE 4y ago
  I want to run a very low-traffic Discord bot, and I was about to use Heroku's free plan for that. But at a minimum for $7/month for just the dyno, I'm far better off renting a full VPS instead. It's frustrating that I haven't found many good options for hosting a program that's constantly running but using few resources. I suppose it's not very profitable to do that kind of thing for around $5/month.
• pgm8705 4y ago
  I imagine this will be an unpopular opinion here due to the VPS provider, but if anyone is looking for a completely free way to spin up hobby apps, Dokku running on Oracle's very generous free tier is tough to beat. 24GB RAM and 4 VCPUs (granted, ARM Ampere processor) is enough to spin up a ton of small hobby apps and even good enough to run a few production apps at decent scale.
• iLoveOncall 4y ago
  This feels like a company committing suicide. I've never used Heroku but the only reason I've ever heard about it is because of free apps being hosted there. They just became another cloud provider in a domain that already has a lot.
• xena 4y ago
  Ex-herokai here. This post made me have feelings. I wrote them up on my blog: https://xeiaso.net/blog/rip-heroku https://xeiaso.net/blog/rip-heroku
• riffic 4y ago
  fine by me - too many freeloaders ruining things for everyone else.
• alexflashdrive 4y ago
  Qoddi.com launched a couple of years ago as a credible Heroku alternative. Our free tier is here to stay and our apps never sleeps! Contact us if you need help to migrate from Heroku
• matthewfcarlson 4y ago
  I deleted my heroku account. Like many others, I’m sad to see the end of an era.
• dwheeler 4y ago
  A pricing increase for at least some paying customers, really. I use Heroku (and pay for it), but I use free tiers for testing pre-production, and that's an extra fee even for someone willing to pay.
• hugocbp 4y ago
  As many have already pointed out, I was one of those that started my developer carrer by using Rails + Heroku from tutorials and bootcamp. To this day, I still haven't found a solution that works as easily as that Rails + Heroku duo did in that time. I still remember when I got my first real paying customer and in about 4 days had a "first version" of their webapp up and heard all the praise they gave. And it was literally just a initial Rails app with login with Devise, a couple of resources of CRUD and a domain linked to Heroku. I still have some apps there from my portfolio in the free tier. Probably time to move them somewhere else, but I, as many, was very, very sad to hear that news. Heroku is past is heyday but I'll never forget my excitement when I got my first real customer app deployed, with database and everything, within hours, with no more than a few weeks of starting to learn programming under my belt. It's not like they are shutting down right now, but it sure feels like that. Thank you for the free tier for all these years, Heroku!
• gosukiwi 4y ago
  Guess I'll be moving my hobby projects to render!
• glenngillen 4y ago
  I posted this previously, but it seems apt to repost given this significant change: I've not found the time to write up the entirety of my experience unfortunately, but I did move a bunch of stuff off Heroku over the past couple of years and directly onto AWS. It was a very piecemeal approach which had the double benefit of being low/no impact to end users while also letting me do it at my leisure. My general approach was: * Import my current Heroku config into Terraform resources so I can co-ordinate changes across multiple platforms as a single atomic change. * Embrace a strangler pattern (https://www.redhat.com/architect/pros-and-cons-strangler-architecture-pattern https://www.redhat.com/architect/pros-and-cons-strangler-arc...). I used Cloudfront, but you could put any CDN in front. * My databases + workers were a large part of my Heroku bill, and I had a very spikey usage profile (potentially days with near zero usage, with brief peaks), so I used it as an opportunity to refactor towards a serverless infrastructure (https://glenngillen.com/safely_migrating_from_heroku_aws_serverless/ https://glenngillen.com/safely_migrating_from_heroku_aws_ser...). This was entirely superfluous to the migration though. If I'd not taken that approach the alternate would have been to provision and RDS Postgres instance, add the required IAM profiles to my Heroku app. Work out how/when to schedule a window to cutover to RDS being the primary DB. Update the DATABASE_URL accordingly. Again, doing all of this via Terraform to make it happen. But doing it in small incremental steps where possible (i.e., adding