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Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
- mscarborough 4y agoInterested to hear what the paying business customers who migrated away from Heroku think about their new home and the process to move to Fly/Render/Digital Ocean/whatever?
- lis 4y agoI've migrated one larger project with several containers / databases to AWS Fargate / RDS and a smaller one to Scalingo [0]. In both cases, I'm happy with how it turned out and the migration went fine. One of the main drivers behind the decision was that Heroku required us to move to the Enterprise tier to run private databases. If the architecture of your application is not too complex, I would suggest trying Scalingo (or Fly.io, Render, etc.) first. It took me around a day to get the application running on Scalingo, Fly.io and Render. This allowed us to be able to compare them a bit. In the end, we went with Scalingo, since the Review Apps feature to automatically launch environments from pull request worked well for our workflow. You can see the configuration for Scalingo for a smaller elixir app on Github [1]. [0] https://www.mindwendel.com https://www.mindwendel.com [1] https://github.com/mindwendel/mindwendel https://github.com/mindwendel/mindwendel
- theonething 4y ago> Review Apps feature to automatically launch environments from pull request worked well for our workflow. Render has this exact feature. They call it Pull Request Reviews. Was it not around when you were evaluating?
- MuffinFlavored 4y agoPay?
- stepbeek 4y agoThere are plenty of reasons to dunk on Heroku from the last year. I’m not sure why asking customers to pay for hosting us one of them.
- the_lonely_road 4y agoMany of these projects have no revenue and only exist because a free plan existed. Paying is a non starter so asking where that next free alternative is is a logical intermediary step before shutting it down and moving on to something else.
- krashidov 4y agoWhy is paying a non starter? There’s a lot of hobbies in the world that require money. I can’t just barge into a climbing gym and say “I’m sorry this hobby will give me no revenue so I refuse to pay”
- the_lonely_road 4y agoNo one barged into Heroku. The company offered a free service because they considered it a worthwhile marketing strategy. It has to be free because no one, including the authors, are interested in paying for the projects that are looking for another free option. I created an Ember.js and Ruby on Rails clone of an old video game called Heroes of Might and Magic because it was fun to show my old buddies what I could do and play through some mock battles. I have no interest in paying for a server to host this so it’s just going to disappear from the internet. I have no interest in doing the work to port it over to even another free service. It never would have existed had Heroku not been an option when I had the idea. Obviously I could pay for it, it’s just not worth paying for. It’s similar to piracy, I consumed a lot of content back in the day simply because it was free. I never would have paid money for those music or to watch those movies.
- josephcsible 4y agoIt feels like a bait-and-switch and the "heroin dealer" model to give something away for free just long enough that people become reliant on it, and then suddenly make it be paid.
- metadat 4y agoMore thorough resource from last week: Heroku Free Alternatives https://github.com/Engagespot/heroku-free-alternatives https://github.com/Engagespot/heroku-free-alternatives https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33300053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33300053 (271 points, 134 comments)
- alphabettsy 4y agoDigital Ocean’s App Platform seems similar. GCP offers Cloud Run which would probably free for most to run containers.
- rhodysurf 4y agoCloud run is really great and cheaaaapppp
- the__alchemist 4y agoStay on Heroku? Still works.
- rcarmo 4y agoTime to remind folk that if you don't need containers (well, it works with containers too, but it's not the point), you can set up https://github.com/piku https://github.com/piku on a VPS as well.
- gbourne 4y agoAll the free alternatives will eventually get rid of their free tier too - could be 1 year, could be 10 years. As the author stated, they had 25 free instances running. They converted over to paid, so maybe they became a profitable client. However, all the users who have 25+ instances and never pay over the course of 10 year isn't sustainable for a business.
- paxys 4y agoHeroku still has a free tier which is comparable to Render, Fly.io and all the other alternatives people keep bringing up. The mythical "an unlimited number of sites & DBs hosted for free forever" option everyone is looking for simply doesn't exist.
- nosecreek 4y agoJust double checked and I’m pretty sure this not true? Or at least it won’t be as of November 28. Unless I’m reading something wrong?
- fragmede 4y agoIt's been 12 years since Amazon announced their free tier, and it's still going strong. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/10/21/announcing-aws-free-usage-tier/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/10/21/announ...
