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Great job on this. What I really like about this type of pricing is that it puts the complex cost calculation onto your side instead of the customer. I use a to
by dangero 13y ago
Great job on this. What I really like about this type of pricing is that it puts the complex cost calculation onto your side instead of the customer. I use a ton of products, Heroku services being an example where I have to try to guess at usage. Literally every day I have an internal conversation with myself that says, "Do you need to go into Heroku and turn down the Database tier you're on because the service isn't using the capacity that you're paying for? Wait, but you might get a traffic surge and the site will go down if you decrease the capacity."
This seems like for me, the ideal case. Automatically scaling down all the way to $0 so I never have to think about unsubscribing if I stop using it.
I was actually discussing with a friend that it seems like there could be a big opportunity in the cloud server space to have a zero scale server where you only pay for time that it is being used. I believe Heroku already does spin down instances that aren't needed behind the scenes, they just don't give you the cost savings. They keep it.
- hayksaakian 13y agoTo be fair, they only spin down people on the free tier, where you can't save over $0.
- dangero 13y agoIs this documented somewhere? Are you sure? How can you tell that you actually have 3 dynos running when you're paying for 3? I suspect that if you pay for at least 2 dynos what happens is that they keep at least one dyno running and scale up to 3 as needed because as a customer I can't really tell the difference between 1 and 3 dynos unless my traffic requires all 3 at which point the service would have already scaled up to three. We already know from the free tier that they can spin up an instance in a couple of seconds. I would bet this is Heroku's little secret about making money. If you look at their cost per month you find that they aren't really making much per instance on AWS servers although, they are perfectly capable of detecting when they should auto scale up. Amazon even has a built in service to do that, but Heroku doesn't expose it because that's where they make their profit margin.
- jordanthoms 13y agoDyno idling is documented, and it only happens to web dynos, when there is only one running. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos#dyno-sleeping https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos#dyno-sleeping I can say from experience they definitely do not scale down the dynos you are paying for - you still see log entries from them and they are immediately available to requests.
- dangero 13y agoOh interesting. I was wrong.