4 ms·

Cloud Star Heroku Preps for Second Act With New CEO

38 points by sinzone 13y ago

mberning 13y ago
I was a big user of Heroku for a long time, but at some point over the last year or two it became more cost effective and performant for me to run my projects from an Amazon EC2 instance. The problem that I experiences is that I wanted my sites to have great performance, even though they only got hit a few times per day. This precluded me from using the Heroku free tier since idle dynos are swapped out and take a considerable amount of time to spring back to life. No big deal, I could just pay for 2 dynos and my app would never idle. Some time after that my postgres database exceded the free tier limit and the only option was to pay $20/mo for a shared postgres DB that was way beyond my needs. I went from an extremely modest website costing nothing, to an extremely modest website costing over $20 per month. I switched all of my projects over to an EC2 instance and pay about 15 bucks with no arbitrary limitations. I hope the new CEO understands that building a healthy customer base means giving people a sensible path for growth.
- jaggederest 13y ago
  I don't really mean to be offensive when I say this, but you're almost certainly not the target market for them. They're looking at people growing from initial concept to 3 dynos to 30 dynos, and if your app won't do that, then they have no incentive to cater to you, as far as I understand it.
  - mberning 13y ago
    How is my app going to grow from 2 users per day to 20 users per day if it takes 30 seconds to un-idle my dyno? The answer is it won't because the end-user experience sucks on Heroku. My bottom of the barrel Amazon EC2 instance gives much better performance for a very reasonable $15/mo. If one of my apps does start to get traction and I need to increase my hosting capacity you can rest assured that I will do it with Amazon. I have no reason to convert my build & deploy process back to Heroku. They lost any future sales they could have hoped to have gotten from me.
    - dantiberian 13y ago
      As jaggederest said, you're not the target customer for Heroku. They are interested in hosting apps that have thousand's to hundred's of thousands of visitors a day for companies like RapGenius who don't want to focus on managing servers. It seems like you don't realise that Heroku is giving you a free dyno to run your apps on. If what they're offering for free doesn't fit your needs that's fine but don't be ungrateful about it.
      - rgbrgb 13y ago
        I don't see what's wrong with pointing out deficiencies in the free tier. It's not as if Heroku is giving devs something out of the goodness of their hearts. It's part of their business model. He's just telling us that he doesn't use Heroku for his projects anymore because their dyno's take so long to warm up. I don't work at Heroku but I think their strategy is to make it a great / cheap platform to start an app on so that you pay them when your app gets traffic and needs to scale. If the free offering isn't compelling then the freemium business model doesn't work.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - ihodes 13y ago
      You just need to ping your website every minute. Pingdom or the like works just fine.
- jdminhbg 13y ago
  I'm guessing they can do just fine without a pile of customers who blanch at paying $20/month for managed hosting.
  - mberning 13y ago
    You are missing the point. I don't mind paying $20 or even $50 per month for managed hosting. The problem is that I have to pay that kind of price per site. It will quickly add up to a hundred dollars a month or more for all of my sites.
    - jdminhbg 13y ago
      I'm not missing the point; it's just not profitable to run managed hosting at $4/month/app. If you are price-sensitive but time-insensitive, Amazon is the perfect place for you to go to host lots of low-traffic applications. That's not the market they are trying for, and their success or failure doesn't hinge on getting that market.
      - mberning 13y ago
        Not profitable? Hardly. Let's take a look. On the free tier I pay $0 per month. I get a single dyno (which has poor performance), and a postgres DB with 10k row limit. I end up getting a few users per day, but my app doesn't perform well so it never takes off. Heroku gave me a bunch of stuff for free and never made any money off of it. Let's say they offered a paid tier at $5 per month that gave me one persistent dyno and a 100MB postgres DB. The usage of my app is not drastically different, but Heroku is taking in $5 per month. If my app takes off I start cranking up the dynos and DB specs. They make more money. I stay happy. Under the hypothetical scenario Heroku could be making $60/year off of me, with the possibility of future sales. Under their current pricing model the cost goes from $0 per month to $44/month (2 dynos @ $35 and a 10M row postgres DB @ $9). I'm not going to pay $44/month for each app that I want to run just for the convenience of being on their platform. I think they are making a huge mis-step by not looking at price points between $0 and $44. There are only so many RapGenius level clients in the world. They can make a lot of money by reeling in the long tail, but so far it seems like all they care about are the big fish.
wilfra 13y ago
I don't understand how they can write that article without mentioning RapGenius or even alluding to that fiasco. Wired just lost some credibility in my mind.
- nfm 13y ago
  Why should they mention RapGenius? At Heroku, I expect it's very much back to business as usual.
  - wilfra 13y ago
    Did you read the article? They replaced their CEO and are strategizing about their 'second act' after being displaced as the 'darling of the developer community'. The article quotes the current CEO as saying he is considering cutting off all existing small devs and focusing on the enterprise market. If that's business as usual, I'm really curious what a crisis looks like. As for why RapGenius should be mentioned - they were the catalyst for all of the above. Without them, this article never gets written in the first place.
    - mark_l_watson 13y ago
      I wouldn't blame them for cutting off the free tier that allows one dyno to run for no cost. They should charge at least $10/month for what is now the free tier, and not time out apps (requiring loading requests). Make the small customers real paying customers. The thing is: I don't understand why a large company would use Heroku because of the costs. Heroku seems like the sweet spot for a 3 or 4 person company where they don't have the economy of scale to manage their own servers.