the IAM profiles to the app first). Once cut-over, take a final snapshot of the Heroku Postgres database and then shut it down. * Updating the code on my workers to be idempotent. * Make sure config vars are imported to Terraform and are sync'd to the various places they need to be (probably just the Heroku app for now). * Have the workers run inside containers on AWS (doing them just one worker at a time), exposing the required config vars for them to work. Let the Heroku + AWS workers both process the work for a period of time, hence the need for being idempotent. Once I'm confident the AWS ones work as intended, shut down the Heroku workers. * Picking off individual paths/API endpoints to serve from AWS. In my case I also migrated all of this to API gateway + lambda. An ALB with EC2/ECS would have also been an alternative. Add a new path based route to your CDN (e.g., /v2/the-existing-path) and have it's origin point to your non-Heroku service. Test it. Once it works, update the existing path that users are using to now go to the new origin. It means if you discover some issue you can quickly update the routing to have Heroku resume serving that route. Once you're confident, rinse and repeat the next path. Continue through until all traffic is ultimately served by the new host. * If there's nothing left then scale down the remaining processes on Heroku. I've gone an all-in AWS approach, but the same general principle could apply to whatever platform you want to run on. I think the biggest thing people I've spoken to in the past about this overlook is that you don't have to make some big wholesale switch. There's ways to derisk it and take an incremental approach to migrating. Which also drastically reduces the cost of making the wrong decision. If you can run just one route through AWS/Fly/DigitialOcean/whatever then you can get a sense for whether it will _actually_ work for your needs, and quickly roll back if you change your mind.
• antonio-ramadas 4y ago
  As an occasional hobbyist user of Heroku’s free tier, what other providers do you recommend? Fly.io? A bit more context if it matters, I use it very lightly, and I’m interested on ease of use and ability to have a DB attached to it (I was using PostgreSQL, but any SQL DB would do it).
• balentio 4y ago
  Headline: Formerly free account in tech that got many adopters on the free platform isn't going to have a free account option anymore. "Users are "Tied into" the solution now, so we can afford to piss them off," says CEO. "Also, we'd like to pick their pocket now that we got them hooked on our crack rock."
• leemcalilly 4y ago
  Good news, Render is WAY better.
• ZacharyPitts 4y ago
  Urgh. I have an open source hobby endpoint hosted for free on heroku for many years. Used by a bunch of websites / discord bots / desktop applications as a REST backend. Annoying to have to open a case just to continue operating.
• Exuma 4y ago
  Can anyone answer how fly.io compares to render.com?
• japhyr 4y ago
  Can anyone clarify what the minimum cost of say, a demo Django project would be now? I come up with $16/month, using a $7 dyno and a $9 postgres instance. Is that accurate? Also, if you're testing the deployment process, what's the minimum charge? Say I push a project, test it to see that the deployment worked, and then destroy the project in less than three minutes. Will I be charged for three minutes of resources, or is there some hourly/daily/monthly minimum? I can't find that kind of info anywhere.
  • gday2020 4y ago
    > Can anyone clarify what the minimum cost of say, a demo Django project would be now? I come up with $16/month, using a $7 dyno and a $9 postgres instance. Is that accurate? Yeah, that's accurate. If you need a worker (like celery), then that's another $7, as that's an extra dyno. If you need redis, then that will be another $15. > Also, if you're testing the deployment process, what's the minimum charge? Say I push a project, test it to see that the deployment worked, and then destroy the project in less than three minutes. Will I be charged for three minutes of resources, or is there some hourly/daily/monthly minimum? I can't find that kind of info anywhere. They charge you per minute (or per second?) iirc.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bvanvugt 4y ago
  Our community recently pulled together a guide for comparing different free hosting providers. https://blog.battlesnake.com/deploying-web-servers-for-free-in-2022/ https://blog.battlesnake.com/deploying-web-servers-for-free-... It's really a shame, given how much we've relied on Heroku free tiers to lower barriers fr all.
