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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

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.
      - lddemi 4y ago
        all tech cos are down 50% from a year ago
        yebyen 4y ago
        But Heroku also had a major GitHub integration that devolved into CVE which could not be fixed for about a month (among other bad news parts of that story, such as lying about the scope and slow walking the disclosures, that all seemed to just get worse.) This is ostensibly all the result of the brain drain after SalesForce acquisition has set in. It's a death spiral.
        typeofhuman 4y ago
        Box isnt. Up almost 21%. Just saying.
      - beckingz 4y ago
        You mean salesforce's stock price?
    - mixmastamyk 4y ago
      There's a search box at the bottom of each page here. Quite a few recent stories of decline, though death an exaggeration.
    - dwaite 4y ago
      I don't know if I would classify it as an unrecoverable death spiral, but it does seem very short-sighted and ignorant of their customer base. Heroku has two core tenets - developer experience and upgrade to paid tier for production workloads. As a result, at least the Heroku customers I know use the free tier for a good portion of their _non_ customer-facing production workloads - prototypes, staging, administrative functions, and so on. This both increases their cost and makes budget planning a lot less stable. It means developers may become motivated to start coming up with workflows that target other environments where they would normally target Heroku, which like robs Heroku of a source for future revenue. Once you take on the devops work yourself, Heroku is no longer price competitive. In other words, this new cost makes the unique value of Heroku look quite a bit more like a detriment. Thats rather unfortunate.
    - xenadu02 4y ago
      No, this is about optimizing profitability. They were bought by Salesforce and that whole cohort (Salesforce, Oracle, et al) are machines optimized to extract as much money as possible from the Fortune 1000. Salesforce doesn't need a free tier to generate product leads. They have an army of sales people to push the product to customers that will write them big fat checks, then hand down edicts from the CTO's office requiring their internal devs use the technology.
      - toyg 4y ago
        Yes, but that's all stagnant tech - dead in all but name.
        rrix2 4y ago
        yup, and their enterprise clients don't care, maybe they even prefer that. in the mean time, it gets salesforce enough capital to leverage to acquire the next generation of leaders to stagnate and extract. the wheel spins on...
  - tech_tuna 4y ago
    Heroku is a dying platform. It's a good time to get started on a migration plan. I have friends who argue that Salesforce has neglected Heroku for a while so this shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone now. I haven't used Heroku too much myself.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  Nah this is a bean counter decision, not an engineering or marketing decision. It will be bad mojo. There are a dozen other ways to cut down on the bogus/abusive accounts.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
What alternative platforms would you consider moving to that have the same features you use/need?
- gkoberger 4y ago
  Fly, Render, or (blah) straight AWS. If I was starting from scratch, I'd go all in on Next + Vercel.
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    Why not bare metal servers or VPS from like... DigitalOcean? What is DigitalOcean missing for your use case/preference specifically compared to Next + Vercel? I'm not a DigitalOcean shill or employee, I'm just curious what I'm missing from a "what do other competitors out there offer". I always thought it was like... spinup Debian/Ubuntu VPS, ssh to it, install Docker, run docker-compose or Docker Swarm or... Terraform?
    - gkoberger 4y ago
      For just the hosting, maybe. But there's so much more Heroku does, from spinning up test environments for PRs to storing secret keys (across different repos) to being a CI to monitoring to... so so much more.
      - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
        > from spinning up test environments for PRs Hooking up some kind of CI/CD to GitHub through webhooks > storing secret keys Built into GitHub (or an instance of Hashicorp Vault which can be hosted for free) > to monitoring Can run your own Grafana/Promtheus Obviously there's a cost running all of this yourself as opposed to just paying them to do it. Just making sure I wasn't missing something obvious tradeoff wise between "our company would rather pay somebody to manage all of this for us"
        4y ago
jarek83 4y ago
I got the same sentiment. Heroku for us was number one because of the free tier. They could consider keeping an option to have 1-2 free instances for already paying customers. It also feels to me that their business will slowly fade since now.
Exuma 4y ago
Can anyone compare Fly with Render?
SomeCallMeTim 4y ago
When I looked at Heroku pricing way back when, I immediately had a "WOW that's expensive" reaction. I look at it now, and...well, I'm all-in on k8s for most things, and cloud functions for most everything else, so I'm really not sure what the advantage of using Heroku would ever be if it they don't have a free plan. For free databases there are multiple options like CockroachDB and Supabase; throw up a $6/month droplet at DigitalOcean and you get the equivalent of a $50/month dyno at Heroku. Yes it's easier to deploy to Heroku, but it's only a couple hours to set up some kind of CI/CD deploy, and then you can control it more precisely. Heroku has basically been a "first one is free, but as soon as the business gets big, soak them" company from the start. Given the number of companies offering free levels of cloud functions and hosting, I think that's where most new experimental development will migrate to in the future. I sympathize with them for giving up in the fight against abuse of their free services, but ... well, I think they're likely to transition to irrelevance if they don't pivot or slash prices soon.
- bigtunacan 4y ago
  Yeah, I really wonder just how out of touch they are with their customer base to believe this is the best course of action. So many of their paying customers ended up that way because it was free and easy to test out an idea. Then if you started making money it was still easy and you could afford to pay Heroku to scale. Then a lot of these paying customers will never outgrow Heroku scale so they stay forever.
- Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
  I agree that paid options of heroku hasn't been competitive for a long time. But removing the free, hobby tier suddenly makes hundreds of programming tutorials outdated which affects students and job seekers, I highly doubt that the students from obscure schools from around the world would be covered by the to-be announced education program and these are the groups who cannot spend any money. Fortunately there are great alternatives[1] for PaaS and for those who can manage the server there's Oracle Cloud free-tier which offers 24GB RAM 4 Core ARM Server which can be used as single machine or split into 4 VMs and 2 x86 1GB RAM 2 Core VMs with 200 GB Block Volume in total. But Oracle Cloud free-tier has lots of quirks and often requires a script[2] to provision the machines(Due to demand). [1] https://startuptoolchain.com/#cloud https://startuptoolchain.com/#cloud (Disclosure: My curated list of startup tools). [2] https://abishekmuthian.com/oracle-cloud-free-tier-quirks/ https://abishekmuthian.com/oracle-cloud-free-tier-quirks/ (Disclosure: My blog where I've detailed Oracle Cloud free-tier quirks with solutions).

