17 ms·

What's the best alternative?

syx 9mo ago
Moved from heroku to fly.io three years ago and I don’t regret it, great platform occasionally goes down and requires a bit of attention but the support forum is great
- actsasbuffoon 9mo ago
  I had an issue with one of my Sprites (Fly.io also runs sprites.dev) and the CEO responded to me personally in less than 10 minutes. They got it fixed quickly. I was a free customer at the time. I pay for it happily now.
- an0malous 9mo ago
  It didn't seem quite as fire-and-forget as doing `Heroku create` when I tried to use it 3-4 years ago, especially the database setup. Do you use their Postgres offering?
  - syx 9mo ago
    No my one is a simple ruby sinatra app with no DB. Yeah unfortunately it wasn’t super reliable as heroku but they’re getting better at keeping the instances up
- mindwok 9mo ago
  Fly.io are absolute G’s. The product is awesome and the tech blogs they write are fantastic.
sm123 9mo ago
Build.io came out of this exact problem a few years ago (I joined in 25Q4) - trying to be what Heroku could have been if it had continued to evolve. We offer the same default simplicity/speed, but with the ability to go deeper once teams hit scale, cost, or workflow limits. Plus a pricing model that stays understandable and improves as teams scale rather than punishing them for it. Fair warning: the website is pretty light right now. It’s mostly a placeholder while we prep a broader push over the few months. Happy to answer questions here if helpful.
- satvikpendem 9mo ago
  Not to be confused with builder.io, or worse, builder.ai
- llIIllIIllIIl 9mo ago
  Do you care to show prices? The true benefit of heroku for me was really predictable pricing model. Build.io website doesn’t have it on mobile site at all. I don’t want to look at demo, i want to hook up my credit card, set a monthly budget and explore
  - runako 9mo ago
    FWIW it doesn't look like pricing or details of the service offerings are available on the desktop site, either.
  - sm123 9mo ago
    llIIllIIllIIl & runako give me an email on steven[at]build.io and I'll share. As mentioned, we stripped the site back while we overhaul and we certainly didn't expect this today!
    - naniwaduni 9mo ago
      To be clear, you just answered "Do you care to show prices?" with No.
      - sm123 9mo ago
        You’re right - reading that back, it comes across as a “no,” and that wasn’t my intent. We should show pricing, and we will. We temporarily stripped the site back while overhauling positioning and pricing, which is why it’s missing right now. That’s on us, not a stance against transparency. In the meantime, I’m more than happy to share pricing directly. At a high level on our pricing: - Current customers are on a mix of usage-based and fixed monthly plans, depending on their needs. We've found many of our customers love the fixed plan as it's a whole new level of predictability. - We’re generally architected to land well below Heroku’s Enterprise pricing and to be competitive with a IaaS. - We want pricing to get out of your way as you scale, so no big steps in pricing as you add services. - Databases are HA by default and support replication. - Pipelines and review apps don’t require hacks to avoid per-review-app database costs. Happy to answer specifics here or over email if helpful.
satvikpendem 9mo ago
If you like VPS, Hetzner with Dokploy. It works great, the UI has essentially all the features of Fly or Render that you'd use for deployment, like preview build URLs and environments.
- BoorishBears 9mo ago
  Very close to the worst alternative for people who actually need Heroku, but it won't stop people from plugging it to death and back.
  - satvikpendem 9mo ago
    Eh, no, depends on why you used Heroku in the first place. Way back when, I used it because the UI was dead simple and it Just Worked™. If I can replicate that with a VPS and have a good UI around it that takes care of everything, it's functionally the same to me.
    - BoorishBears 9mo ago
      "Depends on what you used it for" applies to just about any platform. Realistically, self-hosting the PaaS defeats the purpose of a PaaS for the crowd Heroku was attracting.
      - satvikpendem 9mo ago
        Heroku was one of the first to have that seamless UX, only after which others like Fly or Render or Railway came to copy it. I wager people were primarily attracted to that user experience and only minimally cared that it was fully hosted versus not, because there was also AWS at that time.
        BoorishBears 9mo ago
        How do you think self-hosting affects that seamless UX they value.
runako 9mo ago
Digital Ocean App Engine has the easy setup and GUI management that made Heroku popular.
moorow 9mo ago
We saw this coming (like most people) a while ago when Heroku started flaking without status updates, and moved part of our workload to Fly. We ended up moving off Fly as well (significant unreliability and just some very strange network load balancer issues that would cause us downtime) and went to Railway, and that's been fantastic so far. We've moved our whole workload onto it.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
bendangelo 9mo ago
Kamal works well
- patrickdavey 9mo ago
  Kamal is basically self hosting though right? So you have to take care of keeping the underlying os patched etc. With heroku you only needed to think about git push.. ?

