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Just saw Nate Berkopec who does a lot of rails performance stuff posting about the same idea yesterday saying Heroku is 25-50x price for performance which is so
by jdprgm 1y ago
Just saw Nate Berkopec who does a lot of rails performance stuff posting about the same idea yesterday saying Heroku is 25-50x price for performance which is so insane. They clearly have zero interest in competing on price.
It's a shame they don't just license all their software stack at a reasonable price with a similar model like Sidekiq and let you sort out actually decent hardware. It's insane to consider Heroku if anything has gotten more expensive and worse compared to a decade ago yet in comparison similar priced server hardware has gotten WAY better of a decade. $50 for a dyno with 1 GB of ram in 2025 is robbery. It's even worse considering running a standard rails app hasn't changed dramatically from a resources perspective and if anything has become more efficient. It's comical to consider how many developers are shipping apps on Heroku for hundreds of dollars a month on machines with worse performance/resources than the macbook they are developing it on.
It's the standard playback that damn near everything in society is going for though just jacking prices and targeting the wealthiest least price sensitive percentiles instead of making good products at fair prices for the masses.
- czhu12 1y ago> It's a shame they don't just license all their software stack at a reasonable price with a similar model like Sidekiq and let you sort out actually decent hardware We built and open sourced https://canine.sh https://canine.sh for exactly that reason. There’s no reason PaaS providers should be charging such a giant markup over already marked up cloud providers.
- nicoburns 1y agoThis looks decent for what it is. I feel like there are umpteen solutions for easy self-hosted compute (and tbh even a plain Linux VM isn't too bad to manage). The main reason to use a PAAS provider is a managed database with built-in backups.
- gregsadetsky 1y agoFully agreed - our recommendation is to /not/ run your prod Postgres db yourself, but use one of the many great dedicated options out there - Crunchy Data, Neon, Supabase, or AWS RDS..!
- bcrosby95 1y agoIt really depends upon how much data you have. If its enough to just dump then go crazy. If it isn't its a bit more trouble. Regardless, you're going to have a much easier time developing your app if your datastore access latency is submillisecond rather than tens of milliseconds. So that extra trouble might be worth it...
- bragr 1y agoYou're running at a pretty small scale if running your database locally for sub-milisecond latency is practical. The database solution provided by the DBA team in a data center is going to have about the same latency as RDS or equivalent. Typical intra-datacenter network latency alone is going to be 1-3ms.
- bcrosby95 1y agoThey were talking about using things like Supabase, not just RDS. Also, "small scale" means different things to different people. Given the full topic at hand, I would call it "nano scale". Depending upon your specific schema, you can serve tens of thousands of queries per second with a single server on modern hardware, which is way more than enough for the vast majority of workloads.
- czhu12 1y agoIts the flexibility and power of Kubernetes that I think is incredible. Scaling to multiple nodes is trivial, if your entire data plane is blown away, the recovery is trivial. You can also self host almost any open source service without any fuss, and perform internal networking with telepresence. (For example, if you want to run an internal metabase that is not available on public internet, you can just run `telepresence connect`, and then visit the private instance at metabase.svc.cluster.local). Canine tries to leverage all the best practices and pre-existing tools that are already out there. But agreed, business critical databases probably shouldn't belong on Kubernetes.
- odie5533 1y agoDoes it run Sentry and I can send logs, metrics, and traces to it, and the queries are fast?
- altairprime 1y agoHeroku is pricing for “# of FTE headcount that can be terminated for switching to Heroku”; in that sense, this article’s $3000/mo bill is well below 1.0 FTE/month at U.S. pricing, so it’s not interesting to Heroku to address. I’m not defending this pricing lens, but it’s why their pricing is so high: if you aren’t switching to Heroku to layoff at least 1-2 FTE of salary per billing period, or using Heroku to replace a competitor’s equivalent replacement thereof, Heroku’s value assigned to you as a customer is net negative and they’d rather you went elsewhere. They can’t slam the door shut on the small fry, or else the unicorns would start up elsewhere, but they can set the pricing in FTE-terms and VCs will pay it for their moonshots without breaking a sweat.
- sreekanth850 1y agoCanine looks cool man.
- teiferer 1y agoIt's insane how much my local shop charges for an oil change, I can do it much cheaper myself! It's insane how much a restaurant charges for a decent steak, I can do it much cheaper myself! ...!
- jdprgm 1y agoI know you mean this sarcastically but I actually 100% agree with this particular on the steak point. Especially with beef prices at all time record highs and restaurant inflation being out of control post pandemic. It takes so much of the enjoyment out of things for me if I feel i'm being ripped off left and right.
- grebc 1y agoWhere’s the beef inflation? Local butcher has prime rib fillet $30 AUD/KG cut to your liking.
- degamad 1y agoMy understanding is that here in Oz we get access to cheaper beef than the rest of the world...
- rascul 1y agoOne also doesn't get shamed by the steak snobs if you have different steak preferences.
- waynesonfire 1y agoOr having to cut the steak with a serrated "steak" knife that tears the meat.
