I used to think Heroku was too expensive, and I set out to build a service as comparable to Heroku but using more open source stuff to bring costs down, including bringing the friendly heroku interface to your own servers, so it didn't matter if you had 1 server or 30 servers, you'd pay a single small fee.. I even became a maintainer of Dokku in my time of getting very familiar and contributing to it's plugins and core while building my service.
Then I realized Heroku really isn't that expensive anymore, and I dropped it all and started building my projects on Heroku again.