- mgkimsal 4y agomaybe heroku and fly and others could start shelling books and shoes to help out... it's been 12 years, but they had a decade of other business units helping to fund their service, and can afford loss leaders like few other businesses.
- weaksauce 4y ago> new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year I don't see how that's comparable. it's one instance of a micro server(and a few other things) for one year for a new AWS user and then it's over. heroku was an unlimited number of apps free tier forever with a limit on cpu/database usage for each app.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- greatgib 4y agoFor less than heroku monthly price, you can have your own server in a cloud provider and spawn as much simple apps as you want!
- danjac 4y agoHetzner (or Digital Ocean) + Dokku is cheap & easy to run for small side projects.
- dasil003 4y agoThis looks like a serious agency, so I'm stuck on the question of why the free tier is so important to them versus simply paying for Heroku. Surely doing a mass migration to a new PaaS just to claim a small per-project savings is a dubious proposition given the inevitably of a future rug-pull from wherever you migrate. On the other hand, if you're an individual with a bunch of small projects and you want to host them economically, then standard VPS hosting is going to give you a lot more bang for your buck.
- pjmlp 4y agoI can say that back in the glory days of Nokia Mobiles they certainly got lots of money, you can find this out easily by checking the company history. They can certainly play for Heroku.
- erokar 4y agoThey mention their personal projects in the article.
- nullzzz 4y agoPost author here. We are of course using paid dynos for any business applications. Free tier only makes sense for hobby projects and quick experiments. There's no free lunch in the long run.
- aantix 4y agoUse Hatchbox. With Linode. I love it. https://hatchbox.io/ https://hatchbox.io/
- paxys 4y agoIf your problem with Heroku is the price why would you use something that is even more expensive?
- larrymyers 4y agoThe article calls out having to learn how to create a Docker image for Fly.io as though it's a bad thing. I consider it a huge bonus if you like taking advantage of free tiers for services. The whole point is that if you're going to take advantage of a free tier you should do so in a way that switching is trivial. Docker goes a long way to achieving that. I personally just pay $10/month to Linode and self host these days using Nomad. Less restrictions and more freedom for the cost of a coffee and a bagel. https://www.larrymyers.com/posts/nomad-and-traefik/ https://www.larrymyers.com/posts/nomad-and-traefik/
- KronisLV 4y agoI use Time4VPS (which is linked on my blog) or Hetzner for VPSes and Docker Swarm for orchestration (at least for personal stuff, though Nomad or something like K3s can be great too), in combination with a more boring web server like Apache or Nginx for ingress (but Caddy and Traefik are viable as well). Overall, I'm inclined to agree! You can pick a stack that's as boring or interesting as you want and have your container images work in almost any environment where OCI is supported, with minimal tweaking. You can use either base images that someone else has made (Bitnami images in particular are rather nice), or build your own, about which I wrote in more detail: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-for-all-of-my-containers https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-fo... Currently each of my individual nodes cost around 5-10 euros a month, or I can even use my homelab servers for whatever I want, since they can either be in the same cluster or a separate cluster. Essentially you just adjust some deployment constraints and feed some YAML/HCL into whatever container orchestrator you have. Provided that your registry access is configured correctly, you'll have your software up and running in minutes.
- poopypoopington 4y agothe real story here is that a coffee and a bagel costs $10 \s
- nurettin 4y agoYour post made me realize that I pay more to digitalocean for a 2gb ram instance. I guess roles got reversed.
- ysavir 4y agoMy biggest take away from trying to find a Heroku alternative is that Heroku is late to the game of charging for a basic app. Other service might be free, but seem to have some sort of catch--only static, or requires a certain infrastructure, or whatever else--and only Heroku had the unopinionated free tier. And while I haven't used their competitors, I'm skeptical they can match Heroku's interface, CLI, add-on ecosystem, documentation, and all the various tutorial and stack overflow questions about their platform. So, I'm sticking with Heroku. Sure, it'll cost some (and supposedly they're bringing in cheaper tiers than current, too), but it's not a big difference from their competitors, is reasonably priced (from a competitive perspective), and allows me to continue using a tool I know inside along with all the accompanying ecosystem. I guess after ten years I'll actually have to pay Heroku something for their service. That seems... fine to me. Complaining about that seems petty.
