4 ms·

> 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

> 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’ve read so many of these stories now that I understand why Heroku is phasing out the free tier. It’s kind of fascinating to see how some engineers see free tier limits as an optimization target. I wonder how many engineering hours across the industry went into arbitrarily keeping services small enough to fit in the free tier.

josephcsible 4y ago
> I’ve read so many of these stories now that I understand why Heroku is phasing out the free tier. To me, those stories seem like good arguments for reducing the usage limits of the free tier, but not getting rid of it entirely.
- nomilk 4y ago
  You don't need to profit off every single customer. Many business models make 90%+ of their revenue from 'whales' and crumbs from the rest. Optimising for consistent margin from every single customer could be a waste of time; a distraction, and could even hurt a business.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Why do all the big clouds have generous free tiers with reasonable limits then?
yumraj 4y ago
> I wonder how many engineering hours across the industry went into arbitrarily keeping services small enough to fit in the free tier. Why is that wrong? If everyone optimized their services and applications like it used to be in the past, will substantially bring down compute and memory requirements and reduce overall bloat.
- dcow 4y ago
  It’s not, strictly? It’s just more of a tragedy of the commons.
  - slang800 4y ago
    Heroku is not "the commons", they're a company and people are playing within the rules that they set out.
    - brhsagain 4y ago
      This has to be the analog of "the first amendment only protects you from government restrictions on speech" in this conversation.
      - slang800 4y ago
        Heroku can protect itself from abuse of its free tier by changing the rules - which they eventually did. I'm sure that the only reason why they kept the free tier as long as they did was because it brought in enough users (who were eventually converted into paying customers) to be worth the cost.
    - xeromal 4y ago
      I think it's more of sadness that abuse took it away. It would be nice if hobbyists only used the free tiers and not successful businesses.
    - CactusOnFire 4y ago
      This is definitely the "software engineer" way of conceptualizing and solving the problem. You have discrete limitations, you optimize around them. This is clearly not "working at intended" though and I'd like to believe everyone knows that, including the people building this system.
    - dcow 4y ago
      Of course it’s well within Heroku’s domain to structure their services however they choose. The tragedy is that if everyone uses the platform’s free tier to maximum utility in a self beneficial way, it exhausts the resources available and the common utility ceases to exist. So it’s not ethically wrong as was my response to the GGP. But it’s functionally “wrong” because it exhausts the common resource.
devoutsalsa 4y ago
I like free shit that doesn’t suck.

josephcsible 4y ago

> I’ve read so many of these stories now that I understand why Heroku is phasing out the free tier. To me, those stories seem like good arguments for reducing the usage limits of the free tier, but not getting rid of it entirely.

nomilk 4y ago
You don't need to profit off every single customer. Many business models make 90%+ of their revenue from 'whales' and crumbs from the rest. Optimising for consistent margin from every single customer could be a waste of time; a distraction, and could even hurt a business.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Why do all the big clouds have generous free tiers with reasonable limits then?

yumraj 4y ago

> I wonder how many engineering hours across the industry went into arbitrarily keeping services small enough to fit in the free tier. Why is that wrong? If everyone optimized their services and applications like it used to be in the past, will substantially bring down compute and memory requirements and reduce overall bloat.

dcow 4y ago
It’s not, strictly? It’s just more of a tragedy of the commons.
- slang800 4y ago
  Heroku is not "the commons", they're a company and people are playing within the rules that they set out.
  - brhsagain 4y ago
    This has to be the analog of "the first amendment only protects you from government restrictions on speech" in this conversation.
    - slang800 4y ago
      Heroku can protect itself from abuse of its free tier by changing the rules - which they eventually did. I'm sure that the only reason why they kept the free tier as long as they did was because it brought in enough users (who were eventually converted into paying customers) to be worth the cost.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    I think it's more of sadness that abuse took it away. It would be nice if hobbyists only used the free tiers and not successful businesses.
  - CactusOnFire 4y ago
    This is definitely the "software engineer" way of conceptualizing and solving the problem. You have discrete limitations, you optimize around them. This is clearly not "working at intended" though and I'd like to believe everyone knows that, including the people building this system.
  - dcow 4y ago
    Of course it’s well within Heroku’s domain to structure their services however they choose. The tragedy is that if everyone uses the platform’s free tier to maximum utility in a self beneficial way, it exhausts the resources available and the common utility ceases to exist. So it’s not ethically wrong as was my response to the GGP. But it’s functionally “wrong” because it exhausts the common resource.

devoutsalsa 4y ago

I like free shit that doesn’t suck.