10 ms·

Remind HN: Heroku will delete all free dbs and shut down all free dynos Monday

326 points by nja 4y ago

For other HN'ers out there who have personal projects on Heroku and might've forgotten (like I did), this weekend is the last chance to get data out of Heroku (or upgrade to paid plans) before it deletes databases/Redis and shuts down free dynos on Monday. > What products are impacted by the removal of free plans? > > `free` dynos, `hobby-dev` Heroku Postgres, and `hobby-dev` Heroku Data for Redis plans. > > What happens if I take no action on my free apps or databases or do not upgrade to a paid plan? > > If you take no action by November 28, 2022: > > - `free` dynos will be converted to `eco` dynos scaled down to 0. You must subscribe to the Eco dyno hours plan or upgrade to another paid plan before you can scale them up again. Any Scheduler jobs that used free dynos will fail until they are reconfigured to use another dyno type. > - For non-Enterprise users, `hobby-dev` databases will be deleted in accordance with the Heroku Documentation starting November 28, 2022. > - For Enterprise users, `hobby-dev` databases that belong to an Enterprise Account or Team will be converted to `mini`. There will be no immediate change in cost to your Heroku Enterprise invoices if an app is upgraded from a free tier resource to a paid tier resource. Any changes to Heroku Enterprise pricing would require a contract update to take effect. If you have any concerns about your contract pricing, contact your account executive. > - `hobby-dev` databases that belong to personal accounts will be deleted, and `free dynos` will be converted to `eco` dynos scaled down to 0, even if that user also belongs to an Enterprise Team. These users must upgrade to paid resources before November 28, 2022. ref: https://help.heroku.com/RSBRUH58/removal-of-heroku-free-product-plans-faq I'm personally moving my projects to a self-hosted dokku cluster, but I've heard good things about fly and render too.