  • gregsadetsky 4y ago
    Great guide, thanks! You might want to add a note regarding Railway's free plan: "Render’s free database plan allows you to run a PostgreSQL database that automatically expires 90 days after creation" [0] So it's more a trial than a free plan like Heroku's was (e.g., free forever under 10k rows) [0] https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases
• fullofdev 4y ago
  For anyone looking for heroku alternative with free offer (not all free, some have free offer) Alternative for Heroku Runtime (server) https://finddev.tools/alternative-to/heroku-runtime https://finddev.tools/alternative-to/heroku-runtime Alternative for Heroku Postgres (database) https://finddev.tools/alternative-to/heroku-postgres https://finddev.tools/alternative-to/heroku-postgres Or here in general with "what's free" information: https://freestuff.dev/alternative/heroku/ https://freestuff.dev/alternative/heroku/ Hope it helps for someone who wants to start side project!
• ab-dm 4y ago
  I’m finding it interesting that THIS is the reason that people are now determined to move, rather than the constant outages/issues they’ve had over the last 6 months. Nothing about this is remotely surprising. Over the last 12 months their reliability has nose dived and their support has become borderline useless. We’re planning on migrating to Fargate in the next 6 months. I am VERY much looking forward to shutting our Heroku account down.
  • drusepth 4y ago
    The outages have made me want to move, but this announcement puts it on a faster timeline. This probably won't affect most of my paid apps (we'll see how free staging and review apps in paid pipelines fare), but it does tell me they don't care about proper notice and make me worry I'll find myself trapped into having to migrate on their schedule versus when I have time, sooner or later.
• drusepth 4y ago
  This seems like really, really short notice. I have probably a hundred or two apps that I'll need to migrate off before I even get to my paid apps (which I'll also be migrating off after). I really appreciate all the alternatives people have mentioned in the thread so far. Setting up a giant company cloud on AWS sounds fun, but with this little notice I'll probably just check out Fly/Render to get all my OSS demos/PoCs/etc moved somewhere... And my guess is that wherever I decide to go for that will make that platform the path of least resistance to move my paid apps to, too.
• rdegges 4y ago
  Sad day, indeed. I remember meeting @craigkerstiens through Heroku -- I started using it back when they first released a beta Python buildpack. I also made friends with a ton of amazing people over the years through Heroku. It was a magical company with amazing engineers. Over the years I've written a lot about Heroku on my blog (https://www.rdegges.com/ https://www.rdegges.com/), and even wrote a book on Heroku many years ago (https://www.theherokuhackersguide.com/ https://www.theherokuhackersguide.com/), which really helped improve my technical writing chops, and got me into the public eye. RIP Heroku
  • craigkerstiens 4y ago
    You were an amazing user, customer, and still to this day friend. It still blew my mind when you first shared you were writing a book on Heroku.
• ovao 4y ago
  I've been running an extremely low-traffic, low-resource site on Heroku for the past few years. I use a paid hobby web dyno ($7/month) and a $9/month Postgres 'instance', but leverage the free Redis tier for use as a session store. Generally speaking, Heroku provides a pretty simple, seamless platform to build on. There are much more cost-effective options I could've used for the $16/month I'm throwing at Heroku, but it's provided me the sort of experience I'm after and runs the stack without a whole lot of fuss on my side. Heroku pretty much invented the git-push-to-deploy workflow and that makes for pretty seamless DX. With my personal GitHub account attached to my employer's organization though, and after Heroku's recent breach, the push-to-deploy magic's gone. I can't re-connect my GitHub account without also giving Heroku the keys to my employer's kingdom (is this intentional, Heroku?), and with no free Redis tier, I'm looking at a $31/month bill for what I could retool to run on a couple Lambdas and DynamoDB for less than a buck a month. As thorny as CodePipeline is, it'll get me back to the push-to-deploy workflow I was previously enjoying on Heroku. Or I can get over to Fly.io and pay...nothing? I'm no big fish for Heroku, and despite their numerous 'hobby' plans I realize I'm not their core demo, but it'd sure be nice to have a real explanation as to this move.
