7 ms·

Free (as in beer) Dynos

92 points by jvanbaarsen 11y ago

task_queue 11y ago
So they're getting rid of their free option for another free option that gives you only 18hrs of non-sleep time a day. How is this not a downgrade?
- mapleoin 11y ago
  It is a downgrade. The whole post sounded like a downgrade since they felt the need to emphasize their commitment to experimentation. I am one of the people affected by this since I was running a one-page website dyno and had pingdom keeping it out of sleep mode. This is what they are referring to as well in the last paragraph. I didn't know it was that many people doing this, though the solution for me would be a simple one: just allow me to serve static files.
  - csdrane 11y ago
    People wouldn't have been pinging their dynos to remain awake if it didn't take so long for them to spin back up. Know of any alternative places for projects that don't use a lot of resources?
    - ukbootstrapper 11y ago
      Redhat's OpenShift runs on the same AWS regions as Heroku and offer a free tier.(https://www.openshift.com/products/pricing https://www.openshift.com/products/pricing). IBM are also putting a lot of resources in to Bluemix which offers a 512MB dyno equivalent in their free tier, it doesn't run on AWS though. (https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/ https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/)
  - Lockyy 11y ago
    I also used Pingdom to keep my Heroku apps alive, although I found it annoying having a separate free account on pingdom for every site and recently swapped over to StatusCake (https://www.statuscake.com https://www.statuscake.com). Whilst you're right that it is a downgrade, it was clearly iffy to be using Heroku for free 24/7 hosting with essentially no downside on our end. I had no qualms however because it was just so expensive to move up to any other tier and it took so long for the Dynos to boot up. Since they're adding the Hobbyist tier at only $7 I really don't mind this change and will happily swap over to it.
  - addandsubtract 11y ago
    You could use the free heroku tier to build your projects and host the static pages somewhere else, like S3.
  - thinkbohemian 11y ago
    If you've got a static files you could still serve it using Heroku free. Put cloudflare or another CDN in front of it and boom you've got 24 hours of fast responses. Though if it's a static site why do you need Heroku? Kind of like using a cannon to kill a mosquito.
    - kevinoconnor7 11y ago
      Isn't that the exact purpose Divshot aims to fill?
  - pvh 11y ago
    A better static files offering is definitely something we've been asked for a few times. Near-term, if you put a CDN in front of a static app your dyno will wake up on release, fill the cache, and go to sleep. You shouldn't see much, if any difference for your apps at all.
  - seanwilson 11y ago
    Why not use GitHub Pages? It's free, supports static sites only and has Git based deployment.
  - task_queue 11y ago
    Given the blog post calling people who use pingdoms freeloaders for using the service they advertised as free and changing offerings like this, there are other VPS hosts that don't pull a bait and switch after encouraging dependence that are cheaper.
- yebyen 11y ago
  I want to say that in the terms of service, they always forbade you from using a cron job to keep all of your dynos alive, I heard someone say this once, but I don't believe it's true (I have not read the TOS). Heroku has offered the New Relic monitoring plugin for free which has this same functionality (pretty much as a checkbox), so it would not make sense for them to forbid this in the TOS. So, if you're using Heroku to serve up your apps 24/7, how is that not worth $7/mo? Unless your business is geographically distributed (or otherwise operates 24/7), you can still use Heroku for internal applications for free during business hours (and use monitoring to keep it fast.) If you are serving your public website from Heroku, that's probably worth $7 or more (even as a hobbyist). So, yes it's a downgrade to users in the free tier, but what's wrong with Heroku attempting to monetize their (most likely very, very) long, free tail? I am not surprised by this announcement because it was reported on HN a few weeks ago that they were doing something like this in a beta (and the details were not supposed to be released, NDA, blabla). For anyone who was already paying Heroku, your bill is going down. We actually use the free tier at my business, and this may affect us. Oh well.
