We've used the exact same reasoning with our app Denso. The costs will definitely not make sense if/when we hit scale, but in my mind that's a good problem to h

We've used the exact same reasoning with our app Denso. The costs will definitely not make sense if/when we hit scale, but in my mind that's a good problem to have. The advantage with Heroku over services such as GAE is that no component of our stack is proprietary (as opposed to the BigTable data store available on GAE) and hence, moving hosting providers is slightly more straightforward. The Heroku Add-ons marketplace is also a huge competitive advantage that they provide over other services. There are plenty of examples where we've relied on third-party addons to begin with (for e.g. Embedly) but once the costs of using such third-party services increased (due to increased traffic), we switched over to our own hand-made solutions and we were able to bring down costs substantially.