- charrondev 4y agoI’ve found Vercel to work well for my personal projects. It’s supports dynamic applications and static ones, custom domains, CI for deployment and has a useable CLI all available on its free tier.
- js4ever 4y agoIt's not comparable, you have to rewrite your backend to make it work with vercel
- indigodaddy 4y agoReplit can host any language that it supports (unless I’m reading the verbiage incorrectly at [1]), and custom domains are in the free tier (and ssl I believe). Throw Cloudflare in front to survive an HN hug as far as bandwidth concerns go for the Replit free tier and you should be looking good. [1] https://replit.com/site/hosting https://replit.com/site/hosting
- t_sawyer 4y agoIt’s not the charging that made me leave. It was the security breach where all of my environment variables were stolen. And the amount of time it took and their level of transparency through it all.
- paxys 4y agoEvery conversation on this topic can be summed up as: "Heroku charging $7/mo for hosting is evil. Switch to <competing service that costs $10-$20/mo> instead."
- tyingq 4y agoYou can get pretty far for free on Cloudflare, and the next tier up is $5/mo. Though it does mean either JS or WASM, which doesn't work for everyone.
- coupdejarnac 4y agoI have zero sympathy for these guys, nor for anyone else running their business on free tier infrastructure. This is the kind of customer nobody needs.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bcrosby95 4y agoThey weren't asking for it.
- coupdejarnac 4y agoI don't really care to hear what they have to say on the subject at all. They're freeloaders.
- DangitBobby 4y agoIn the article, it says they use Heroku for work and hobby projects. I imagine, like many developers with projects on the side, they try out new tech or platforms on the side and advocate for it at work. In this case, I imagine they used Heroku for hobby projects because it was free and brought it to work (where they could switch seamlessly to a paid tier when usage demanded it) because they liked the platform. On Heroku's side of the fence, I would consider this to be a marketing strategy known as a "loss leader". It's fine for Heroku to take that away, but it's also fine for people to be driven away when the marketing strategy that lured them in is abolished. I can want free shit. If you offer it, I can use it. If you stop offering it, I can leave and look for more free shit. I can also help other people who want free shit to find it. I can write about it, and you can downvote it if you don't like it. The end.
- coupdejarnac 4y agoI think it's reasonable to say that having 25 projects on free tier is excessive. So, be outraged all you want. Can I borrow your car? I'll only put 20k miles on it, no big deal, man! Oh you won't? Do you know where I can use a car for free? And you're defending this kind of nonsense.
- michaelbuckbee 4y agoNo discussion of Heroku and the free tier should happen without the context of the massive cryptomining scheme that was directly targeting their free tier: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-cryptomining-campaign-abuses-free-tier-cloud-dev-resources/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-crypt... Note, oddly the article doesn't state Heroku by name, but the network diagrams all do.
- stoeckley 4y ago> the article doesn't state Heroku by name Heroku is mentioned in the first sentence.
- bdcravens 4y agoAnyone know any developers willing to work for free? I have a business idea, and it'll probably make me decent money, but I'd rather not have to pay for the resources needed to fulfill my vision.
- nathants 4y agoyou don’t want a free tier. what you want is reasonable usage based pricing and scale to zero. all the actual tiny projects on free tiers have actual costs approaching zero. everything else shouldn’t be on a free tier. if it’s not possible to monitor usage (not billing) and automatically unplug dns if usage spikes above some threshold, it’s probably not a good provider. having confidence that some project will never cost above x/month is a reasonable ask, and not challenging. hint: use aws. like python and linux, it's not very good, but everything else is worse.
- devin 4y agohttps://neon.tech/ https://neon.tech/ wasn't mentioned in the article, but I'm looking forward to trying it out. At the moment it's unclear if they'll have something suitable for hobbyists.
- TheFreim 4y ago> "Neon is a fully managed serverless PostgreSQL with a generous free tier." https://neon.tech/docs/cloud/about/ https://neon.tech/docs/cloud/about/ Seems neon is just a hosted database, not a heroku alternative? Will be interested to see what they offer when it's released.
- Mikeb85 4y ago$7 is less than a single beer in the pub. If you can afford to devote thousands of hours to learn programming and then hundreds to thousands of hours to build an app then you can afford the hosting cost...