- pvh 11y ago
  You could call it a side-grade. We're also allowing users to add a worker dyno and use up to 18hrs/day of `heroku run` and scheduler one-off dynos as well. All told you can get quite a few more compute-hours for free applications now than before.
  - arsenide 11y ago
    You can call it what you want, but for what I (and others presumably) use it for, the 24/7 uptime is essential. Sure an argument can be made for needing to pay for 24/7 uptime, but it is very clearly a downgrade in such a case where such an argument even needs to be made!
    - senorprogrammer 11y ago
      > 24/7 uptime is essential And all that for only $7/month. Seems reasonable, for an essential service.
    - infecto 11y ago
      No argument needs to be made. If you want 24/7 uptime, you need to pay for it. Under the old model you were just freeloading.
    - arsenide 11y ago
      To clarify: I'm particularly speaking about the parent's use of the term "sidegrade." I'm not disagreeing with the idea that 24/7 uptime should be paid for (because I agree), but to call the change in terms of service a "sidegrade" is a misrepresentation of what it actually is: a downgrade in services for my particular use case.
      - yebyen 11y ago
        You can have a web dyno and a worker dyno running side-by-side 18h/day for free in the new free tier (unless I've misunderstood something.) You can't have one web worker running 24h/day for free, not as of next January. 18+18 > 24 I understand that your (and my) particular use case are affected negatively by this, but if it wasn't totally clear what he means by sidegrade, that's about the size it. More compute hours for your $0, but less availability.
hayksaakian 11y ago
So what's the down side they failed to mention? Whats the difference between a hobby (7$) dyno than a real dyno?
- gt565k 11y ago
  https://www.heroku.com/beta-pricing https://www.heroku.com/beta-pricing
- addandsubtract 11y ago
  A real dyno costs $34. So in essence, they're replacing the 24h free tier with an 18h free tier, but lowering the cost of the first paid dyno to $7. At least that's how I'm reading it...
  - yebyen 11y ago
    They also lowered the cost of that 1x dyno in the Pro tier, and if I'm reading correctly that $7 actually buys you two full-time dynos (but only one of them can be web, the other has to be a background worker.) You can use both 1x web and 1x worker in the free tier too, as long as you abide by the new policy of sleeping 6 hours.
    - danneu 11y ago
      I hadn't considered that interpretation, but it's less confusing than mine: My initial suspicion was that since the hobby dyno has "10 process types", I would think the "1 web, 1 worker" restriction for the free dyno is just another way of saying "2 process types". But would that mean the worker is prorated up to an additional $7/mo? I think this could be cleared up on the pricing page.
      - yebyen 11y ago
        For sure. My interpretation is $7/mo buys you two dynos, but not more than one web type, and this seems to be consistent with what the heroku rep here in this discussion seems to be saying. (eg. comments that Free tier actually potentially gets more compute time under this arrangement) But it's not at all clear on further reflection (that if you do choose to do this 2-dyno 1 web, 1 worker arrangement on the hobby tier, you don't wind up paying $14/mo rather than the total of $7/mo). I think that's what it says, but I'm not at all sure.
jackcarter 11y ago