syx 9mo ago

Moved from heroku to fly.io three years ago and I don’t regret it, great platform occasionally goes down and requires a bit of attention but the support forum is great

actsasbuffoon 9mo ago
I had an issue with one of my Sprites (Fly.io also runs sprites.dev) and the CEO responded to me personally in less than 10 minutes. They got it fixed quickly. I was a free customer at the time. I pay for it happily now.
an0malous 9mo ago
It didn't seem quite as fire-and-forget as doing `Heroku create` when I tried to use it 3-4 years ago, especially the database setup. Do you use their Postgres offering?
- syx 9mo ago
  No my one is a simple ruby sinatra app with no DB. Yeah unfortunately it wasn’t super reliable as heroku but they’re getting better at keeping the instances up
mindwok 9mo ago
Fly.io are absolute G’s. The product is awesome and the tech blogs they write are fantastic.

sm123 9mo ago

Build.io came out of this exact problem a few years ago (I joined in 25Q4) - trying to be what Heroku could have been if it had continued to evolve. We offer the same default simplicity/speed, but with the ability to go deeper once teams hit scale, cost, or workflow limits. Plus a pricing model that stays understandable and improves as teams scale rather than punishing them for it. Fair warning: the website is pretty light right now. It’s mostly a placeholder while we prep a broader push over the few months. Happy to answer questions here if helpful.

satvikpendem 9mo ago
Not to be confused with builder.io, or worse, builder.ai
llIIllIIllIIl 9mo ago
Do you care to show prices? The true benefit of heroku for me was really predictable pricing model. Build.io website doesn’t have it on mobile site at all. I don’t want to look at demo, i want to hook up my credit card, set a monthly budget and explore
- runako 9mo ago
  FWIW it doesn't look like pricing or details of the service offerings are available on the desktop site, either.
- sm123 9mo ago
  llIIllIIllIIl & runako give me an email on steven[at]build.io and I'll share. As mentioned, we stripped the site back while we overhaul and we certainly didn't expect this today!
  - naniwaduni 9mo ago
    To be clear, you just answered "Do you care to show prices?" with No.
    - sm123 9mo ago
      You’re right - reading that back, it comes across as a “no,” and that wasn’t my intent. We should show pricing, and we will. We temporarily stripped the site back while overhauling positioning and pricing, which is why it’s missing right now. That’s on us, not a stance against transparency. In the meantime, I’m more than happy to share pricing directly. At a high level on our pricing: - Current customers are on a mix of usage-based and fixed monthly plans, depending on their needs. We've found many of our customers love the fixed plan as it's a whole new level of predictability. - We’re generally architected to land well below Heroku’s Enterprise pricing and to be competitive with a IaaS. - We want pricing to get out of your way as you scale, so no big steps in pricing as you add services. - Databases are HA by default and support replication. - Pipelines and review apps don’t require hacks to avoid per-review-app database costs. Happy to answer specifics here or over email if helpful.

satvikpendem 9mo ago

If you like VPS, Hetzner with Dokploy. It works great, the UI has essentially all the features of Fly or Render that you'd use for deployment, like preview build URLs and environments.

BoorishBears 9mo ago
Very close to the worst alternative for people who actually need Heroku, but it won't stop people from plugging it to death and back.
- satvikpendem 9mo ago
  Eh, no, depends on why you used Heroku in the first place. Way back when, I used it because the UI was dead simple and it Just Worked™. If I can replicate that with a VPS and have a good UI around it that takes care of everything, it's functionally the same to me.
  - BoorishBears 9mo ago
    "Depends on what you used it for" applies to just about any platform. Realistically, self-hosting the PaaS defeats the purpose of a PaaS for the crowd Heroku was attracting.
    - satvikpendem 9mo ago
      Heroku was one of the first to have that seamless UX, only after which others like Fly or Render or Railway came to copy it. I wager people were primarily attracted to that user experience and only minimally cared that it was fully hosted versus not, because there was also AWS at that time.
      - BoorishBears 9mo ago
        How do you think self-hosting affects that seamless UX they value.

runako 9mo ago

Digital Ocean App Engine has the easy setup and GUI management that made Heroku popular.

moorow 9mo ago

We saw this coming (like most people) a while ago when Heroku started flaking without status updates, and moved part of our workload to Fly. We ended up moving off Fly as well (significant unreliability and just some very strange network load balancer issues that would cause us downtime) and went to Railway, and that's been fantastic so far. We've moved our whole workload onto it.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

bendangelo 9mo ago

Kamal works well

patrickdavey 9mo ago
Kamal is basically self hosting though right? So you have to take care of keeping the underlying os patched etc. With heroku you only needed to think about git push.. ?