- santoshalper 4y agoTrue, I noticed that too. I mean, how low do you value your time to not pay $7/mo for your a project you are spending significant time on? On the other hand... there is a ton of intangible value in the form of knowledge to be gained from switching tech stacks and hosting platforms. So another way to look at it is, this is a chance to re-evaluate and potentially upgrade your tech stack or skils.
- UncleEntity 4y ago> there is a ton of intangible value… Which is not what I got from TFA, more like their local bar no longer giving away free buffalo wings because people weren’t buying drinks so now they’re shopping for new happy hour specials. About a month ago I found a tiny VPS for ~$11 for two years which could easily host a pet node app if I were into that sort of thing. $5.50 a year I think it is.
- topspin 4y agoSo all these "Oh noes Heroku!" posts appearing on HN are over $7/month? Sigh.
- DangitBobby 4y agoWell most of them (including TFA) are talking about multiple hobby projects. If you've got 5 or so hobby projects, that can start to be a bit much.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- DangitBobby 4y ago
- dERtuTOR 4y agoI appreciate the great article. Heroku has been my go-to platform for personal projects. I'll research these Heroku alternatives. You've given me a terrific place to start and saved me countless hours. Best wishes for your relocation!
- ajmurmann 4y agoI've been using Google Cloud Run for one of my hobby projects and it worked like a charm. You can have a Google Cloud Build job that takes your GitHub repo from which it builds a Docker image. You make sure that the CMD in the container starts your server. When a request comes in the container is started within ms. You only pay for the storage for the image & the cost from actually executing the container. If you get no requests, it's practically free which is important for my side projects, since there is hardly any traffic. I tried to get a similar solution with AWS Lambda and API Gateway and it was a huge PITA in comparison.
- nzoschke 4y agoDisclosure: former heroku employee. I believe there is a new tier coming that that is a small price for dyno hours spread across all your apps. So if your apps sleep it could still be cheap. Personally I just doubled down on heroku! I cleaned up a lot of free apps. ‘git pull’ to grab the source is just as magical as git push. I scaled the important ones up. I simply don’t have time to learn another platform and its trade offs, or to repackage my apps. I definitely don’t have time for anything other than Postgres which isn’t standard or cheap on other platforms either. Nothing else is free anyway and who knows how long other platforms will be around. The whole Docker fad has practically come and gone meanwhile build packs keep doing their thing. In doing so I hit a problem redeploying and the docs and support response are as good as ever. Thanks for everything up till now Heroku, I’m still a customer for life!
- t_sawyer 4y agoI’m personally very happy with switching to a Hetzner dedicated server, I’m saving a ton of money, and the server can handle my busiest months of load with plenty of room to spare. I use docker containers for a rails app and send backups of my db to S3 with restic. Docker compose files and DR scripts are in my repo. If Hetzner goes down I’ll run them on a VPS from any of the million providers. Deploys push a docker container to dockerhub, then ssh into Hetzner and pulls them. If you want the ease of git push deploys similar to Heroku then use Dokku. Everyone should remember how long it took Heroku to tell you your environment variables were stolen in a breach and how they were not transparent at all through the whole process.
- siquick 4y agoAlso a Hetzner convert. Their pricing is so cheap for VPS compared to AWS that I worry they’ll have to put up the prices at some point.
- t_sawyer 4y agoThey recently increased prices to account for an increase for them on electric costs. Their business model is sound especially for the server auction dedicated servers. All that to say I hear your worry but I’m not worried. Hell I was paying more than double on heroku for MUCH less compute resources. So if they double their prices I’d still be ahead.
- mhoad 4y agoGCP Cloud Run and Cloud Native Buildpacks will get you back the Heroku workflow and includes a bunch of other advantages on top of it. It also includes a free tier as well.
- strzibny 4y agoThere are cheap virtual machines that are good enough for most. In my book Deployment from Scratch I make a case that just a little bit of Bash gets you pretty far. There is also nothing wrong with Dokku (we used it at one startup) or Capistrano (I didn't really use it but I think it's fine!) and other simple tools for simple deployments.
- rpastuszak 4y agoI have a Heroku Postgres DB I’d like to migrate to Planetscale (MySQL). Has anyone here attempted that?
- cudgy 4y ago“… we have more than 25 applications running on free Heroku” No wonder Heroku is getting rid of the free tier with freeloaders like these guys.