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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 th

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 But removing the free, hobby tier suddenly makes hundreds of programming tutorials outdated which affects students and job seekers, I highly doubt that the students from obscure schools from around the world would be covered by the to-be announced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).
- LtdJorge 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing

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).

LtdJorge 4y ago
Thanks for sharing