I wonder if crypto mining was one of the reasons why the had to shut the free tier down. Other platforms offering free computing resources, whether as a coding platform, as a CI/CD service, or in any other way, suffered from that kind of abuse. People working at both Sourcehut and Replit indicated that, and if these (relatively) small platforms had that kind of trouble, I can't imagine what the people at Heroku had to go through.
Removal of Heroku free product plans
201–210 of 590 posts
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#202I've barely used Heroku, just playing with it for a day or two when it was in its heyday to see what it was about. But my incredibly anecdotal sense is that Heroku's real sweet spot was apps that started out on the free plan and then grew to be paying customers. Is that not really accurate? I know that's kind of a hard business model because only a tiny percentage of free customers will ever start paying. But do comp…
Also anecdotally, we were on heroku for like 10 years. Started on free tier, and as our hobby project grew, we moved up in tiers (ending at $59/mo - after that any “upgrade” would double our costs).
Heroku was great for us. But they didn’t seem to stay competitive with the alternatives.
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#203I don't get why heroku would do this, it's killing any customer who would start off small and scale up. I mean how much money could they possibly be losing from hobby dynos etc...
They're telling you why: having a free tier means allocating a lot of resources to fraud and abuse, which are rampant in hosting, especially now that you can convert hosting dollars almost directly to cash. It's a big problem, and I have every reason to believe they're being forthright about why they've made this decision.
You can still offer a "free tier for existing customers" and call it "development" or something. This lets people who are already known/paying to spin up test instances, without having to go through purchasing, which leads eventually to more paid usage.
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#204Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#205IF we want to take them at face-value that this is because of fraud and abuse (a trust/respect they have not earned IMHO, or rather they lost many years ago) then this a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Otherwise it's some stupid MBA finding a way to save some money which will ultimately only speed up Heroku's demise.
Either way the writing is on the wall. The Heroku that delighted us all is long dead and the product is on life support at this point to eek some more money from people who haven't already moved on to greener pastures. It's really say to be honest, Heroku felt like magic and was amazing for a number of years and then just stopped being relevant, coasted, and hemorrhaged talent.
The downfall started before Salesforce IIRC but at this point it's clear the heart of Heroku is dead and gone.
I'm sure the other PaaS that have innovated, moved with the times (fly.io/render/etc) are popping bottles today at this news.
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're telling you why: having a free tier means allocating a lot of resources to fraud and abuse, which are rampant in hosting, especially now that you can convert hosting dollars almost directly to cash. It's a big problem, and I have every reason to believe they're being forthright about why they've made this decision.
You can still offer a "free tier for existing customers" and call it "development" or something. This lets people who are already known/paying to spin up test instances, without having to go through purchasing, which leads eventually to more paid usage.
I guess it depends on where you think the platform is going, and which segment of the market you think the revenue is going to come from. I'm just saying: it's a significant cost. It's maybe the most important thing to know about the hosting business.
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#207Fly.io has a dedicated process for moving off of Heroku. Auth via Heroku and they'll launch your app onto Fly. They also have a free tier. The process: https://fly.io/launch/heroku The docs: https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/speed-up-a-heroku-app I haven't used it [the Heroku -> Fly process] myself, but it's been around for quite some time!
Please let me know in the replies what you'd like to see at Fly that would make it as good, if not better, than Heroku. I recently started working at Fly to focus on making Rails & Ruby app deployments awesome, and of course Heroku set that benchmark almost a decade ago. I can't promise I'll get to everything, but I can promise that it will help me better prioritize what I should be focusing on to make Fly better for…
We spend more on Heroku CI than we do running our app on Heroku and it's well worth it.
CI runs on (almost) the exact same platform as production and we don't have to maintain any of it. When Heroku removes a package from their base image it gets removed from CI and we know if it broke anything.
The pricing model is the same as running our app. Which means if 10 people want to run 10 branches on CI at the same, and each CI run runs 32 nodes in parallel, and takes ~15 min, Heroku gives us 3200 nodes and we pay to run them for 15 minutes. No waiting, no upgrading to a different tier, etc...
I don't see many other people talking about Heroku CI, and Heroku doesn't seem to push it that much in their marketing, so either it's only really amazing for our use case or people just don't know about it yet.
For us it was a lot cheaper than other options when you consider how costly sitting around waiting for CI to start is.
Anyways that would be really hard to leave for another platform.
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#208For those who are interested in a free PostgreSQL on Heroku, drop me a mail (adrien at stackhero dot io) and I'll send you an invitation for a new PostgreSQL add-on that is free :)
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#209Another entry for https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#210I don't get why heroku would do this, it's killing any customer who would start off small and scale up. I mean how much money could they possibly be losing from hobby dynos etc...
Salesforce acquired Heroku if you weren't aware. There's your "why" right there!
Um that was 11 years ago.