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> generous free level of service, This is likely the biggest culprit for a lot of these companies. Too many of us have grown up in the culture of getting hos

> generous free level of service, This is likely the biggest culprit for a lot of these companies. Too many of us have grown up in the culture of getting hosting and platform for "free", but at some point the companies providing it still have to pay the bills. There has to be a better pricing model that let's someone deploy their relatively small, low-traffic app for $10s/month or even $200 - $300 / year for the basics (e.g. - Heroku free tier type capabilities). It's not going to save these companies but it would limit excessive growth of their own costs from a free tier while at the same time still being affordable for 1 - 2 person teams who are trying to get something in front of users.

karmelapple 4y ago
I agree. And I know this is unpopular, but I think none of these companies should be expected to have a free tier. A low-cost tier? Certainly. Perhaps even a free trial with a credit card? Great. But our team, who has used Heroku for over a decade, got bit multiple times by Heroku having a free tier. Why were we impacted by other apps? Because Heroku’s load balancers are shared amongst all their apps. That includes all the sketchy apps running on the platform. If Heroku could somehow isolate us from everyone else? Great - and they offered that for awhile with a reasonably-priced Add-On supported by them called SSL Endpoint. It cost about $15/month and put us into a pool that was shared with other folks willing to spend that much per month to run their app. I understand that’s not great for a hobby project. But for those of us trying to run a large product on Heroku and not have to spend multiple extra thousands of dollars every month for a Heroku Private Space, this was a great way of pooling: put a small fee in place for one pool of resources. Not many malware writers or other misbehaving app creators will probably want to spend that much per month. But they axed that a few years ago. Only a couple months after when we were thrown back into the load balancer pool with all the other free apps, one of the IPs was marked as spam and we had to figure out a kind of janky solution. Additionally, Heroku seemingly spent a ton of resources on free tier support, malware fighting, etc. I hope to see more features on Heroku since they’ve dropped that support… but I haven’t seen much evidence of that in roughly six months since they did that. But we’ll see.
- trilobyte 4y ago
  Nice write up! I wish I shared your enthusiasm for where Heroku could go but I have a few friends at Salesforce I've asked about how they see Heroku internally and it really doesn't seem like it is going to get much love. Hope to be wrong though.
  - karmelapple 4y ago
    Thanks! I have talked with two Heroku folks who say (to me, a paying customer of Heroku Enterprise) that Heroku is absolutely in active development. I let them know they need to demonstrate that to me. They have a roadmap [1], but it seems to have barely anything moving forward, including some really important concepts like http/2 support. [1] https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130 https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      Well, they’re owned by bigcorp now right? Everything probably takes 10 times as long for no good reason.
- ignoramous 4y ago
  > And I know this is unpopular, but I think none of these companies should be expected to have a free tier. Free tier is a GTM motion which makes sense for novel tech products like Fly because: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle
- cowl 4y ago
  Most of these platform have reached their critical mass to stay in business (and time to attract the customers like you) only because of the free tier. Sorry but even a low cost tier is too much for most wanting to give a try to a new infrastructure/stack. Most of these adoptions come from hobby projects trying it first and then recommending to use it in a professional setting. In a professional setting yes. you can afford to pay to low cost to evaluate it but you cant afford the time to do so. So they always rightly offer a trade of time to evaluate for the free cost. This is what actually brings the initial customers.
mike_hearn 4y ago
If you don't need all that much, Oracle Cloud does offer a free tier for VMs. You get 2 AMD VMs or 4 ARM VMs and even a free Oracle DB, object storage, load balancing and monitoring. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ It's still just a free tier so you can't expect good support, but, it's there.
dcow 4y ago
Check out DO app platform. It’s literally exactly what you describe.
mike_d 4y ago
All of the forum posts and howtos on spinning up an AdGuard or similar service on Fly.io instead of a local Raspberry Pi probably didn't help things. While it does drive user growth, it isn't the type of users you want. One of the hardest lessons every business needs to learn is how to say no to the users they don't need.

karmelapple 4y ago

I agree. And I know this is unpopular, but I think none of these companies should be expected to have a free tier. A low-cost tier? Certainly. Perhaps even a free trial with a credit card? Great. But our team, who has used Heroku for over a decade, got bit multiple times by Heroku having a free tier. Why were we impacted by other apps? Because Heroku’s load balancers are shared amongst all their apps. That includes all the sketchy apps running on the platform. If Heroku could somehow isolate us from everyone else? Great - and they offered that for awhile with a reasonably-priced Add-On supported by them called SSL Endpoint. It cost about $15/month and put us into a pool that was shared with other folks willing to spend that much per month to run their app. I understand that’s not great for a hobby project. But for those of us trying to run a large product on Heroku and not have to spend multiple extra thousands of dollars every month for a Heroku Private Space, this was a great way of pooling: put a small fee in place for one pool of resources. Not many malware writers or other misbehaving app creators will probably want to spend that much per month. But they axed that a few years ago. Only a couple months after when we were thrown back into the load balancer pool with all the other free apps, one of the IPs was marked as spam and we had to figure out a kind of janky solution. Additionally, Heroku seemingly spent a ton of resources on free tier support, malware fighting, etc. I hope to see more features on Heroku since they’ve dropped that support… but I haven’t seen much evidence of that in roughly six months since they did that. But we’ll see.

trilobyte 4y ago
Nice write up! I wish I shared your enthusiasm for where Heroku could go but I have a few friends at Salesforce I've asked about how they see Heroku internally and it really doesn't seem like it is going to get much love. Hope to be wrong though.
- karmelapple 4y ago
  Thanks! I have talked with two Heroku folks who say (to me, a paying customer of Heroku Enterprise) that Heroku is absolutely in active development. I let them know they need to demonstrate that to me. They have a roadmap [1], but it seems to have barely anything moving forward, including some really important concepts like http/2 support. [1] https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130 https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    Well, they’re owned by bigcorp now right? Everything probably takes 10 times as long for no good reason.
ignoramous 4y ago
> And I know this is unpopular, but I think none of these companies should be expected to have a free tier. Free tier is a GTM motion which makes sense for novel tech products like Fly because: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle
cowl 4y ago
Most of these platform have reached their critical mass to stay in business (and time to attract the customers like you) only because of the free tier. Sorry but even a low cost tier is too much for most wanting to give a try to a new infrastructure/stack. Most of these adoptions come from hobby projects trying it first and then recommending to use it in a professional setting. In a professional setting yes. you can afford to pay to low cost to evaluate it but you cant afford the time to do so. So they always rightly offer a trade of time to evaluate for the free cost. This is what actually brings the initial customers.

mike_hearn 4y ago

If you don't need all that much, Oracle Cloud does offer a free tier for VMs. You get 2 AMD VMs or 4 ARM VMs and even a free Oracle DB, object storage, load balancing and monitoring. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ It's still just a free tier so you can't expect good support, but, it's there.

dcow 4y ago

Check out DO app platform. It’s literally exactly what you describe.

mike_d 4y ago

All of the forum posts and howtos on spinning up an AdGuard or similar service on Fly.io instead of a local Raspberry Pi probably didn't help things. While it does drive user growth, it isn't the type of users you want. One of the hardest lessons every business needs to learn is how to say no to the users they don't need.