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Clickable links https://render.com/ https://render.com/ - One of the top Heroku alternatives with a free plan to get started. https://fly.io/ https://fly.io/

Clickable links https://render.com/ https://render.com/ - One of the top Heroku alternatives with a free plan to get started. https://fly.io/ https://fly.io/ - Run your full stack apps (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. https://railway.app/ https://railway.app/ - Railway is the cloud that takes the complexity out of shipping software. https://www.cyclic.sh/ https://www.cyclic.sh/ - Connect your GitHub repo. We will build, deploy and manage the hosting. https://qoddi.com/ https://qoddi.com/ - Qoddi is a fully managed App Hosting Platform running on a tier 1 network at 10% of the cost of similar solutions. https://www.deta.sh/ https://www.deta.sh/ - Build & deploy your ideas on the universe's most developer friendly cloud platform. https://adaptable.io/ https://adaptable.io/ - Just connect your GitHub repository and let Adaptable handle the rest. https://www.alwaysdata.com/en/ https://www.alwaysdata.com/en/ - All your services in one place.

pigtailgirl 4y ago
-- fwiw had an awful interview process with railway - long call with the CEO - asked some follow up questions via email - got a reply to move forward - put in 6 hours of work - ghosted --
- justjake 4y ago
  Oh man, that’s not at all what I’m aiming for here (Railway Founder) Could you bump the email in my inbox? Even if you hate my guts and have no interest in the company, I‘d like to know cause I don’t recall this at all :( We do a 30 minute screen with me (to protect our engineers time) and share the problem ahead of time (to not surprise the interviewee)
bongobingo1 4y ago
Is delta just ... free? I cant see any price anywhere on the site, which just leaves me suspicious. They do seem to be pushing some sort of creative-focus, maybe they intend to just keep it really small user base, invite only, just people who actually make things vs a platform just to run your SaaS on?
- rolisz 4y ago
  I've been using deta for a (quite small) side project for a year now. It's free, but it has quite the limitations: max RAM of 512 MB (recently upgraded, before it was 128), and their database is a custom thingy, which doesn't have too many features.
mooreds 4y ago
I just deployed my first app to render. Was a good experience. However, they delete your database after 90 days if you do not have a paid plan. From https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases "Render’s free database plan allows you to run a PostgreSQL database that automatically expires 90 days after creation. Free databases are suspended after 90 days (unless they are upgraded to a paid plan), and are no longer reachable at this point." The paid plans do start at $7, and you can share a database across many apps, though. And if you have static site or a site without a database, it looks like it is forever free.
- ncann 4y ago
  I tried out Render and I must say I was not impressed. Every deploy took 3-5 minutes even with a Hello world Node app. Maybe it was that slow because I was using the free tier? In comparison, fly's deploy was also slow the first time but was significantly faster for subsequent deploys.
  - anurag 4y ago
    Free tier deploys are slow (but not on purpose). We're planning to unify our free and paid architectures so builds are fast across the board.
- nikita 4y ago
  You can try Neon(neon.tech). Disclaimer I’m CEO. We architected Neon such that it’s very cheap for us to keep the database forever. It’s still behind the waitlist but it’s coming off in a few weeks. Also if you onboard via hasura.io there is no gate.
  - mhrmsn 4y ago
    This looks pretty cool! From the docs it sounds like one can pick the underlying cloud provider and region, is that true?
  - johtso 4y ago
    Another great option with a similar approach that's now publicly available with a generous free tier is CockroachDB serverless
8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
Request for startup: something like Render, but that is HIPAA compliant from day one.
- bongobingo1 4y ago
  fly advertises HIPAA https://fly.io/docs/about/healthcare/ https://fly.io/docs/about/healthcare/
- geoffeg 4y ago
  You might check out https://www.aptible.com/ https://www.aptible.com/. It's not quite as ridiculously simple as Heroku but they are HIPAA compliant.
- anurag 4y ago
  (Render CEO) We now offer a standard BAA for HIPAA compliance. Email support@render.com to get started.
  - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
    Thanks for the response, anurag! Is that usually the most that your customers passing PHI through Render will ask for? Or are there a few other steps they have to take in order to feel like their compliance requirements are met by the platform?
    - anurag 4y ago
      It depends on the customer, but the BAA is the most we've been asked for so far outside of our regular security practices.
      - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
        That's good to know, appreciate you sharing that.
mhrmsn 4y ago
How does alwaysdata work? The pricing just references different storage tiers - how is that related to vCPUs or RAM or the number of apps, DBs etc. deployed? Couldn't really find anything on their site...
anyfactor 4y ago
I wish fly.io provided more clarity about their free tier.
- selykg 4y ago
  What’s unclear about it? I read the pricing page and it seems clear to me.
  - anyfactor 4y ago