yellowapple 4y ago
Well darn. http://heroku-sucks.herokuapp.com/ http://heroku-sucks.herokuapp.com/ had a good run, I guess.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  How very YTMND.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    Maybe as a final commit I should add some background music?
sieabahlpark 4y ago
faitswulff 4y ago
Does anyone have a quick and dirty script to download the Git repo and data for all your Heroku apps?
- Aqua_Geek 4y ago
  I’ve just been going through and cloning the repos via their command line tool: heroku git:clone --a <app name> If you have really old apps (e.g. on the bamboo stack or older), there is a plug-in that allows you to download the slug (as Git doesn’t work with those old stacks).
  - anyfactor 4y ago
    Thank you. Downloaded everything.
lkrubner 4y ago
A fun fact (and I'm not violating any NDA here) my client https://paireyewear.com https://paireyewear.com is growing very fast and last year they raised $73 million from VC investors. They have their main store on Shopify, so they didn't need too much on the backend: only their CRM for keeping customers happy and handling returns and damaged goods and refunds and special sales. Also, on the backend, they had all the integrations with the 3PL, that is, 3rd Party Logistics, which is to say, they worked with external warehouses, because they weren't ready to have their own warehouses. They did have integrations with the warehouses so they could track inventory levels. So the fun fact is this: they were running entirely on free Heroku dynos. This year they successfully transferred to AWS, but they got to a fairly big scale while running entirely on free Heroku dynos. I'm still kind of amazed by that.
- rubyist5eva 4y ago
  Why did they not just start paying for Heroku?
  - rekttrader 4y ago
    They’re part of the reason it’s not free any more.
    - gl-prod 4y ago
      Well, Salesforce could have made the free dynos non-commercial only
      - 999900000999 4y ago
        That's even worse, so when your hobbyist project accidentally makes 40$ Salesforce can send it's legal team after you?
        Marsymars 4y ago
        I would prevent any hobbyist project of mine from making $40 for tax reasons alone, where the difference the to tax authorities between $0 and $40 is basically the same as the difference to a Saleforce non-commercial clause. At $0 I don’t have to do anything about taxes. At $40 it’s immediately in the red due to whatever time I have to spend sorting out taxes for $40 in revenue.
skilled 4y ago
I understand this is news for a few months now but still, such a hostile way to just unplug projects and to an extent, the history of the web. I doubt Salesforce is struggling with cash not to let these projects stay online on a “read only” mode.
- clintonb 4y ago
  What would you propose they do differently?
  - simonw 4y ago
    The single biggest thing would be to suspend the websites but NOT delete the underlying data - for at least a month, ideally six. That way all of the people who missed the news about Heroku and first heard about it when sites they were using stopped working would have a fighting chance to recover their data before it vanished. Even better: Salesforce could have actually invested resources in Heroku (instead of effectively feature-freezing it a few years ago) such that the thing where the free tier acts as a major funnel for attracting paying customers continued to work, as it had for most of the lifetime of the service.
    - vachina 4y ago
      If you have a Heroku instance you definitely have a local copy of your code stashed somewhere.
      - Raed667 4y ago
        some projects are +10 year old. People will go through multiple laptops in that time. if your project used heroku directly without any github integration then they effectively were also your source control.
      - simonw 4y ago
        The PostgreSQL data is a much bigger problem than the code.
gl-prod 4y ago
Rip Heroku
- mym1990 4y ago
  Heroku will keep going alive and well. It will be integrated into many Salesforce services and the user base will come from those integrations.
  - teeray 4y ago
    The Ship of Theseus sails on…
kirillzubovsky 4y ago
Thanks for the reminder! Could've lost a bunch of photos :) Also, it's interesting how little effort Heroku put into helping you upgrade. There's no one-click options, and instead it's a forest of choices and menus to jump through. By the way, one hack to not upgrading your app? Move your DBs to a single shared instance on Amazon, and then point Heroku apps to that one instance. Meanwhile, in Heroku just remove the Postgres addon. As long as it doesn't see a free instance, it doesn't complain.
- kirillzubovsky 4y ago
  Looked into it a few seconds more and realized they've got a new "mini" plan, which is basically a free Dev plan, but costing 1 cent a month. I suppose this is a deliberate attempt to kill all the non-maintained projects, rather than a way to make money.
  - throwaway6275 4y ago
    I’d say to kill more abuse rather than non-maintained projects https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-cryptomining-campaign-abuses-free-tier-cloud-dev-resources/amp/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-crypt...
  - japhyr 4y ago
    Where are you reading 1 cent/month? The cheapest way I can see to run a small app+db project on Heroku now is to use an Eco dyno at $5/month with a Mini Postgres instance at $5/month, for a total of $10/month. If you don't want your project to sleep, you probably want a Basic dyno ($7/month) instead of an Eco dyno. Am I missing something? Edit: I meant to add a link to the pricing page. https://www.heroku.com/pricing https://www.heroku.com/pricing
    - nikodunk 4y ago
      Just found this too. The brand-new Eco plan costs $5/mo, shared over all projects up to 1000 dyno hours, and then it seems each database on the Micro plan is $0.01 per month. That comes out to $5.05 per month for me I believe for my 5 portfolio projects? Maybe there's hope for Heroku yet.
p2detar 4y ago
I’ve migrated an old PHP7 app from Heroku to GCP the last couple of weeks. I rewrote the CRUD in Go. The rest of the components were an SQLite database and an old (2013) SPA that holds up surprisingly good even today. Heroku account: deleted. For small scale projects Heroku seemed thousands of times easier to work with than GCP. I sometimes get lost in all the GCP menus and settings. It’s a lot.
- jtokoph 4y ago
  How do you persist SQLite on heroku? Isn’t all storage ephemeral?
  - p2detar 4y ago
    Good catch and my bad: I should have added that my Heroku app ran on a free ClearDB MySQL instance. I pulled that into an SQLite db for simplicity. The app is in a parked state where it's not doing any write ops at this point, so apart from no FTS support, this went well.
Varqu 4y ago
So basically anyone with a bunch of free dynos (who doesn't use heroku DBs) can just switch to the $7/month eco subscription and keep their dynos running?
novakinblood 4y ago
Thanks for that reminder. I had to delete an app I had running since 2013. Up until the moment before I committed to deleting it, I felt no emotion at all. But right after I confirmed deletion, I felt like an animal I had on the farm died. I was sad. I had that thing chugging along with no real issues for almost 9 years. I used that platform to learn and try new things and then built an app to track my workout progress. It was a great way for me to learn Django without losing money and build some useful tools.
- Kye 4y ago
  There's Glitch if you want a new playground: https://glitch.com/ https://glitch.com/
  - kopochameleon 4y ago
    Have they committed to anything different than what Heroku had committed to? We're Charlie Brown running towards the football repeatedly. We need to learn a lesson here. "We're the good platform devs" branding doesn't mean a company will do the kind thing by their true believer users (post-acquisition, post-cash-flow-belt-tightening, post-IPO, etc) There ought to be a platform on which new coders can build a free simple web app in a playground, and know it will be accessible in 20 years. If a company wants to use "free easy backends" as bait for capturing growing companies' future costs, devs should hold them to long-term persistence and at least an off-platform future migration path. See also Parse, Geocities, etc Use some % of the money and put it in to an OSS migration path or a fund to pay their own future AWS bills, c'mon.
    - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
      People need to realize that free plans are a loss leader/sales feature, not a guarantee. The longer you're able to use their free plan, the more obvious it is that you aren't going to convert to a paid user. The better the free plan, the less likely it is to make sense to run long term. The only free tier product I use is Cloudflare's, and if it goes away someday, I'll pay for it.
majodev 4y ago
Just moved off my 8 years old project google-webfonts-helper https://github.com/majodev/google-webfonts-helper https://github.com/majodev/google-webfonts-helper from their free tier to my own private infra and replaced the current dyno with a 301 handler: https://github.com/kenmickles/heroku-redirect https://github.com/kenmickles/heroku-redirect AFAIK sadly Heroku does not provide some other _free_ permanent redirect option for their *.herokuapp.com sub-domains without actually running a dyno there.
- mzur 4y ago
  Thank you so much for google-webfonts-helper! It's been helping me a lot recently ever since there was this questionable court decision in Germany that using fonts directly from Google violates the privacy regulation and website owners were sued all over the place.
  - maltris 4y ago
    You havent by any chance been sued by some weird lawyer from a german capital whose name pops up all over google on researching this in the name of a person that does not really seem to exist? They are fraudulently trying to trick people in paying ~170 euro without any clear statement on what is their claim. Dont fall for it.
    - mzur 4y ago
      I haven't been sued personally but some of my clients were. I told everyone to ignore it but had to update their websites nonetheless.
- asddubs 4y ago
  That's good to hear, I was thinking about whether google fonts helper would survive this. Awesome project by the way, I've used it a lot, thanks for making it!
- kenmickles 4y ago
  I use your webfonts helper all the time! Cool to see the tiny redirect app I published 10 years ago used to keep my bookmark working.
gw67 4y ago
It’s curios like this action push user to go way instead just paying 7$/month.
- mym1990 4y ago
  I think for many people there is a clear line between free and not free, no matter whether the service costs 2$, 7$, or 100$. It's a psychological thing. On top of this, it could be 7$ now, 14$ next year, and over time you get sucked into this money pit. A good example is Adobe products. Pre-cloud I would freely use PS/Lightroom off a CD, then got into the monthly plan for students, which turned into a full price plan after I graduated, and which sucked me into a year long contract for a certain plan. Now I did this all willingly of course, and after 5 years I looked back and thought 'where did all that money go?' But to some degree it undermines my trust in my ability to gauge the actual value of subscription based services.
xrd 4y ago
They can delete my dynos but they can't delete all the emails over months and months telling me they are going to delete my dynos. I'll never get that time back. I kid. Thanks for everything, Heroku.
satvikpendem 4y ago
Last time a post about Heroku was posted, I talked about my great experience using Coolify: I am using Coolify (https://coolify.io https://coolify.io), an open source self-hosted PaaS which is a relatively newer kid on the block compared to Dokku and CapRover. I tried both of these and I just didn't like how they were, always had some problem or another. In contrast, Coolify has a great GUI that abstracts away the most common things about PaaS hosting, like connecting to GitHub automatically for git push deploys, SSL certificates, reverse proxying and custom domain support, and best of all, having support for Heroku style buildpacks as well as Dockerfiles. I've been quite happy with it, the creator has a Discord and responds to issues very quickly. With regards to non-self-hosted options, I did try out Render, Fly.io and Railway but I found that their free servers were too anemic. I was compiling a Rust backend and it simply could not compile on their free servers. On Hetzner, for 5 bucks I could get a 2 AMD vCPU and 2 GB RAM machine that was sufficient to compile my Rust apps in a way that the non-self-hosted ones were not. I have a JS frontend app that works fine though but I wanted to keep everything under the same VPS, plus I can run other types of self-hosted services on it too, like Plausible analytics and a Ghost blog. I'm not sure if those are allowed on non-self-hosted options. All in all, it costs me 5 bucks a month, and I never have to worry about sudden upcharges for traffic à la AWS as in the very worst, my VPS goes down for a while. I'm now running about 20 different services on this 5 dollar box including databases and applications as well as other services, works just fine.
- jtsiskin 4y ago
  What did coolify have that caprover didn’t?
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Better UI, more streamlined GitHub integration (I could not for the life of me get CapRover's integration to work), Docker compose support
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  Hesitate to tell that Fly is the only good option since they won't hibernate your instances, and have a reasonable free db and bandwidth quota .. unlike Render (almost not count as free plan, more like some free trial) I'm fearing folks could abuse Fly and they could start to let it go..
arcturus17 4y ago
Does anyone have a link to a good analysis about the "death" of Heroku? Say, a good Ben Thompson style piece explaining how it all was subsumed into Salesforce and failed as a standalone service.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  I feel like nobody external really totally understands it. Heroku kept going fine for some years after the initial salesforce purchase in 2011 (heroku's real launch wasn't even until 2009, so arguably most of the "golden" years were post-salesforce... ) I would be very interested to see a balance sheet, like how much revenue and how much profit for heroku specifically, over time. But that's known to nobody outside of salesforce so far as I know. Neither is how their staffing may or may not have changed over time. We have seen heroku kind of stagnating, and maybe having more technical problems, which they handle without the professional polish we had previously expected, and now get rid of free tier -- and there have been a few pieces kind of saying this, but what I'm interested in is... why? What's happened? I have seen various people speculate, including that it may have been doing quite fine well in the black as an independent unit, but salesforce has always wanted it to be more "synergistic" with their other business than it has been, and just wasn't interested in investing in it. But maybe it hasn't been that profitable? not sure anyone publicly really knows?
- Rastonbury 4y ago
  They wanted to go into Cloud if you read the press release, it must have been a pure diversification play albeit poorly thought out. Heroku caters to hobbyists/students/small business, it would've taken massive effort to turn it into the next AWS. There is almost zero overlap with their main CRM product and PaaS, totally different stakeholders. Whats worse is that they served different segments. Enterprise buyers spending 6 digits on Salesforce are not going to host on Heroku. Hobbyists/indie projects are not going to have sales teams that even need a cheap CRM let alone SFDC. There's almost no cross sell potential. Heroku probably turned into a black hole on their balance sheet. Post M&A Integration wise there are many accounts of Heroku first employees resisting the corporatisation of the organization, I believe all the founders eventually left a few years after. It was ultimately probably a value destructive acquisition, left alone imagine what Heroku could have been. Thinking about this is pretty sad. The product is still after all these year almost like 'magic' vis a vis upcoming competitors (Render/Fly). Beyond its products, Heroku was THE gateway for students and learners to spin up an app almost immediately, helping them become professional developers
version_five 4y ago
To be fair, I have had quite a few emails form Heroku telling me to move my stuff. Even after I thought it was already shut down, I keep getting emails. Everything I have on there is 5+ year old hobby things that I won't bother hosting elsewhere, it's nice to know they are paying more attention than I am to my projects' fates