Seems like they're walking back from the previous announcement, which said they'd give 12 hours of non-sleep time per day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9295874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9295874 There's a huge difference between 24 hours/day and 18 hours/day, but I don't think there's such a big difference going from 18->12, so I don't think many people will care about this improvement.
- pvh 11y ago
  We looked at the numbers and it's actually a very, very small percentage of applications that run between 18 and 24 hrs per day. Eighteen hours a day is enough to keep your app running from 9AM to 3AM every day, and unless your application has a global reach, it should naturally equilibrate into a comfortable place. We are asking that if you want 24x7 wake-time that you pay for a hobby dyno, but if you can let your application sleep when you do, you won't see any difference at all.
frewsxcv 11y ago
Relevant links: https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2015/5/7/new-dyno-types-public-beta https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2015/5/7/new-dyno-types-pub... https://www.heroku.com/beta-pricing https://www.heroku.com/beta-pricing
- gt565k 11y ago
  Hmm looks like the 1st and 2nd tier dynos are actually cheaper now at $25 and $50. Before they were $34.99 and something else.
websitescenes 11y ago
Heroku has great services/integrations and deployment is dead simple but when you commit to them you introduce a level of uncertainty into your stack. Services being deprecated, pricing changes and addons breaking are all very real issues. I initially enjoyed the simplicity of the platform but find myself feeling a little jerked around lately.
- pvh 11y ago
  Hey there, we absolutely want to make this the smoothest, easiest pricing change you've ever been through. We're just announcing the beta today and almost every single customer we have will see savings in some form here. We'll keep the old pricing until the end of January next year and let people opt in at their leisure until then.
- Artemis2 11y ago
  A pricing change was long overdue. AWS (which Heroku relies on to host everything) has been getting a lot cheaper in the last few years, but Heroku never changed its pricing and pocketed the difference.
  - danneu 11y ago
    Unfortunately it's strictly a price increase for everyone who bought a second dyno to get out of the freeloader tier. $35/mo (one free + one standard dyno @ $35/ea) to $50/mo (two standard dynos @ $25/ea). It's only a price decrease for people with 4+ dynos.
    - adamesque 11y ago
      Not really — if you were paying $35/month JUST to have always-on dynos, you should be able to downgrade to the $7/month hobby tier. If you really needed that 2nd dyno for performance reasons, then yeah, it's a price hike.
      - rapcal 11y ago
        For production apps, 2 dynos is the least you need not only because of sleep, but also because of redundancy. So there's no way of downgrading to the Hobby tier for lots of us. For 2 dynos the price increase is 44,9%!
Shank 11y ago
As one of a small niche group who hosts Hubot on Heroku, this is horrible news. Chatroom bots are useless if they aren't in a room 24/7; that's the only reason why we have a keepalive. It's not as if the chat bot is doing a lot of computation, but this really does make it sound like I'll have to toss Heroku despite the convenience factor with it.
- briandear 11y ago
  Or pay $7 per month?
  - Shank 11y ago
    It's for an open source project, not an internal work instance or anything. As a student at uni with no full time job, adding more monthly charges is hard to deal with.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - thinkbohemian 11y ago
      At Georgia Tech we got a very small server space which was used in a few CS classes, it would have been large enough to run hubot. Your university might have a similar setup.
      - derefr 11y ago