    I wish they provided more clarity considering they are seen as a Heroku alternative, let me explain that. I am not saying that it fails to provide clarity to someone who is willing to pay for it, but the rule of thumb of pricing pages offering a "free" product is to explicitly mention this ⇒ "$0". Am I being picky? Yes. Why? Because it is a Heroku alternative, and Heroku did mention free in an obvious way in describing their pricing plans. When you mention overage charges immediately after the free tier, it kinda feels a little bit weird. In the pricing plans section, they don't mention a free plan. https://fly.io/plans https://fly.io/plans https://render.com/pricing https://render.com/pricing https://www.heroku.com/pricing https://www.heroku.com/pricing
    - tptacek 4y ago
      We're happy people are running workloads on us that they used to run on Heroku, but we are our own thing; we've been around for years, long before Heroku killed their free tier.
      - anyfactor 4y ago
        My apologies. I totally understand fly.io being a distinct company with their offering and history. To me, fly.io is an alternative to Heroku as the title of the thread is "on: Heroku Free Alternatives". So I was comparing it to Heroku and their pricing section UX.
        tptacek 4y ago
rozenmd 4y ago
I recently migrated OnlineOrNot's uptime checks to run (mostly) on fly.io, strong recommend for ease of use and reliability! I wrote about the experience here: https://onlineornot.com/on-moving-million-uptime-checks-onto-fly-io https://onlineornot.com/on-moving-million-uptime-checks-onto...
hkhanna 4y ago
We switched from Heroku to Render about 6 months ago. It was a great experience initially, but there are a lot of sharp edges we've encountered since then, to the point that if I were switching away from Heroku today, I'd consider something else. For example, we had a monitor set up in Papertrail that notifies us if it doesn't see our application's heartbeat log entry in a 10-minute period. We had to disable that monitor because Render will regularly have outages related to logging where logs simply don't make it to the log stream. Their status page is all green and I've unfortunately had to reach out to support on more than one Friday night. Deploys take a little too long, around 5 minutes on the paid Pro Plus tier. And, minor gripe, but the web UI feels like an SPA, and I think it's built to be one, but the frontend state isn't stable and will often show the wrong information. From time to time, you'll need to manually refresh the page to get the correct information. The security issue that happened with Heroku back in April and the subsequent flubbing of communication around the issue made it so we had no choice but to migrate. But the platform itself was rock solid in my experience. I don't get that same feeling from Render. I'm holding out hope that it improves in the coming months! EDIT: I double checked the deploy times because of the comment below, and it's actually closer to 5 minutes, not 10, so I've updated my comment accordingly. 5 minutes is much more reasonable.
- anurag 4y ago
  I'm sorry you ran into these issues and feel your frustration. The tl;dr is we hit completely unexpected scale overnight when Heroku's free tier news broke, and had to find and fix unpredictable bottlenecks quickly. We're in better shape now, and I feel confident about the rough edges fading away over the next few weeks. For example, we've worked hard to get logging to a stable state over the last couple of weeks, and I hope you've noticed the improvements already. Regarding deploys, I'm surprised they're taking this long on paid plans. I'd love to follow up if you could share details over email (address in profile). We have internal SLOs around build times and we've made (and observed) improvements recently, so I'm wondering if this is specific to how your build is being cached.
  - hkhanna 4y ago
    Totally understand re the unexpected scale, and Render did pretty well, all things considered. I double checked the deploy times and it's closer to 5 minutes, so I updated my comment accordingly. I'm rooting for you!
ricklamers 4y ago
One more, my personal favorite. https://northflank.com/ https://northflank.com/ - The comprehensive developer platform to build and scale microservices, jobs and managed databases with a powerful UI, API & CLI.
Sytten 4y ago
We have been using render in production for about 8 months (paid services). Overall happy but some things are annoying: - Latency of the oregon region is very high. A simple health endpoint is around 500ms from north america and europe, 1.3s from Asia/Australia (we have been monitoring it for many months with better uptime) - Services tend to die at least once a week, so you do need at least two instances all the time - Logs are often delayed for a long time, though it has been more severe recently. - Build time is just horrible, our rust service takes around 40m to deploy. I get that it is free, but at least give me a docker registry so I can build it elsewhere and push the image - No option to pay for support 24/7, so if there is an outage during the US night you are on your own
- anurag 4y ago
  Glad to hear you're happy overall, and I want to add that we're working to address the things you mentioned. We also have paid 24/7 support with response and uptime SLAs: https://render.com/pricing#support https://render.com/pricing#support I'm surprised to hear about the service dying once a week: in my experience this is typically an application issue. Happy to help debug if you'd like to shoot me an email.
aantix 4y ago
Can you include Hatchbox ( https://hatchbox.io/ https://hatchbox.io/ )? Coupled with Linode.
- joshmn 4y ago
  Hatchbox doesn't provide hardware and is tied down to Ruby.
doublepg23 4y ago
I’ve run a couple Telegram bots on Fly’s free tier and it’s been very slick - I especially like the remote docker builders they added recently. Remote docker building is ideal vs. having to debug my local Podman install on Fedora. I will say I’m not sure how the reporting is supposed to work. Fly thinks I’ve been running a failed process for the last couple days but it sure is working!
listenallyall 4y ago
Reading what they offer, you'd think Java runtime didn't exist anymore.