- swat535 1y agoWhat you're missing here is that companies happily pay the premium to Heroku because it lets them focus on building the product and generating business rather than wasting precious engineering time managing infra. By the time the product is a success and reaches a scale where it becomes cost prohibitive, they have enough resources to expand or migrate away anyway. I suppose for solo devs it might be cheaper to setup a box for fun, but even then, I would argue that not everyone enjoys doing devops and prefers spending their time elsewhere.
- layoric 1y ago> $50 for a dyno with 1 GB of ram in 2025 is robbery AWS isn't much better honestly.. $50/month gets you an m7a.medium which is 1 vCPU (not core) and 4GB of RAM. Yes that's more memory but any wonder why AWS is making money hand-over-fist..
- electroly 1y agom7a doesn't use HyperThreading; 1 vCPU is a full dedicated core. To compare to Heroku's standard dynos (which are shared hosting) you want the t3a family which is also shared, and much cheaper.
- layoric 1y agoI must be confused, my understanding was m7a was 4th generation Epyc (Genoa, Bergamo and Siena) which I believe all have 2 threads per core no?
- electroly 1y agoYou're not confused--AWS either gets custom chips without it, or they disable the SMT. I'm not sure which. Here's where AWS talks about it: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/m7a/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/m7a/ > One of the major differences between M7a instances and the previous generations of instances, such as M6a instances, is their vCPU to physical processor core mapping. Every vCPU on a M7a instance is a physical CPU core. This means there is no Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT). By contrast, every vCPU on prior generations such as M6a instances is a thread of a CPU core. My wild guess is they're disabling it. For Intel instance families they loudly praise their custom Intel processors, but this page does not contain the word "custom" anywhere.
- bearjaws 1y agoThat is assuming you need that 1 core 24/7, you can get 2 core / 8gb for $43, this will most likely fit 90% of workloads (steady traffic with spikes, or 9-5 cadence). If you reserve that instance you can get it for 40% cheaper, or get 4 cores instead. Yes it's more expensive than OVH but you also get everything AWS to offer.
- condiment 1y agoJacked up prices isn't what is happening here. There is a psychological effect that Heroku and other cloud vendors are (wittingly or unwittingly) the beneficiary of. Customer expectations are anchored in the price they pay when they start using the service, and without deliberate effort, those expectations change in _linear_ fashion. Humans think in linear terms, while actual compute hardware improvements are exponential. Heroku's pricing has _remained the same_ for at least seven years, while hardware has improved exponentially. So when you look at their pricing and see a scam, what you're actually doing is comparing a 2025 anchor to a mid-2010s price that exists to retain revenue. At the big cloud vendors, they differentiate customers by adding obstacles to unlocking new hardware performance in the form of reservations and updated SKUs. There's deliberate customer action that needs to take place. Heroku doesn't appear to have much competition, so they keep their prices locked and we get to read an article like this whenever a new engineer discovers just how capable modern hardware is.
- rtpg 1y agoI mean Heroku is also offering all of the ancillary stuff around their product. It's not literally "just" hosting. It's pretty nice to not have to manage a kube cluster, to get stuff like ephemeral QA envs and the like, etc.... Heroku has obviously stagnated now but their stack is _very cool_ for if you have a fairly simple system but still want all the nice parts of a mode developed ops system. It almost lets you get away with not having an ops team for quite a while. I don't know any other provider that is low-effort "decent" ops (Fly seems to directionally want to be new Heroku but is still missing a _lot_ in my book, though it also has a lot)
- maccard 1y agoI think it’s easy to forget how much you get with a modern setup like this, and how much work it is to maintain it. If you’re at a big corp, the team who maintains this stuff is larger than most mid corp’s engineering departments. For a solo person, it’s fine. But if you have 10-30 engineers, it’s a lot of work, and paying heroku $1000/mo is significantly cheaper than having even a junior engineer spend 40% of their time on keeping up.
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- tonyhart7 1y agoYeah, I choose railway app for my PaaS hosting for this reason
- herval 1y agoHeroku is the Vercel of Rails: people will pay a fortune for it simply because it works. This has always been their business model, so it’s not really a new development. There’s little competition since the demand isn’t explosive and the margin is thin, so you end up with stagnation
- echelon 1y agoVercel should have a ton of competition on account of the frontend space being much larger than Heroku's market. Netlify sets the same prices. Just throw it into a cloud bucket from CI and be done with it.
- kazanz 1y agoYou'd be surprised. There are very few because it takes a lot more work to build reliable systems across mid-market cloud providers (flakey APIs, missing functionality, etc). Plus you need to know the idiosyncrasies of all the various frameworks + build systems. That said, they are emerging. I'm actually working on a drop-in Vercel competitor at https://www.sherpa.sh https://www.sherpa.sh. We're 70% lower cost by running on EU based CDN and dedicated servers (Hetzner, etc). But we had to build the relationships to solve all the above challenges first.
- Onavo 1y agoI am not sure what's there to license. The hard and expensive part is in the labor to keep everything running. You are paying to make DevSecOps Somebody Else's Problem. You are paying for A Solution. You are not paying for software. There are plenty of Heroku clones mentioned in this thread.
- __mharrison__ 1y agoNow I know why the teaching platform I use is trying to kick me off... Every other time I login to the admin site I get a Heroku error.