38 points by sinzone 13y ago

I was a big user of Heroku for a long time, but at some point over the last year or two it became more cost effective and performant for me to run my projects from an Amazon EC2 instance. The problem that I experiences is that I wanted my sites to have great performance, even though they only got hit a few times per day. This precluded me from using the Heroku free tier since idle dynos are swapped out and take a considerable amount of time to spring back to life. No big deal, I could just pay for 2 dynos and my app would never idle. Some time after that my postgres database exceded the free tier limit and the only option was to pay $20/mo for a shared postgres DB that was way beyond my needs. I went from an extremely modest website costing nothing, to an extremely modest website costing over $20 per month. I switched all of my projects over to an EC2 instance and pay about 15 bucks with no arbitrary limitations. I hope the new CEO understands that building a healthy customer base means giving people a sensible path for growth.

jaggederest 13y ago
I don't really mean to be offensive when I say this, but you're almost certainly not the target market for them. They're looking at people growing from initial concept to 3 dynos to 30 dynos, and if your app won't do that, then they have no incentive to cater to you, as far as I understand it.
- mberning 13y ago
  How is my app going to grow from 2 users per day to 20 users per day if it takes 30 seconds to un-idle my dyno? The answer is it won't because the end-user experience sucks on Heroku. My bottom of the barrel Amazon EC2 instance gives much better performance for a very reasonable $15/mo. If one of my apps does start to get traction and I need to increase my hosting capacity you can rest assured that I will do it with Amazon. I have no reason to convert my build & deploy process back to Heroku. They lost any future sales they could have hoped to have gotten from me.
  - dantiberian 13y ago
    As jaggederest said, you're not the target customer for Heroku. They are interested in hosting apps that have thousand's to hundred's of thousands of visitors a day for companies like RapGenius who don't want to focus on managing servers. It seems like you don't realise that Heroku is giving you a free dyno to run your apps on. If what they're offering for free doesn't fit your needs that's fine but don't be ungrateful about it.
    - rgbrgb 13y ago
      I don't see what's wrong with pointing out deficiencies in the free tier. It's not as if Heroku is giving devs something out of the goodness of their hearts. It's part of their business model. He's just telling us that he doesn't use Heroku for his projects anymore because their dyno's take so long to warm up. I don't work at Heroku but I think their strategy is to make it a great / cheap platform to start an app on so that you pay them when your app gets traffic and needs to scale. If the free offering isn't compelling then the freemium business model doesn't work.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - ihodes 13y ago
    You just need to ping your website every minute. Pingdom or the like works just fine.
jdminhbg 13y ago
I'm guessing they can do just fine without a pile of customers who blanch at paying $20/month for managed hosting.
- mberning 13y ago
  You are missing the point. I don't mind paying $20 or even $50 per month for managed hosting. The problem is that I have to pay that kind of price per site. It will quickly add up to a hundred dollars a month or more for all of my sites.
  - jdminhbg 13y ago
    I'm not missing the point; it's just not profitable to run managed hosting at $4/month/app. If you are price-sensitive but time-insensitive, Amazon is the perfect place for you to go to host lots of low-traffic applications. That's not the market they are trying for, and their success or failure doesn't hinge on getting that market.
    - mberning 13y ago
      Not profitable? Hardly. Let's take a look. On the free tier I pay $0 per month. I get a single dyno (which has poor performance), and a postgres DB with 10k row limit. I end up getting a few users per day, but my app doesn't perform well so it never takes off. Heroku gave me a bunch of stuff for free and never made any money off of it. Let's say they offered a paid tier at $5 per month that gave me one persistent dyno and a 100MB postgres DB. The usage of my app is not drastically different, but Heroku is taking in $5 per month. If my app takes off I start cranking up the dynos and DB specs. They make more money. I stay happy. Under the hypothetical scenario Heroku could be making $60/year off of me, with the possibility of future sales. Under their current pricing model the cost goes from $0 per month to $44/month (2 dynos @ $35 and a 10M row postgres DB @ $9). I'm not going to pay $44/month for each app that I want to run just for the convenience of being on their platform. I think they are making a huge mis-step by not looking at price points between $0 and $44. There are only so many RapGenius level clients in the world. They can make a lot of money by reeling in the long tail, but so far it seems like all they care about are the big fish.

wilfra 13y ago

I don't understand how they can write that article without mentioning RapGenius or even alluding to that fiasco. Wired just lost some credibility in my mind.

nfm 13y ago
Why should they mention RapGenius? At Heroku, I expect it's very much back to business as usual.
- wilfra 13y ago
  Did you read the article? They replaced their CEO and are strategizing about their 'second act' after being displaced as the 'darling of the developer community'. The article quotes the current CEO as saying he is considering cutting off all existing small devs and focusing on the enterprise market. If that's business as usual, I'm really curious what a crisis looks like. As for why RapGenius should be mentioned - they were the catalyst for all of the above. Without them, this article never gets written in the first place.
  - mark_l_watson 13y ago
    I wouldn't blame them for cutting off the free tier that allows one dyno to run for no cost. They should charge at least $10/month for what is now the free tier, and not time out apps (requiring loading requests). Make the small customers real paying customers. The thing is: I don't understand why a large company would use Heroku because of the costs. Heroku seems like the sweet spot for a 3 or 4 person company where they don't have the economy of scale to manage their own servers.