pigtailgirl 4y ago

-- fwiw had an awful interview process with railway - long call with the CEO - asked some follow up questions via email - got a reply to move forward - put in 6 hours of work - ghosted --

justjake 4y ago
Oh man, that’s not at all what I’m aiming for here (Railway Founder) Could you bump the email in my inbox? Even if you hate my guts and have no interest in the company, I‘d like to know cause I don’t recall this at all :( We do a 30 minute screen with me (to protect our engineers time) and share the problem ahead of time (to not surprise the interviewee)

bongobingo1 4y ago

Is delta just ... free? I cant see any price anywhere on the site, which just leaves me suspicious. They do seem to be pushing some sort of creative-focus, maybe they intend to just keep it really small user base, invite only, just people who actually make things vs a platform just to run your SaaS on?

rolisz 4y ago
I've been using deta for a (quite small) side project for a year now. It's free, but it has quite the limitations: max RAM of 512 MB (recently upgraded, before it was 128), and their database is a custom thingy, which doesn't have too many features.

mooreds 4y ago

I just deployed my first app to render. Was a good experience. However, they delete your database after 90 days if you do not have a paid plan. From https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases "Render’s free database plan allows you to run a PostgreSQL database that automatically expires 90 days after creation. Free databases are suspended after 90 days (unless they are upgraded to a paid plan), and are no longer reachable at this point." The paid plans do start at $7, and you can share a database across many apps, though. And if you have static site or a site without a database, it looks like it is forever free.

ncann 4y ago
I tried out Render and I must say I was not impressed. Every deploy took 3-5 minutes even with a Hello world Node app. Maybe it was that slow because I was using the free tier? In comparison, fly's deploy was also slow the first time but was significantly faster for subsequent deploys.
- anurag 4y ago
  Free tier deploys are slow (but not on purpose). We're planning to unify our free and paid architectures so builds are fast across the board.
nikita 4y ago
You can try Neon(neon.tech). Disclaimer I’m CEO. We architected Neon such that it’s very cheap for us to keep the database forever. It’s still behind the waitlist but it’s coming off in a few weeks. Also if you onboard via hasura.io there is no gate.
- mhrmsn 4y ago
  This looks pretty cool! From the docs it sounds like one can pick the underlying cloud provider and region, is that true?
- johtso 4y ago
  Another great option with a similar approach that's now publicly available with a generous free tier is CockroachDB serverless

8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago

Request for startup: something like Render, but that is HIPAA compliant from day one.

bongobingo1 4y ago
fly advertises HIPAA https://fly.io/docs/about/healthcare/ https://fly.io/docs/about/healthcare/
geoffeg 4y ago
You might check out https://www.aptible.com/ https://www.aptible.com/. It's not quite as ridiculously simple as Heroku but they are HIPAA compliant.
anurag 4y ago
(Render CEO) We now offer a standard BAA for HIPAA compliance. Email support@render.com to get started.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
  Thanks for the response, anurag! Is that usually the most that your customers passing PHI through Render will ask for? Or are there a few other steps they have to take in order to feel like their compliance requirements are met by the platform?
  - anurag 4y ago
    It depends on the customer, but the BAA is the most we've been asked for so far outside of our regular security practices.
    - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
      That's good to know, appreciate you sharing that.

mhrmsn 4y ago

How does alwaysdata work? The pricing just references different storage tiers - how is that related to vCPUs or RAM or the number of apps, DBs etc. deployed? Couldn't really find anything on their site...

anyfactor 4y ago

I wish fly.io provided more clarity about their free tier.