        Heroku was basically becoming the go-to place to run thousands of little bots—and more importantly, to advise people to run their little bots—without thinking about marginal costs. It was becoming everyone's little pocket of persistent personal cloud agents. The "launch on Heroku" button on Github pages was a thing you could just press on a whim as a realistic solution to your problem. Now none of that's true.
    - sebular 11y ago
      I'd try to scrounge some old computer from your CS department or buy a raspberry pi and run it on that.
CoachRufus87 11y ago
What exactly is a Process Type?
- danneu 11y ago
  Probably each line of your Procfile.
- JoshGlazebrook 11y ago
  In your Procfile you can have any type of process you want. The "web" process type is just special because it expects you to open an listening tcp socket on the port it provides in their environmental variable to your app. Aside from that you could say have a worker process, emailer process, etc and scale them independently.
dang 11y ago
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9506244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9506244. If the other URL is better, we can change this one.
peregrine 11y ago
So ahh when are they going to lower prices on the "professional" dyno pricing? AWS has only gotten cheaper and heroku has only gotten more expensive.
stfnkolb 11y ago
I understand the thoughts about changing the current pricing. However, it would be really good if Heroku would support the community with a 24/7 dyno for open source projects. It hurts if you need to put in additional monetary effort into projects you provide for free.
jk5_ 11y ago
The good news is, they decided to keep the custom domain on the free tier. Last news we had, it was only available with the hobby. Also, 18 hours daily sounds good compared to the initial 12 hours. Not as disappointed as expected about these changes :)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
zebracanevra 11y ago
Previously, worker dynos never slept. On the new free dynos, you now get a free worker dyno, but the tradeoff is that the app must sleep for 6 hours/day. Does that sleeping time include the worker dynos? If it does, when do they sleep? Workers can't "timeout" like web dynos can.
- petitmiam 11y ago
  The updated help pages only mention the scenario of a worker dyno running along a web dyno. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-types#dyno-sleeping https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-types#dyno-sleepi... It's unclear what happens to apps which just have a single worker dyno. Are we meant to use the scheduler to kill workers for 6 hours a day?
mysterymachine 11y ago
I'm pretty sure pinging services and such were out of their ToS anyway. They're better facilitating non-sketchy free users by giving them the Scheduler and a worker, and have given people who absolutely need 24/7 service a great service for dirt cheap. I bet most people who need the 24/7 service probably have the money to spare, and I bet most people are overestimating the uptime they need anyway. On the flip side, for a small flat fee, I can now have 10 processes running on a 24/hr server, effortlessly. I'll pay the 7 bucks for an easy deploy. Most of my projects are going to be hosted on Github Pages or Heroku's free tier anyway.
fiatjaf 11y ago
Stupid people who were abusing Heroku by pinging the apps caused this, now they might as well suffer. All my hobby apps go to sleep regularly and it is not bad. I am grateful to Heroku for providing me all this free computing and I hope they get rid of the freeloaders.
matt2000 11y ago
I've probably posted a similar comment a few times before, but why don't the dynos ever improve? I have no problems with the pricing, but dyno performance and memory has been the same for, what, 5 years? Longer? The whole time I'm getting emails from AWS telling me about cheaper, better instances. Doesn't make sense.
egomaksab 11y ago
You can move your apps to Openshift https://www.openshift.com https://www.openshift.com . They provide 3x512MB gears for free and you can use your custom domain.