- reaperducer 4y ago
  I have had quite a few emails form Heroku telling me to move my stuff. Heroku's warning emails are how I found out two things: - That I'm still the administrative contact for a former employer's production environment. - That my former employer is using a free tier for its public-facing web site. Ethically, I should let the company know is web site is about to go offline. But it's a start-up run like a fiefdom and the founder tells all departing employees that if they contact anyone at the company, he'll sic the (imaginary) lawyers on them.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - richbell 4y ago
    That's hilarious; I'd heavily encourage you to remove this comment, just in case the lawyers turn out to be real. :)
neilv 4y ago
I hope no one is rushing over the 4.5-day US holiday weekend to do a last-minute migration or backup.
- ryanSrich 4y ago
  To be fair, Heroku has been sending reminders for this every week for at least a month.
- Rapzid 4y ago
  Yeah, Monday's are the worst days already so the Monday after Thanksgiving week haha.
jorgesborges 4y ago
This thread was fine with me until I considered Vercel might do the same thing in five years with their free tier.
mythz 4y ago
For alternatives we can recommend Hetzner US Cloud [1] which was the best US Cloud provider we've found that works out to be an order of magnitude less expensive than equivalent specs on Azure/AWS and also includes 20TB free bandwidth that would cost a fortune in AWS/Azure's artificially inflated egress costs [2]. The UX behind managing instances is delightfully pleasant where new instances are available faster than any other cloud provider we've used, within seconds of creating an instance you can immediately login with your configured SSH keys. Another nice feature is being able to "rescale" your instance to higher specs after a restart [3], so you can confidentially start with a small instance that just meets your current workload knowing that you can easily scale up your instances as your workload increases. AWS RDS was the only critical service keeping us on AWS, a service we no longer need in our new Apps which we're building with SQLite thanks to the effortless replication in Litestream [4] that we're using to replicate to Cloudflare R2 - another great value alternative S3 alternative with $0 egress fees [5] where you can get even greater value & performance when hosting behind their free CDN. [1] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud [2] https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-provider https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-pr... [3] https://bizanosa.com/how-to-upgrade-resize-hetzner-cloud-server/ https://bizanosa.com/how-to-upgrade-resize-hetzner-cloud-ser... [4] https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream [5] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  If you're considering using Hetzner I'd also like to humbly recommend you try/sign up for Nimbus[0] -- I'm building a managed service provider for people running on Hetzner, and basic cache support will be out within the week. If you want services like Redis on a semi-managed provider like Hetzner but don't want to write the bash scripts/Terraform/etc or hook up networking/TLS and run it yourself, Nimbus is for you. [0]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com
akmittal 4y ago
Now that Heroku free tier is not available, here are a few alternatives Serverless and edge functions: Deno, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare. Databases: Planetscale, Supabase, Cockroach, Fauna, Upstash. Services: Fly, Railway, Render. https://mobile.twitter.com/Ak_Mittal/status/1567175784229650432 https://mobile.twitter.com/Ak_Mittal/status/1567175784229650...
phas0ruk 4y ago
I’ve been using render.com. Pretty good alternative.
anyfactor 4y ago
Gave up on PAAS and decided to switch to a VPS. I enjoy the comfort of a persistent storage.
anyfactor 4y ago
Thank you very much. I forgot about this.
messutied 4y ago
I didn’t receive any emails from Heroku about this, thank you so much for this reminder. Saved us a lot of headaches.
matus_congrady 4y ago
Hi. Please take my oppinion with a grain of salt, as I might be biased since I'm a founder at a competing service. In recent years, there was a significant amount of startups/bootstraped companies that tried to make application deployment easier, similar to Heroku. A lot of them were trying to get as much users as possible using a very generous offering. A lot of the times, this use-growth was fueled by a VC money, and the only metric that mattered was user/customer growth. But then came the "cooling" at the private markets. VCs are looking not only at the user-growth, but also at the cash flow. A lot of the very generous offerings that were possible only thanks to the VC funding will eventually disappear. I believe that what's currently happening with Heroku will happen to a lot of other Paas/BaaS startups. They will need to transform to a cash-flow positive business. Similarly to what Heroku is transforming to (a "cash cow": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_cow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_cow). A lot of other PaaS providers will need to increase their prices to stay cash-flow positive. A portion of them will need to cancel or reduce the generousity of their free offereings. The margin of these companies is usually possible thanks to 2 things: - the infrastructure resources they provide is slightly (10-100%) more expensive than the underlying infrastructure they run you workloads on - they use more cost efficient hardware (e.g. databases running on 3rd gen SSD disks) to run your workloads. Since these companies are renting raw hardware, on which they run your workloads (and are not using cloud-provider-native services, such as RDS), they need to hire experienced operators able to run and manage those workloads in production. This (for obvious reasons) is not exactly easy, and requires a lot of experienced talent with operational experience. Hiring those people is very hard, as these experts are not usually available on the market. This leaves us with with the obvious problem: Are the operators of the given PaaS provider really able to run your production workloads? Are they able to to withstand all the issues that may arise? Don't get me wrong. There definitely are companies (the most succesful) able to hire very capable talent (such as https://supabase.io https://supabase.io), but this definitely isn't the case for all of those PaaS providers. And I believe that these companies will need to increase their prices (and be less lucrative for their customers) or changes their business model. This is something that we at stacktape.com built our business case on. We took a different path. We just wanted to make the existing (AWS) offerings 2 orders of magnitue easier to use, so that any developer (withou Cloud or DevOps experience) can use them productively. We're not running your workloads for you. We are just making AWS services (run by experienced operators) significantly easier to consume (97% less difficult, so that any developer can do the job). For that, we're charging 30%->20% of the AWS infrastructure costs managed by us premium. This also means that you are not restricted to our platform, but can easily extend your infrastructure by any AWS service (using AWS CloufFormation or AWS CDK). AWS offers areasonably generous free tier, and Stacktape won't charge you for any resources withing the free tier. We're launching our v2 soon (~1-2 weeks), and if the offering we have sounds interesting, we'll be very happy to hear your thoughts.
carmenhchung 4y ago
Hey everyone! A couple of pretty decent Heroku alternatives have already been mentioned, but in case anyone is looking for another platform that offers super easy backend service deployment and scaling, Fl0 (https://fl0.com/ https://fl0.com/) is going to release to the public in a couple of months. You can sign up to be on the waitlist for access here: https://fl0.com/contact?utm_campaign=hn https://fl0.com/contact?utm_campaign=hn (Disclaimer: I work at Fl0.)
ptman 4y ago
Depending on how your software is architected, there are other free clouds available: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/