• elesbao 4y ago
  I thank heroku for all the innovation that changed the way we develop and expect developer experience to work and of course for the free tier stuff that I've used a lot. It is fair for them to remove it, specially under the current economic conditions and it would be unfair to complain. Thanks a lot heroku !
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  Vercel and Netlify to the rescueeee I use their free tiers and store all the static files on IPFS (pinned for free with web3.storage) and accessed over the cloudfront ipfs gateway which cached pretty well I used to pay Heroku for my hobby and not fully fleshed out ideas. But now I do everything they offered for free! (well. don't really have a free memcache and database solution, but I just stopped doing system designs that included those, and disqualified ideas that needed them)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• phillipcarter 4y ago
  Some feedback on communications, especially given the backlash: 1. "Why are we doing this?" should be the very first item. Explain it in clear terms. 2. The blog post that explains the "why" is rather scant on details, with the real "why" buried in text. Nuh-uh. Make it front end center and make it detailed. Developers all across the world have to deal with fraud and abuse and are sympathetic to how expensive it is. We get it. So lay it all out for us! Explain why, in detail, it's so cost-prohibitive that you have no choice but to shut down the free tier! Maybe we'll have more empathy and believe you when you say you really are doubling down on other offerings. Maybe you'll learn that you can actually keep the free tier, since some people in the community have suggestions you hadn't considered yet, and in a few months' time you'll get to thank them for their contributions towards improving your practices and keeping the free tier free forever. Who knows? But without a lot of details, nobody can be of help.
• asdojasdosadsa 4y ago
  One of my first touches to web development was to write a small web application and to deploy it Heroku. Seeing my app live on Heroku made a really lasting effect, and now several years later I am still using Heroku (paid) and I am very happy client. But - If Heroku didn't have a free tier then, I wouldn't probably have tried Heroku, maybe even knew what Heroku is From my (client, paid) perspective, this seems very weird move, although maybe needed to save in costs; but maybe an approach like GitLab where you deprecate unused projects would work better?
• jbirer 4y ago
  It's really funny to see third world freeloaders seethe in the comments about this. Heroku is a great service that deserves the money, and it's not your ticket out of poverty by freelancing online. The free tier being removed means less Ukrainian / Indian spammers and bitcoin mining attempts, which means more resources for the paying quality clients. Thanks Heroku!
  • creatonez 4y ago
    Why is it so important to you to identify the third-worldness of the freeloaders you're referring to? It's a bit unusual. Is identifying them as "freeloaders" not enough for the purpose of what you're saying? It's like... bringing recognition to the fact that some of them are trying to escape poverty via whatever means necessary, but then not actually following through with the moral implications of that.
  • Enlarged9135 4y ago
    shut up comzoomer
• franky123 4y ago
  It was a smart marketing move to get the people from university bringing heroku to the companies or start their own company with heroku, as they already know how to use it. Now other companies like mogenius come in place.
• mkl95 4y ago
  That sucks. I deployed my first production grade app with Heroku circa 2017.
• rsavage 4y ago
  Same boat as many others. We spend $5000 a month on Heroku. We run production apps and then over 150 review apps at once. We are using paid dynos but free tier redis and Postgres. With literally a couple entires in redis and a few hundred rows in Postgres. This is going to massively increase the bills for review apps - with 0 positives and no alternatives. The hacks, the downtimes, the communication, the support, lack of security features, no innovation. What exactly is heroku offering these days other than - it will cost you money to move? I can’t imagine any serious business moving to Heroku these days. You are pushing away everyone you have left.
  • pawelkomarnicki 4y ago
    If you are dealing with a lot of "empty databases" you can basically make something like a "core app" — attach cheapest paid redis and postgres to it, then copy the credentials between apps. I have done this before — had one "X-core" app and "x-whitelabel-1", "x-whitelabel-2", and so on, connected to the same database while each app used different database name.