92 points by jvanbaarsen 11y ago

So they're getting rid of their free option for another free option that gives you only 18hrs of non-sleep time a day. How is this not a downgrade?

mapleoin 11y ago
It is a downgrade. The whole post sounded like a downgrade since they felt the need to emphasize their commitment to experimentation. I am one of the people affected by this since I was running a one-page website dyno and had pingdom keeping it out of sleep mode. This is what they are referring to as well in the last paragraph. I didn't know it was that many people doing this, though the solution for me would be a simple one: just allow me to serve static files.
- csdrane 11y ago
  People wouldn't have been pinging their dynos to remain awake if it didn't take so long for them to spin back up. Know of any alternative places for projects that don't use a lot of resources?
  - ukbootstrapper 11y ago
    Redhat's OpenShift runs on the same AWS regions as Heroku and offer a free tier.(https://www.openshift.com/products/pricing https://www.openshift.com/products/pricing). IBM are also putting a lot of resources in to Bluemix which offers a 512MB dyno equivalent in their free tier, it doesn't run on AWS though. (https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/ https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/)
- Lockyy 11y ago
  I also used Pingdom to keep my Heroku apps alive, although I found it annoying having a separate free account on pingdom for every site and recently swapped over to StatusCake (https://www.statuscake.com https://www.statuscake.com). Whilst you're right that it is a downgrade, it was clearly iffy to be using Heroku for free 24/7 hosting with essentially no downside on our end. I had no qualms however because it was just so expensive to move up to any other tier and it took so long for the Dynos to boot up. Since they're adding the Hobbyist tier at only $7 I really don't mind this change and will happily swap over to it.
- addandsubtract 11y ago
  You could use the free heroku tier to build your projects and host the static pages somewhere else, like S3.
- thinkbohemian 11y ago
  If you've got a static files you could still serve it using Heroku free. Put cloudflare or another CDN in front of it and boom you've got 24 hours of fast responses. Though if it's a static site why do you need Heroku? Kind of like using a cannon to kill a mosquito.
  - kevinoconnor7 11y ago
    Isn't that the exact purpose Divshot aims to fill?
- pvh 11y ago
  A better static files offering is definitely something we've been asked for a few times. Near-term, if you put a CDN in front of a static app your dyno will wake up on release, fill the cache, and go to sleep. You shouldn't see much, if any difference for your apps at all.
- seanwilson 11y ago
  Why not use GitHub Pages? It's free, supports static sites only and has Git based deployment.
- task_queue 11y ago
  Given the blog post calling people who use pingdoms freeloaders for using the service they advertised as free and changing offerings like this, there are other VPS hosts that don't pull a bait and switch after encouraging dependence that are cheaper.
yebyen 11y ago
I want to say that in the terms of service, they always forbade you from using a cron job to keep all of your dynos alive, I heard someone say this once, but I don't believe it's true (I have not read the TOS). Heroku has offered the New Relic monitoring plugin for free which has this same functionality (pretty much as a checkbox), so it would not make sense for them to forbid this in the TOS. So, if you're using Heroku to serve up your apps 24/7, how is that not worth $7/mo? Unless your business is geographically distributed (or otherwise operates 24/7), you can still use Heroku for internal applications for free during business hours (and use monitoring to keep it fast.) If you are serving your public website from Heroku, that's probably worth $7 or more (even as a hobbyist). So, yes it's a downgrade to users in the free tier, but what's wrong with Heroku attempting to monetize their (most likely very, very) long, free tail? I am not surprised by this announcement because it was reported on HN a few weeks ago that they were doing something like this in a beta (and the details were not supposed to be released, NDA, blabla). For anyone who was already paying Heroku, your bill is going down. We actually use the free tier at my business, and this may affect us. Oh well.
pvh 11y ago
You could call it a side-grade. We're also allowing users to add a worker dyno and use up to 18hrs/day of `heroku run` and scheduler one-off dynos as well. All told you can get quite a few more compute-hours for free applications now than before.
- arsenide 11y ago
  You can call it what you want, but for what I (and others presumably) use it for, the 24/7 uptime is essential. Sure an argument can be made for needing to pay for 24/7 uptime, but it is very clearly a downgrade in such a case where such an argument even needs to be made!
  - senorprogrammer 11y ago
    > 24/7 uptime is essential And all that for only $7/month. Seems reasonable, for an essential service.
  - infecto 11y ago
    No argument needs to be made. If you want 24/7 uptime, you need to pay for it. Under the old model you were just freeloading.
  - arsenide 11y ago
    To clarify: I'm particularly speaking about the parent's use of the term "sidegrade." I'm not disagreeing with the idea that 24/7 uptime should be paid for (because I agree), but to call the change in terms of service a "sidegrade" is a misrepresentation of what it actually is: a downgrade in services for my particular use case.
    - yebyen 11y ago
      You can have a web dyno and a worker dyno running side-by-side 18h/day for free in the new free tier (unless I've misunderstood something.) You can't have one web worker running 24h/day for free, not as of next January. 18+18 > 24 I understand that your (and my) particular use case are affected negatively by this, but if it wasn't totally clear what he means by sidegrade, that's about the size it. More compute hours for your $0, but less availability.

hayksaakian 11y ago

So what's the down side they failed to mention? Whats the difference between a hobby (7$) dyno than a real dyno?