326 points by nja 4y ago

yellowapple 4y ago

Well darn. http://heroku-sucks.herokuapp.com/ http://heroku-sucks.herokuapp.com/ had a good run, I guess.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
How very YTMND.
- yellowapple 4y ago
  Maybe as a final commit I should add some background music?

sieabahlpark 4y ago

faitswulff 4y ago

Does anyone have a quick and dirty script to download the Git repo and data for all your Heroku apps?

Aqua_Geek 4y ago
I’ve just been going through and cloning the repos via their command line tool: heroku git:clone --a <app name> If you have really old apps (e.g. on the bamboo stack or older), there is a plug-in that allows you to download the slug (as Git doesn’t work with those old stacks).
- anyfactor 4y ago
  Thank you. Downloaded everything.

lkrubner 4y ago

A fun fact (and I'm not violating any NDA here) my client https://paireyewear.com https://paireyewear.com is growing very fast and last year they raised $73 million from VC investors. They have their main store on Shopify, so they didn't need too much on the backend: only their CRM for keeping customers happy and handling returns and damaged goods and refunds and special sales. Also, on the backend, they had all the integrations with the 3PL, that is, 3rd Party Logistics, which is to say, they worked with external warehouses, because they weren't ready to have their own warehouses. They did have integrations with the warehouses so they could track inventory levels. So the fun fact is this: they were running entirely on free Heroku dynos. This year they successfully transferred to AWS, but they got to a fairly big scale while running entirely on free Heroku dynos. I'm still kind of amazed by that.

rubyist5eva 4y ago
Why did they not just start paying for Heroku?
- rekttrader 4y ago
  They’re part of the reason it’s not free any more.
  - gl-prod 4y ago
    Well, Salesforce could have made the free dynos non-commercial only
    - 999900000999 4y ago
      That's even worse, so when your hobbyist project accidentally makes 40$ Salesforce can send it's legal team after you?
      - Marsymars 4y ago
        I would prevent any hobbyist project of mine from making $40 for tax reasons alone, where the difference the to tax authorities between $0 and $40 is basically the same as the difference to a Saleforce non-commercial clause. At $0 I don’t have to do anything about taxes. At $40 it’s immediately in the red due to whatever time I have to spend sorting out taxes for $40 in revenue.

skilled 4y ago

I understand this is news for a few months now but still, such a hostile way to just unplug projects and to an extent, the history of the web. I doubt Salesforce is struggling with cash not to let these projects stay online on a “read only” mode.

clintonb 4y ago
What would you propose they do differently?
- simonw 4y ago
  The single biggest thing would be to suspend the websites but NOT delete the underlying data - for at least a month, ideally six. That way all of the people who missed the news about Heroku and first heard about it when sites they were using stopped working would have a fighting chance to recover their data before it vanished. Even better: Salesforce could have actually invested resources in Heroku (instead of effectively feature-freezing it a few years ago) such that the thing where the free tier acts as a major funnel for attracting paying customers continued to work, as it had for most of the lifetime of the service.
  - vachina 4y ago
    If you have a Heroku instance you definitely have a local copy of your code stashed somewhere.
    - Raed667 4y ago
      some projects are +10 year old. People will go through multiple laptops in that time. if your project used heroku directly without any github integration then they effectively were also your source control.
    - simonw 4y ago
      The PostgreSQL data is a much bigger problem than the code.

gl-prod 4y ago

Rip Heroku

mym1990 4y ago
Heroku will keep going alive and well. It will be integrated into many Salesforce services and the user base will come from those integrations.
- teeray 4y ago
  The Ship of Theseus sails on…

kirillzubovsky 4y ago

Thanks for the reminder! Could've lost a bunch of photos :) Also, it's interesting how little effort Heroku put into helping you upgrade. There's no one-click options, and instead it's a forest of choices and menus to jump through. By the way, one hack to not upgrading your app? Move your DBs to a single shared instance on Amazon, and then point Heroku apps to that one instance. Meanwhile, in Heroku just remove the Postgres addon. As long as it doesn't see a free instance, it doesn't complain.

kirillzubovsky 4y ago
Looked into it a few seconds more and realized they've got a new "mini" plan, which is basically a free Dev plan, but costing 1 cent a month. I suppose this is a deliberate attempt to kill all the non-maintained projects, rather than a way to make money.
- throwaway6275 4y ago
  I’d say to kill more abuse rather than non-maintained projects https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-cryptomining-campaign-abuses-free-tier-cloud-dev-resources/amp/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-crypt...
- japhyr 4y ago
  Where are you reading 1 cent/month? The cheapest way I can see to run a small app+db project on Heroku now is to use an Eco dyno at $5/month with a Mini Postgres instance at $5/month, for a total of $10/month. If you don't want your project to sleep, you probably want a Basic dyno ($7/month) instead of an Eco dyno. Am I missing something? Edit: I meant to add a link to the pricing page. https://www.heroku.com/pricing https://www.heroku.com/pricing
  - nikodunk 4y ago
    Just found this too. The brand-new Eco plan costs $5/mo, shared over all projects up to 1000 dyno hours, and then it seems each database on the Micro plan is $0.01 per month. That comes out to $5.05 per month for me I believe for my 5 portfolio projects? Maybe there's hope for Heroku yet.

