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I lament what could have been with heroku. I did some back of the envelope calculations for what it would have cost for my own startup to run on it and it came

I lament what could have been with heroku. I did some back of the envelope calculations for what it would have cost for my own startup to run on it and it came out to significantly more than what it costs us on aws INCLUDING our dedicated devops guy. They really killed its utility for anything bigger than a hobby project.

sleepy_keita 1y ago
Yeah. It used to be the go-to for starting simple projects. We have quite a bit of other options in this space now, though - GH Pages, Cloudflare workers, Vercel, Netlify, etc etc...
- cpursley 1y ago
  Those are static site providers. For actual server paas that can run docker containers, render.com and fly.io are what heroku could have evolved to.
catlover76 1y ago
> I lament what could have been with heroku. I did some back of the envelope calculations for what it would have cost for my own startup to run on it and it came out to significantly more than what it costs us on aws INCLUDING our dedicated devops guy. That's...nuts. o_O Are you doing something special, do you guys already have a lot of traffic?
- dtech 1y ago
  No, Heroku is just bonkers expensive
  - catlover76 1y ago
    [dead]
czhu12 1y ago
This is exactly why we built https://canine.sh https://canine.sh, to try to rebuild Heroku in the open source We begged heroku for years to lower their prices but they just kept increasing it. I even showed a rep a side by side comparison of heroku vs raw AWS costs and it was 8x. Absolutely couldn’t justify
- gosukiwi 1y ago
  Isn't Dokku doing that already?
  - ptman 1y ago
    There are several https://gist.github.com/ptman/1b9e3a992e6c8aeecc86b5f1fd1c5f61 https://gist.github.com/ptman/1b9e3a992e6c8aeecc86b5f1fd1c5f...
  - debarshri 1y ago
    Community compiled list of Heroku alternatives. https://github.com/debarshibasak/awesome-paas https://github.com/debarshibasak/awesome-paas
kirillkosolapov 1y ago
As the founder of a local cloud very similar to Heroku, I understand Heroku's limitations. It's a balance between control and convenience. The simpler everything is, the better it's suited for small projects, but the less control you have for complex projects. Unless you're just running a hobby project, you'll be using Kubernetes and similar services with full control and the complexity that comes with it. Heroku uses AWS, which means they can't make computations cheaper, otherwise the economics don't add up. In my experience, we (I won't advertise) have prices several times lower, and we try very hard to accommodate more serious projects, but 99% of projects are small and consume less than 200 MB of RAM. This is simply the nature of this market and product.
- cpursley 1y ago
  I’ll bite, what’s your product. I’m always interested in these types of platforms.
- mycall 11mo ago
  Is there some layers that run over kubernetes that makes it work similar to heroku in ease? That would either be the best or the worst of both worlds, unsure.
netdevphoenix 11mo ago
It's hard to compare, surely as heroku is basically aws + virtual 24/7 generic dev ops guy. Aws will always be cheaper because heroku itself runs on it. Afaik, the USP of heroku is deployment ease for small/medium projects. If you need complex setups, you need to roll your own in aws.

sleepy_keita 1y ago

Yeah. It used to be the go-to for starting simple projects. We have quite a bit of other options in this space now, though - GH Pages, Cloudflare workers, Vercel, Netlify, etc etc...

cpursley 1y ago
Those are static site providers. For actual server paas that can run docker containers, render.com and fly.io are what heroku could have evolved to.

catlover76 1y ago

> I lament what could have been with heroku. I did some back of the envelope calculations for what it would have cost for my own startup to run on it and it came out to significantly more than what it costs us on aws INCLUDING our dedicated devops guy. That's...nuts. o_O Are you doing something special, do you guys already have a lot of traffic?

dtech 1y ago
No, Heroku is just bonkers expensive
- catlover76 1y ago
  [dead]

czhu12 1y ago

This is exactly why we built https://canine.sh https://canine.sh, to try to rebuild Heroku in the open source We begged heroku for years to lower their prices but they just kept increasing it. I even showed a rep a side by side comparison of heroku vs raw AWS costs and it was 8x. Absolutely couldn’t justify

gosukiwi 1y ago
Isn't Dokku doing that already?
- ptman 1y ago
  There are several https://gist.github.com/ptman/1b9e3a992e6c8aeecc86b5f1fd1c5f61 https://gist.github.com/ptman/1b9e3a992e6c8aeecc86b5f1fd1c5f...
- debarshri 1y ago
  Community compiled list of Heroku alternatives. https://github.com/debarshibasak/awesome-paas https://github.com/debarshibasak/awesome-paas

kirillkosolapov 1y ago

As the founder of a local cloud very similar to Heroku, I understand Heroku's limitations. It's a balance between control and convenience. The simpler everything is, the better it's suited for small projects, but the less control you have for complex projects. Unless you're just running a hobby project, you'll be using Kubernetes and similar services with full control and the complexity that comes with it. Heroku uses AWS, which means they can't make computations cheaper, otherwise the economics don't add up. In my experience, we (I won't advertise) have prices several times lower, and we try very hard to accommodate more serious projects, but 99% of projects are small and consume less than 200 MB of RAM. This is simply the nature of this market and product.

cpursley 1y ago
I’ll bite, what’s your product. I’m always interested in these types of platforms.
mycall 11mo ago
Is there some layers that run over kubernetes that makes it work similar to heroku in ease? That would either be the best or the worst of both worlds, unsure.

netdevphoenix 11mo ago

It's hard to compare, surely as heroku is basically aws + virtual 24/7 generic dev ops guy. Aws will always be cheaper because heroku itself runs on it. Afaik, the USP of heroku is deployment ease for small/medium projects. If you need complex setups, you need to roll your own in aws.