gt565k 11y ago
https://www.heroku.com/beta-pricing https://www.heroku.com/beta-pricing
addandsubtract 11y ago
A real dyno costs $34. So in essence, they're replacing the 24h free tier with an 18h free tier, but lowering the cost of the first paid dyno to $7. At least that's how I'm reading it...
- yebyen 11y ago
  They also lowered the cost of that 1x dyno in the Pro tier, and if I'm reading correctly that $7 actually buys you two full-time dynos (but only one of them can be web, the other has to be a background worker.) You can use both 1x web and 1x worker in the free tier too, as long as you abide by the new policy of sleeping 6 hours.
  - danneu 11y ago
    I hadn't considered that interpretation, but it's less confusing than mine: My initial suspicion was that since the hobby dyno has "10 process types", I would think the "1 web, 1 worker" restriction for the free dyno is just another way of saying "2 process types". But would that mean the worker is prorated up to an additional $7/mo? I think this could be cleared up on the pricing page.
    - yebyen 11y ago
      For sure. My interpretation is $7/mo buys you two dynos, but not more than one web type, and this seems to be consistent with what the heroku rep here in this discussion seems to be saying. (eg. comments that Free tier actually potentially gets more compute time under this arrangement) But it's not at all clear on further reflection (that if you do choose to do this 2-dyno 1 web, 1 worker arrangement on the hobby tier, you don't wind up paying $14/mo rather than the total of $7/mo). I think that's what it says, but I'm not at all sure.

jackcarter 11y ago

Seems like they're walking back from the previous announcement, which said they'd give 12 hours of non-sleep time per day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9295874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9295874 There's a huge difference between 24 hours/day and 18 hours/day, but I don't think there's such a big difference going from 18->12, so I don't think many people will care about this improvement.

pvh 11y ago
We looked at the numbers and it's actually a very, very small percentage of applications that run between 18 and 24 hrs per day. Eighteen hours a day is enough to keep your app running from 9AM to 3AM every day, and unless your application has a global reach, it should naturally equilibrate into a comfortable place. We are asking that if you want 24x7 wake-time that you pay for a hobby dyno, but if you can let your application sleep when you do, you won't see any difference at all.

frewsxcv 11y ago

Relevant links: https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2015/5/7/new-dyno-types-public-beta https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2015/5/7/new-dyno-types-pub... https://www.heroku.com/beta-pricing https://www.heroku.com/beta-pricing

gt565k 11y ago
Hmm looks like the 1st and 2nd tier dynos are actually cheaper now at $25 and $50. Before they were $34.99 and something else.

websitescenes 11y ago

Heroku has great services/integrations and deployment is dead simple but when you commit to them you introduce a level of uncertainty into your stack. Services being deprecated, pricing changes and addons breaking are all very real issues. I initially enjoyed the simplicity of the platform but find myself feeling a little jerked around lately.

pvh 11y ago
Hey there, we absolutely want to make this the smoothest, easiest pricing change you've ever been through. We're just announcing the beta today and almost every single customer we have will see savings in some form here. We'll keep the old pricing until the end of January next year and let people opt in at their leisure until then.
Artemis2 11y ago
A pricing change was long overdue. AWS (which Heroku relies on to host everything) has been getting a lot cheaper in the last few years, but Heroku never changed its pricing and pocketed the difference.
- danneu 11y ago
  Unfortunately it's strictly a price increase for everyone who bought a second dyno to get out of the freeloader tier. $35/mo (one free + one standard dyno @ $35/ea) to $50/mo (two standard dynos @ $25/ea). It's only a price decrease for people with 4+ dynos.
  - adamesque 11y ago
    Not really — if you were paying $35/month JUST to have always-on dynos, you should be able to downgrade to the $7/month hobby tier. If you really needed that 2nd dyno for performance reasons, then yeah, it's a price hike.
    - rapcal 11y ago
      For production apps, 2 dynos is the least you need not only because of sleep, but also because of redundancy. So there's no way of downgrading to the Hobby tier for lots of us. For 2 dynos the price increase is 44,9%!