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.
    - lddemi 4y ago
      all tech cos are down 50% from a year ago
      - yebyen 4y ago
        But Heroku also had a major GitHub integration that devolved into CVE which could not be fixed for about a month (among other bad news parts of that story, such as lying about the scope and slow walking the disclosures, that all seemed to just get worse.) This is ostensibly all the result of the brain drain after SalesForce acquisition has set in. It's a death spiral.
      - typeofhuman 4y ago
        Box isnt. Up almost 21%. Just saying.
    - beckingz 4y ago
      You mean salesforce's stock price?
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    There's a search box at the bottom of each page here. Quite a few recent stories of decline, though death an exaggeration.
  - dwaite 4y ago
    I don't know if I would classify it as an unrecoverable death spiral, but it does seem very short-sighted and ignorant of their customer base. Heroku has two core tenets - developer experience and upgrade to paid tier for production workloads. As a result, at least the Heroku customers I know use the free tier for a good portion of their _non_ customer-facing production workloads - prototypes, staging, administrative functions, and so on. This both increases their cost and makes budget planning a lot less stable. It means developers may become motivated to start coming up with workflows that target other environments where they would normally target Heroku, which like robs Heroku of a source for future revenue. Once you take on the devops work yourself, Heroku is no longer price competitive. In other words, this new cost makes the unique value of Heroku look quite a bit more like a detriment. Thats rather unfortunate.
  - xenadu02 4y ago
    No, this is about optimizing profitability. They were bought by Salesforce and that whole cohort (Salesforce, Oracle, et al) are machines optimized to extract as much money as possible from the Fortune 1000. Salesforce doesn't need a free tier to generate product leads. They have an army of sales people to push the product to customers that will write them big fat checks, then hand down edicts from the CTO's office requiring their internal devs use the technology.
    - toyg 4y ago
      Yes, but that's all stagnant tech - dead in all but name.
      - rrix2 4y ago
        yup, and their enterprise clients don't care, maybe they even prefer that. in the mean time, it gets salesforce enough capital to leverage to acquire the next generation of leaders to stagnate and extract. the wheel spins on...
- tech_tuna 4y ago
  Heroku is a dying platform. It's a good time to get started on a migration plan. I have friends who argue that Salesforce has neglected Heroku for a while so this shouldn't be much of a surprise to anyone now. I haven't used Heroku too much myself.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
Nah this is a bean counter decision, not an engineering or marketing decision. It will be bad mojo. There are a dozen other ways to cut down on the bogus/abusive accounts.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