selykg 4y ago
What’s unclear about it? I read the pricing page and it seems clear to me.
- anyfactor 4y ago
  I wish they provided more clarity considering they are seen as a Heroku alternative, let me explain that. I am not saying that it fails to provide clarity to someone who is willing to pay for it, but the rule of thumb of pricing pages offering a "free" product is to explicitly mention this ⇒ "$0". Am I being picky? Yes. Why? Because it is a Heroku alternative, and Heroku did mention free in an obvious way in describing their pricing plans. When you mention overage charges immediately after the free tier, it kinda feels a little bit weird. In the pricing plans section, they don't mention a free plan. https://fly.io/plans https://fly.io/plans https://render.com/pricing https://render.com/pricing https://www.heroku.com/pricing https://www.heroku.com/pricing
  - tptacek 4y ago
    We're happy people are running workloads on us that they used to run on Heroku, but we are our own thing; we've been around for years, long before Heroku killed their free tier.
    - anyfactor 4y ago
      My apologies. I totally understand fly.io being a distinct company with their offering and history. To me, fly.io is an alternative to Heroku as the title of the thread is "on: Heroku Free Alternatives". So I was comparing it to Heroku and their pricing section UX.
      - tptacek 4y ago

rozenmd 4y ago

I recently migrated OnlineOrNot's uptime checks to run (mostly) on fly.io, strong recommend for ease of use and reliability! I wrote about the experience here: https://onlineornot.com/on-moving-million-uptime-checks-onto-fly-io https://onlineornot.com/on-moving-million-uptime-checks-onto...

hkhanna 4y ago

We switched from Heroku to Render about 6 months ago. It was a great experience initially, but there are a lot of sharp edges we've encountered since then, to the point that if I were switching away from Heroku today, I'd consider something else. For example, we had a monitor set up in Papertrail that notifies us if it doesn't see our application's heartbeat log entry in a 10-minute period. We had to disable that monitor because Render will regularly have outages related to logging where logs simply don't make it to the log stream. Their status page is all green and I've unfortunately had to reach out to support on more than one Friday night. Deploys take a little too long, around 5 minutes on the paid Pro Plus tier. And, minor gripe, but the web UI feels like an SPA, and I think it's built to be one, but the frontend state isn't stable and will often show the wrong information. From time to time, you'll need to manually refresh the page to get the correct information. The security issue that happened with Heroku back in April and the subsequent flubbing of communication around the issue made it so we had no choice but to migrate. But the platform itself was rock solid in my experience. I don't get that same feeling from Render. I'm holding out hope that it improves in the coming months! EDIT: I double checked the deploy times because of the comment below, and it's actually closer to 5 minutes, not 10, so I've updated my comment accordingly. 5 minutes is much more reasonable.

anurag 4y ago
I'm sorry you ran into these issues and feel your frustration. The tl;dr is we hit completely unexpected scale overnight when Heroku's free tier news broke, and had to find and fix unpredictable bottlenecks quickly. We're in better shape now, and I feel confident about the rough edges fading away over the next few weeks. For example, we've worked hard to get logging to a stable state over the last couple of weeks, and I hope you've noticed the improvements already. Regarding deploys, I'm surprised they're taking this long on paid plans. I'd love to follow up if you could share details over email (address in profile). We have internal SLOs around build times and we've made (and observed) improvements recently, so I'm wondering if this is specific to how your build is being cached.
- hkhanna 4y ago
  Totally understand re the unexpected scale, and Render did pretty well, all things considered. I double checked the deploy times and it's closer to 5 minutes, so I updated my comment accordingly. I'm rooting for you!

ricklamers 4y ago

One more, my personal favorite. https://northflank.com/ https://northflank.com/ - The comprehensive developer platform to build and scale microservices, jobs and managed databases with a powerful UI, API & CLI.

Sytten 4y ago

We have been using render in production for about 8 months (paid services). Overall happy but some things are annoying: - Latency of the oregon region is very high. A simple health endpoint is around 500ms from north america and europe, 1.3s from Asia/Australia (we have been monitoring it for many months with better uptime) - Services tend to die at least once a week, so you do need at least two instances all the time - Logs are often delayed for a long time, though it has been more severe recently. - Build time is just horrible, our rust service takes around 40m to deploy. I get that it is free, but at least give me a docker registry so I can build it elsewhere and push the image - No option to pay for support 24/7, so if there is an outage during the US night you are on your own

anurag 4y ago
Glad to hear you're happy overall, and I want to add that we're working to address the things you mentioned. We also have paid 24/7 support with response and uptime SLAs: https://render.com/pricing#support https://render.com/pricing#support I'm surprised to hear about the service dying once a week: in my experience this is typically an application issue. Happy to help debug if you'd like to shoot me an email.

aantix 4y ago

Can you include Hatchbox ( https://hatchbox.io/ https://hatchbox.io/ )? Coupled with Linode.

joshmn 4y ago
Hatchbox doesn't provide hardware and is tied down to Ruby.

doublepg23 4y ago

I’ve run a couple Telegram bots on Fly’s free tier and it’s been very slick - I especially like the remote docker builders they added recently. Remote docker building is ideal vs. having to debug my local Podman install on Fedora. I will say I’m not sure how the reporting is supposed to work. Fly thinks I’ve been running a failed process for the last couple days but it sure is working!

listenallyall 4y ago

Reading what they offer, you'd think Java runtime didn't exist anymore.