p2detar 4y ago

I’ve migrated an old PHP7 app from Heroku to GCP the last couple of weeks. I rewrote the CRUD in Go. The rest of the components were an SQLite database and an old (2013) SPA that holds up surprisingly good even today. Heroku account: deleted. For small scale projects Heroku seemed thousands of times easier to work with than GCP. I sometimes get lost in all the GCP menus and settings. It’s a lot.

jtokoph 4y ago
How do you persist SQLite on heroku? Isn’t all storage ephemeral?
- p2detar 4y ago
  Good catch and my bad: I should have added that my Heroku app ran on a free ClearDB MySQL instance. I pulled that into an SQLite db for simplicity. The app is in a parked state where it's not doing any write ops at this point, so apart from no FTS support, this went well.

Varqu 4y ago

So basically anyone with a bunch of free dynos (who doesn't use heroku DBs) can just switch to the $7/month eco subscription and keep their dynos running?

novakinblood 4y ago

Thanks for that reminder. I had to delete an app I had running since 2013. Up until the moment before I committed to deleting it, I felt no emotion at all. But right after I confirmed deletion, I felt like an animal I had on the farm died. I was sad. I had that thing chugging along with no real issues for almost 9 years. I used that platform to learn and try new things and then built an app to track my workout progress. It was a great way for me to learn Django without losing money and build some useful tools.

Kye 4y ago
There's Glitch if you want a new playground: https://glitch.com/ https://glitch.com/
- kopochameleon 4y ago
  Have they committed to anything different than what Heroku had committed to? We're Charlie Brown running towards the football repeatedly. We need to learn a lesson here. "We're the good platform devs" branding doesn't mean a company will do the kind thing by their true believer users (post-acquisition, post-cash-flow-belt-tightening, post-IPO, etc) There ought to be a platform on which new coders can build a free simple web app in a playground, and know it will be accessible in 20 years. If a company wants to use "free easy backends" as bait for capturing growing companies' future costs, devs should hold them to long-term persistence and at least an off-platform future migration path. See also Parse, Geocities, etc Use some % of the money and put it in to an OSS migration path or a fund to pay their own future AWS bills, c'mon.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    People need to realize that free plans are a loss leader/sales feature, not a guarantee. The longer you're able to use their free plan, the more obvious it is that you aren't going to convert to a paid user. The better the free plan, the less likely it is to make sense to run long term. The only free tier product I use is Cloudflare's, and if it goes away someday, I'll pay for it.

majodev 4y ago

Just moved off my 8 years old project google-webfonts-helper https://github.com/majodev/google-webfonts-helper https://github.com/majodev/google-webfonts-helper from their free tier to my own private infra and replaced the current dyno with a 301 handler: https://github.com/kenmickles/heroku-redirect https://github.com/kenmickles/heroku-redirect AFAIK sadly Heroku does not provide some other _free_ permanent redirect option for their *.herokuapp.com sub-domains without actually running a dyno there.

mzur 4y ago
Thank you so much for google-webfonts-helper! It's been helping me a lot recently ever since there was this questionable court decision in Germany that using fonts directly from Google violates the privacy regulation and website owners were sued all over the place.
- maltris 4y ago
  You havent by any chance been sued by some weird lawyer from a german capital whose name pops up all over google on researching this in the name of a person that does not really seem to exist? They are fraudulently trying to trick people in paying ~170 euro without any clear statement on what is their claim. Dont fall for it.
  - mzur 4y ago
    I haven't been sued personally but some of my clients were. I told everyone to ignore it but had to update their websites nonetheless.
asddubs 4y ago
That's good to hear, I was thinking about whether google fonts helper would survive this. Awesome project by the way, I've used it a lot, thanks for making it!
kenmickles 4y ago
I use your webfonts helper all the time! Cool to see the tiny redirect app I published 10 years ago used to keep my bookmark working.

gw67 4y ago

It’s curios like this action push user to go way instead just paying 7$/month.

mym1990 4y ago
I think for many people there is a clear line between free and not free, no matter whether the service costs 2$, 7$, or 100$. It's a psychological thing. On top of this, it could be 7$ now, 14$ next year, and over time you get sucked into this money pit. A good example is Adobe products. Pre-cloud I would freely use PS/Lightroom off a CD, then got into the monthly plan for students, which turned into a full price plan after I graduated, and which sucked me into a year long contract for a certain plan. Now I did this all willingly of course, and after 5 years I looked back and thought 'where did all that money go?' But to some degree it undermines my trust in my ability to gauge the actual value of subscription based services.

xrd 4y ago

They can delete my dynos but they can't delete all the emails over months and months telling me they are going to delete my dynos. I'll never get that time back. I kid. Thanks for everything, Heroku.