Shank 11y ago

As one of a small niche group who hosts Hubot on Heroku, this is horrible news. Chatroom bots are useless if they aren't in a room 24/7; that's the only reason why we have a keepalive. It's not as if the chat bot is doing a lot of computation, but this really does make it sound like I'll have to toss Heroku despite the convenience factor with it.

briandear 11y ago
Or pay $7 per month?
- Shank 11y ago
  It's for an open source project, not an internal work instance or anything. As a student at uni with no full time job, adding more monthly charges is hard to deal with.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - thinkbohemian 11y ago
    At Georgia Tech we got a very small server space which was used in a few CS classes, it would have been large enough to run hubot. Your university might have a similar setup.
    - derefr 11y ago
      Heroku was basically becoming the go-to place to run thousands of little bots—and more importantly, to advise people to run their little bots—without thinking about marginal costs. It was becoming everyone's little pocket of persistent personal cloud agents. The "launch on Heroku" button on Github pages was a thing you could just press on a whim as a realistic solution to your problem. Now none of that's true.
  - sebular 11y ago
    I'd try to scrounge some old computer from your CS department or buy a raspberry pi and run it on that.

CoachRufus87 11y ago

What exactly is a Process Type?

danneu 11y ago
Probably each line of your Procfile.
JoshGlazebrook 11y ago
In your Procfile you can have any type of process you want. The "web" process type is just special because it expects you to open an listening tcp socket on the port it provides in their environmental variable to your app. Aside from that you could say have a worker process, emailer process, etc and scale them independently.

dang 11y ago

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9506244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9506244. If the other URL is better, we can change this one.

peregrine 11y ago

So ahh when are they going to lower prices on the "professional" dyno pricing? AWS has only gotten cheaper and heroku has only gotten more expensive.

stfnkolb 11y ago

I understand the thoughts about changing the current pricing. However, it would be really good if Heroku would support the community with a 24/7 dyno for open source projects. It hurts if you need to put in additional monetary effort into projects you provide for free.

jk5_ 11y ago

The good news is, they decided to keep the custom domain on the free tier. Last news we had, it was only available with the hobby. Also, 18 hours daily sounds good compared to the initial 12 hours. Not as disappointed as expected about these changes :)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

zebracanevra 11y ago

Previously, worker dynos never slept. On the new free dynos, you now get a free worker dyno, but the tradeoff is that the app must sleep for 6 hours/day. Does that sleeping time include the worker dynos? If it does, when do they sleep? Workers can't "timeout" like web dynos can.

petitmiam 11y ago
The updated help pages only mention the scenario of a worker dyno running along a web dyno. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-types#dyno-sleeping https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-types#dyno-sleepi... It's unclear what happens to apps which just have a single worker dyno. Are we meant to use the scheduler to kill workers for 6 hours a day?

mysterymachine 11y ago

I'm pretty sure pinging services and such were out of their ToS anyway. They're better facilitating non-sketchy free users by giving them the Scheduler and a worker, and have given people who absolutely need 24/7 service a great service for dirt cheap. I bet most people who need the 24/7 service probably have the money to spare, and I bet most people are overestimating the uptime they need anyway. On the flip side, for a small flat fee, I can now have 10 processes running on a 24/hr server, effortlessly. I'll pay the 7 bucks for an easy deploy. Most of my projects are going to be hosted on Github Pages or Heroku's free tier anyway.

fiatjaf 11y ago

Stupid people who were abusing Heroku by pinging the apps caused this, now they might as well suffer. All my hobby apps go to sleep regularly and it is not bad. I am grateful to Heroku for providing me all this free computing and I hope they get rid of the freeloaders.

matt2000 11y ago

I've probably posted a similar comment a few times before, but why don't the dynos ever improve? I have no problems with the pricing, but dyno performance and memory has been the same for, what, 5 years? Longer? The whole time I'm getting emails from AWS telling me about cheaper, better instances. Doesn't make sense.

egomaksab 11y ago

You can move your apps to Openshift https://www.openshift.com https://www.openshift.com . They provide 3x512MB gears for free and you can use your custom domain.