What alternative platforms would you consider moving to that have the same features you use/need?

gkoberger 4y ago
Fly, Render, or (blah) straight AWS. If I was starting from scratch, I'd go all in on Next + Vercel.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  Why not bare metal servers or VPS from like... DigitalOcean? What is DigitalOcean missing for your use case/preference specifically compared to Next + Vercel? I'm not a DigitalOcean shill or employee, I'm just curious what I'm missing from a "what do other competitors out there offer". I always thought it was like... spinup Debian/Ubuntu VPS, ssh to it, install Docker, run docker-compose or Docker Swarm or... Terraform?
  - gkoberger 4y ago
    For just the hosting, maybe. But there's so much more Heroku does, from spinning up test environments for PRs to storing secret keys (across different repos) to being a CI to monitoring to... so so much more.
    - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
      > from spinning up test environments for PRs Hooking up some kind of CI/CD to GitHub through webhooks > storing secret keys Built into GitHub (or an instance of Hashicorp Vault which can be hosted for free) > to monitoring Can run your own Grafana/Promtheus Obviously there's a cost running all of this yourself as opposed to just paying them to do it. Just making sure I wasn't missing something obvious tradeoff wise between "our company would rather pay somebody to manage all of this for us"
      - 4y ago

jarek83 4y ago

I got the same sentiment. Heroku for us was number one because of the free tier. They could consider keeping an option to have 1-2 free instances for already paying customers. It also feels to me that their business will slowly fade since now.

Exuma 4y ago

Can anyone compare Fly with Render?

SomeCallMeTim 4y ago

When I looked at Heroku pricing way back when, I immediately had a "WOW that's expensive" reaction. I look at it now, and...well, I'm all-in on k8s for most things, and cloud functions for most everything else, so I'm really not sure what the advantage of using Heroku would ever be if it they don't have a free plan. For free databases there are multiple options like CockroachDB and Supabase; throw up a $6/month droplet at DigitalOcean and you get the equivalent of a $50/month dyno at Heroku. Yes it's easier to deploy to Heroku, but it's only a couple hours to set up some kind of CI/CD deploy, and then you can control it more precisely. Heroku has basically been a "first one is free, but as soon as the business gets big, soak them" company from the start. Given the number of companies offering free levels of cloud functions and hosting, I think that's where most new experimental development will migrate to in the future. I sympathize with them for giving up in the fight against abuse of their free services, but ... well, I think they're likely to transition to irrelevance if they don't pivot or slash prices soon.

bigtunacan 4y ago
Yeah, I really wonder just how out of touch they are with their customer base to believe this is the best course of action. So many of their paying customers ended up that way because it was free and easy to test out an idea. Then if you started making money it was still easy and you could afford to pay Heroku to scale. Then a lot of these paying customers will never outgrow Heroku scale so they stay forever.
Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
I agree that paid options of heroku hasn't been competitive for a long time. But removing the free, hobby tier suddenly makes hundreds of programming tutorials outdated which affects students and job seekers, I highly doubt that the students from obscure schools from around the world would be covered by the to-be announced education program and these are the groups who cannot spend any money. Fortunately there are great alternatives[1] for PaaS and for those who can manage the server there's Oracle Cloud free-tier which offers 24GB RAM 4 Core ARM Server which can be used as single machine or split into 4 VMs and 2 x86 1GB RAM 2 Core VMs with 200 GB Block Volume in total. But Oracle Cloud free-tier has lots of quirks and often requires a script[2] to provision the machines(Due to demand). [1] https://startuptoolchain.com/#cloud https://startuptoolchain.com/#cloud (Disclosure: My curated list of startup tools). [2] https://abishekmuthian.com/oracle-cloud-free-tier-quirks/ https://abishekmuthian.com/oracle-cloud-free-tier-quirks/ (Disclosure: My blog where I've detailed Oracle Cloud free-tier quirks with solutions).