satvikpendem 4y ago

Last time a post about Heroku was posted, I talked about my great experience using Coolify: I am using Coolify (https://coolify.io https://coolify.io), an open source self-hosted PaaS which is a relatively newer kid on the block compared to Dokku and CapRover. I tried both of these and I just didn't like how they were, always had some problem or another. In contrast, Coolify has a great GUI that abstracts away the most common things about PaaS hosting, like connecting to GitHub automatically for git push deploys, SSL certificates, reverse proxying and custom domain support, and best of all, having support for Heroku style buildpacks as well as Dockerfiles. I've been quite happy with it, the creator has a Discord and responds to issues very quickly. With regards to non-self-hosted options, I did try out Render, Fly.io and Railway but I found that their free servers were too anemic. I was compiling a Rust backend and it simply could not compile on their free servers. On Hetzner, for 5 bucks I could get a 2 AMD vCPU and 2 GB RAM machine that was sufficient to compile my Rust apps in a way that the non-self-hosted ones were not. I have a JS frontend app that works fine though but I wanted to keep everything under the same VPS, plus I can run other types of self-hosted services on it too, like Plausible analytics and a Ghost blog. I'm not sure if those are allowed on non-self-hosted options. All in all, it costs me 5 bucks a month, and I never have to worry about sudden upcharges for traffic à la AWS as in the very worst, my VPS goes down for a while. I'm now running about 20 different services on this 5 dollar box including databases and applications as well as other services, works just fine.

jtsiskin 4y ago
What did coolify have that caprover didn’t?
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Better UI, more streamlined GitHub integration (I could not for the life of me get CapRover's integration to work), Docker compose support
Existenceblinks 4y ago
Hesitate to tell that Fly is the only good option since they won't hibernate your instances, and have a reasonable free db and bandwidth quota .. unlike Render (almost not count as free plan, more like some free trial) I'm fearing folks could abuse Fly and they could start to let it go..

arcturus17 4y ago

Does anyone have a link to a good analysis about the "death" of Heroku? Say, a good Ben Thompson style piece explaining how it all was subsumed into Salesforce and failed as a standalone service.

jrochkind1 4y ago
I feel like nobody external really totally understands it. Heroku kept going fine for some years after the initial salesforce purchase in 2011 (heroku's real launch wasn't even until 2009, so arguably most of the "golden" years were post-salesforce... ) I would be very interested to see a balance sheet, like how much revenue and how much profit for heroku specifically, over time. But that's known to nobody outside of salesforce so far as I know. Neither is how their staffing may or may not have changed over time. We have seen heroku kind of stagnating, and maybe having more technical problems, which they handle without the professional polish we had previously expected, and now get rid of free tier -- and there have been a few pieces kind of saying this, but what I'm interested in is... why? What's happened? I have seen various people speculate, including that it may have been doing quite fine well in the black as an independent unit, but salesforce has always wanted it to be more "synergistic" with their other business than it has been, and just wasn't interested in investing in it. But maybe it hasn't been that profitable? not sure anyone publicly really knows?
Rastonbury 4y ago
They wanted to go into Cloud if you read the press release, it must have been a pure diversification play albeit poorly thought out. Heroku caters to hobbyists/students/small business, it would've taken massive effort to turn it into the next AWS. There is almost zero overlap with their main CRM product and PaaS, totally different stakeholders. Whats worse is that they served different segments. Enterprise buyers spending 6 digits on Salesforce are not going to host on Heroku. Hobbyists/indie projects are not going to have sales teams that even need a cheap CRM let alone SFDC. There's almost no cross sell potential. Heroku probably turned into a black hole on their balance sheet. Post M&A Integration wise there are many accounts of Heroku first employees resisting the corporatisation of the organization, I believe all the founders eventually left a few years after. It was ultimately probably a value destructive acquisition, left alone imagine what Heroku could have been. Thinking about this is pretty sad. The product is still after all these year almost like 'magic' vis a vis upcoming competitors (Render/Fly). Beyond its products, Heroku was THE gateway for students and learners to spin up an app almost immediately, helping them become professional developers

version_five 4y ago

To be fair, I have had quite a few emails form Heroku telling me to move my stuff. Even after I thought it was already shut down, I keep getting emails. Everything I have on there is 5+ year old hobby things that I won't bother hosting elsewhere, it's nice to know they are paying more attention than I am to my projects' fates

reaperducer 4y ago
I have had quite a few emails form Heroku telling me to move my stuff. Heroku's warning emails are how I found out two things: - That I'm still the administrative contact for a former employer's production environment. - That my former employer is using a free tier for its public-facing web site. Ethically, I should let the company know is web site is about to go offline. But it's a start-up run like a fiefdom and the founder tells all departing employees that if they contact anyone at the company, he'll sic the (imaginary) lawyers on them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- richbell 4y ago
  That's hilarious; I'd heavily encourage you to remove this comment, just in case the lawyers turn out to be real. :)

neilv 4y ago

I hope no one is rushing over the 4.5-day US holiday weekend to do a last-minute migration or backup.

ryanSrich 4y ago
To be fair, Heroku has been sending reminders for this every week for at least a month.
Rapzid 4y ago
Yeah, Monday's are the worst days already so the Monday after Thanksgiving week haha.

jorgesborges 4y ago

This thread was fine with me until I considered Vercel might do the same thing in five years with their free tier.