• Enlarged9135 4y ago
  ok then I don't need it anymore
• w3abhishek 4y ago
  Railway.app can be a good alternative.
• pawelkomarnicki 4y ago
  I don't mind paying their fees for production resources (e.g. they ALREADY force that for the Team accounts where no free tier dynos are available) but now they effectively killed any kind of experimentation and pipelines — now EVERY single app will have to use the paid Postgres, paid Redis, and paid dynos and that can add up quickly (basically $29 per app, no matter if it's production, staging, or a review app...)
• protoc 4y ago
  This is a shame but VPS are not too expensive these days. Not sure how you can do the "wake up" feature so you can have many sleep applications though.
• z_malloc_ 4y ago
  When SF bought Heroku, it was something like, hey! We need to get on board with this cloud stuff. Our infrastructure using these pods of oracle + big iron no longer make good sense. So, as a multi billion dollar company what do they do. They don't pay for services, they don't build it from the ground up, they buy the hottest business on the market at the time. For the first few years it was somewhat hands off. Let things gel and start installing SF leaders into the upper ranks on the Heroku org. Then the endless strategic plans to integrate and transition both advancing SF existing stacks and extending Heroku stacks with SF specialty hooks. Heroku Connect, etc. The young elite engineers at Heroku had very little interest in build CRM product. So it wasn't necessarily full blown revolt, but rather total lack of enthusiasm and effort. Which led to some key firings in management, and more crony installation until the real heads of Heroku took the reigns and secretly put all future energies into SF integration to the extent that Heroku should ultimately become a product wing of SF much Einstein, <fill in the blank> Cloud..etc. At this point, upper management told Heroku staff not to worry. Nothing is getting cancelled and every manner of 'remain calm' language. Narrowly curbing a full blow revolt. The key facilitators of which being coaxed into supplying company wide admissions that they were wrong, and everything is fine, and hurray, I love Heroku and I love SF. All of them were then discreetly fired weeks later, some of which continued the ruse, probably under duress, that everything is great and this is just a move based on growing a career and not dissatisfaction. Over the next couple years, the typical corporate agenda played out of endless cost cutting, employee benefit slashing, and general freedom neutering. The talent by this point had drastically evaporated. And here we are today. No talent to extend and create new services. No ability to keep pace with other cloud offerings. Continued denial about the true reality of what is going on with the business. With multi million dollar customers more or less in the dark about the fact they are running on what is tantamount to abandonware. Enter the first waves of service sun setting seasoned with a nice dose of kool aid. You need to realize something else. Heroku was never unprofitable while SF owned them (possibly ever). It's just that the millions Heroku was generating was literally peanuts compared to the SF earnings. They needed to scratch an itch and thought they could do it by just buying the tool factor rather than the tool. The fact that they drove the tool company into the ground is of little consequence when you look at the numbers in play. There are specific people who are directly culpable for the downward spiral of Heroku. Yes-men/women without a single stitch of the vision and drive that created Heroku and it's earlier success. Heroku died in my arms years ago. It's all very sad.
• umangsh 4y ago
  Just moved a django app from heroku hobby to fly.io. flyctl CLI, the documentation was super easy to work with. Fly.io Trial Plan is a decent alternative for Heroku hobby dynos (SSL certs through Let's Encrypt was a pleasant surprise).
• rkuykendall-com 4y ago
  I have a few apps I wrote that I like to look at once or twice a year (and have available for my resume). Looks like my only options are paying $504/y or moving to another service.
• agalvilaku 4y ago
  I am using Heroku dynos for personal use almost for 10 years to track my expenses and my monthly usage is less than 3%. By introducing the pricing model, I can no longer enjoy and thankful for them until now. Instead of wiping out all the accounts, they could have put some threshold.
• okyanusoz 4y ago
  I used to use Heroku, it was a great experience. This is sad. I can no longer deploy low-traffic apps for free on Heroku.
• grigduta 4y ago
  I've been playing around with https://www.bunnyshell.com/ https://www.bunnyshell.com/ on AWS, they have a free forever plan and it's pretty easy to get started with