mythz 4y ago

For alternatives we can recommend Hetzner US Cloud [1] which was the best US Cloud provider we've found that works out to be an order of magnitude less expensive than equivalent specs on Azure/AWS and also includes 20TB free bandwidth that would cost a fortune in AWS/Azure's artificially inflated egress costs [2]. The UX behind managing instances is delightfully pleasant where new instances are available faster than any other cloud provider we've used, within seconds of creating an instance you can immediately login with your configured SSH keys. Another nice feature is being able to "rescale" your instance to higher specs after a restart [3], so you can confidentially start with a small instance that just meets your current workload knowing that you can easily scale up your instances as your workload increases. AWS RDS was the only critical service keeping us on AWS, a service we no longer need in our new Apps which we're building with SQLite thanks to the effortless replication in Litestream [4] that we're using to replicate to Cloudflare R2 - another great value alternative S3 alternative with $0 egress fees [5] where you can get even greater value & performance when hosting behind their free CDN. [1] https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud [2] https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-provider https://servicestack.net/blog/finding-best-us-value-cloud-pr... [3] https://bizanosa.com/how-to-upgrade-resize-hetzner-cloud-server/ https://bizanosa.com/how-to-upgrade-resize-hetzner-cloud-ser... [4] https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/litestream [5] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/ https://www.cloudflare.com/products/r2/

hardwaresofton 4y ago
If you're considering using Hetzner I'd also like to humbly recommend you try/sign up for Nimbus[0] -- I'm building a managed service provider for people running on Hetzner, and basic cache support will be out within the week. If you want services like Redis on a semi-managed provider like Hetzner but don't want to write the bash scripts/Terraform/etc or hook up networking/TLS and run it yourself, Nimbus is for you. [0]: https://nimbusws.com https://nimbusws.com

akmittal 4y ago

Now that Heroku free tier is not available, here are a few alternatives Serverless and edge functions: Deno, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare. Databases: Planetscale, Supabase, Cockroach, Fauna, Upstash. Services: Fly, Railway, Render. https://mobile.twitter.com/Ak_Mittal/status/1567175784229650432 https://mobile.twitter.com/Ak_Mittal/status/1567175784229650...

phas0ruk 4y ago

I’ve been using render.com. Pretty good alternative.

anyfactor 4y ago

Gave up on PAAS and decided to switch to a VPS. I enjoy the comfort of a persistent storage.

anyfactor 4y ago

Thank you very much. I forgot about this.

messutied 4y ago

I didn’t receive any emails from Heroku about this, thank you so much for this reminder. Saved us a lot of headaches.

matus_congrady 4y ago

Hi. Please take my oppinion with a grain of salt, as I might be biased since I'm a founder at a competing service. In recent years, there was a significant amount of startups/bootstraped companies that tried to make application deployment easier, similar to Heroku. A lot of them were trying to get as much users as possible using a very generous offering. A lot of the times, this use-growth was fueled by a VC money, and the only metric that mattered was user/customer growth. But then came the "cooling" at the private markets. VCs are looking not only at the user-growth, but also at the cash flow. A lot of the very generous offerings that were possible only thanks to the VC funding will eventually disappear. I believe that what's currently happening with Heroku will happen to a lot of other Paas/BaaS startups. They will need to transform to a cash-flow positive business. Similarly to what Heroku is transforming to (a "cash cow": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_cow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_cow). A lot of other PaaS providers will need to increase their prices to stay cash-flow positive. A portion of them will need to cancel or reduce the generousity of their free offereings. The margin of these companies is usually possible thanks to 2 things: - the infrastructure resources they provide is slightly (10-100%) more expensive than the underlying infrastructure they run you workloads on - they use more cost efficient hardware (e.g. databases running on 3rd gen SSD disks) to run your workloads. Since these companies are renting raw hardware, on which they run your workloads (and are not using cloud-provider-native services, such as RDS), they need to hire experienced operators able to run and manage those workloads in production. This (for obvious reasons) is not exactly easy, and requires a lot of experienced talent with operational experience. Hiring those people is very hard, as these experts are not usually available on the market. This leaves us with with the obvious problem: Are the operators of the given PaaS provider really able to run your production workloads? Are they able to to withstand all the issues that may arise? Don't get me wrong. There definitely are companies (the most succesful) able to hire very capable talent (such as https://supabase.io https://supabase.io), but this definitely isn't the case for all of those PaaS providers. And I believe that these companies will need to increase their prices (and be less lucrative for their customers) or changes their business model. This is something that we at stacktape.com built our business case on. We took a different path. We just wanted to make the existing (AWS) offerings 2 orders of magnitue easier to use, so that any developer (withou Cloud or DevOps experience) can use them productively. We're not running your workloads for you. We are just making AWS services (run by experienced operators) significantly easier to consume (97% less difficult, so that any developer can do the job). For that, we're charging 30%->20% of the AWS infrastructure costs managed by us premium. This also means that you are not restricted to our platform, but can easily extend your infrastructure by any AWS service (using AWS CloufFormation or AWS CDK). AWS offers areasonably generous free tier, and Stacktape won't charge you for any resources withing the free tier. We're launching our v2 soon (~1-2 weeks), and if the offering we have sounds interesting, we'll be very happy to hear your thoughts.

carmenhchung 4y ago

Hey everyone! A couple of pretty decent Heroku alternatives have already been mentioned, but in case anyone is looking for another platform that offers super easy backend service deployment and scaling, Fl0 (https://fl0.com/ https://fl0.com/) is going to release to the public in a couple of months. You can sign up to be on the waitlist for access here: https://fl0.com/contact?utm_campaign=hn https://fl0.com/contact?utm_campaign=hn (Disclaimer: I work at Fl0.)

ptman 4y ago

Depending on how your software is architected, there are other free clouds available: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/