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Heroku Beta Pricing

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21–30 of 96 posts

Re: Heroku Beta Pricing

#22
post #8

I tried to post this yesterday[0] and fell off the new stories list, but such is HN. Basically, they're nerfing their free tier by charging $7/month for a 24/7 running app. People wanting to run a free app may look at App Engine or AWS's one year free tier, or compare the price among other "cloud" and cloud-ish services. [0] http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881

Well, that just nuked my blog, and also my company's hubot. Ah well, guess I'll need to properly support that hubot now.

I'm in the same boat with my blog. I'm not paying $7 for a single dyno when it's footprint is no-where near 512 mb. They should offer a smaller dynos at say 128 mb for $1.75, that I might be interested in.

I'll be interested to see what they do to my existing apps.

Re: Heroku Beta Pricing

#23
post #14
post #5

Link doesn't work for me. From another source I found: Free – Experiment in your own dev or demo app with a web and a worker dyno for free. Sleeps after 1 hr of inactivity. Active up to 12 hours a day. No custom domains. 512 MB RAM. Hobby – Run a small app 24×7 with the Heroku developer experience for $7/dyno/mo. Custom domains. Run a maximum of one dyno per Procfile entry. 512 MB RAM. Standard 1X, 2X: Build producti…

Did the free-tier just drop from 750 to ~350 dyno-hours/month? Does no custom domains mean no DNS redirects? https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/billing edit: I read TFL, no more free tier with a cron job hitting it hourly to keep it awake 24/7. Can't say I'm surprised.

well amazon's free tier allows you to have a smallish machine up 24/7 (for a year), seems to me heroku is going to push away a lot of smallish side projects that might have evolved into actual usage.

Re: Heroku Beta Pricing

#24
post #16
post #8

I tried to post this yesterday[0] and fell off the new stories list, but such is HN. Basically, they're nerfing their free tier by charging $7/month for a 24/7 running app. People wanting to run a free app may look at App Engine or AWS's one year free tier, or compare the price among other "cloud" and cloud-ish services. [0] http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881

also Openshift. But clearly, unlimited "limited" Free cloud hosting will be over in a few years. hobbyist devs and students really need to prepare for this.

For the lazy: https://www.openshift.com/products/pricing/plan-comparison

Re: Heroku Beta Pricing

#25
post #14
post #5

Link doesn't work for me. From another source I found: Free – Experiment in your own dev or demo app with a web and a worker dyno for free. Sleeps after 1 hr of inactivity. Active up to 12 hours a day. No custom domains. 512 MB RAM. Hobby – Run a small app 24×7 with the Heroku developer experience for $7/dyno/mo. Custom domains. Run a maximum of one dyno per Procfile entry. 512 MB RAM. Standard 1X, 2X: Build producti…

Did the free-tier just drop from 750 to ~350 dyno-hours/month? Does no custom domains mean no DNS redirects? https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/billing edit: I read TFL, no more free tier with a cron job hitting it hourly to keep it awake 24/7. Can't say I'm surprised.

Under this tentative scheme, if you want to point example.com to exampleapp.herokuapp.com then you'd need to be on the $7/month tier.

I don't know why you'd want to point your domain to an app that's only up half the time anyways, so I don't think this is a big deal.

Re: Heroku Beta Pricing

#26
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the free-tier just drop from 750 to ~350 dyno-hours/month? Does no custom domains mean no DNS redirects? https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/billing edit: I read TFL, no more free tier with a cron job hitting it hourly to keep it awake 24/7. Can't say I'm surprised.

well amazon's free tier allows you to have a smallish machine up 24/7 (for a year), seems to me heroku is going to push away a lot of smallish side projects that might have evolved into actual usage.

Is there anyone outside of a total beginner or a newly created company who hasn't had an AWS account for over a year now? I don't even use mine a lot (mostly S3) but signed up very early on just to check it out, as with most things, so I wonder how relevant Amazon's free tier even is now.

Re: Heroku Beta Pricing

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that just nuked my blog, and also my company's hubot. Ah well, guess I'll need to properly support that hubot now.

I run my companies hubot on a $5 a month Digital Ocean instance. It's also far easier than using Heroku because it's just a regular linux server and not a managed/restricted instance.

I also use the $5-tier Digital Ocean droplets to host some side projects.

I've had some processes die semi-regularly, though, because the OS does a scheduled maintenance task that maxes out the 512mb RAM.

Adding a swap file seems to have taken care of it, though. I wish they enabled them by default on their smallest droplets: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-...

Re: Heroku Beta Pricing

#28
This actually works out well for me since I don't host any "free" projects there, but I suspect DigitalOcean will be deploying a whole ton of VPSes in the next month with the Dokku image running ;-)

Re: Heroku Beta Pricing

#29
post #8

I tried to post this yesterday[0] and fell off the new stories list, but such is HN. Basically, they're nerfing their free tier by charging $7/month for a 24/7 running app. People wanting to run a free app may look at App Engine or AWS's one year free tier, or compare the price among other "cloud" and cloud-ish services. [0] http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881

While it doesn't seem certain any price change has happened. A drop in pricing has been way overdue, the cost of computing power and memory has been dropping but not Heroku pricing. I get that Heroku is meant to be a "premium" cloud product, but it often doesn't feel like one.

This also may not be much of a drop for people with minimal production requirements. Under the free hours system, 2x1X was $35 now it may be $50 unless the Hobby pricing is factored in for the first 1X and it's $25 + $7 = $32. For 2x2X the price drop will only be $6.50. Still it's good that the cost to scale has gone down.

The paid hobby tier is actually welcome change, the limitations of the free tier (often used for staging and demo environments) were (are?) annoying. The ability to run 1 dyno per Procfile entry (instead of per app) is a welcome change, as allows you to fully mimic production without dyno scaling more easily at a lower cost. People were likely using while allowing them to pay a reasonable price for these low-traffic systems.

I have been saying for a while 1X dyno is underpowered and unnecessarily memory limited considering it's price (particularly for Rails apps) even before 2X was announced. If I had my way the 1X would be dropped in favour of the 2X at the same price and the 1X only used for hobby and things like a worker role handling infrequent job queue processing. These price changes come pretty close to doing that, while adding a paid, but low-cost, hobby tier for applications with very limited needs.

Let's hope this is actually serious.

Re: Heroku Beta Pricing

#30
I'm kinda surprised that we haven't seen a price decrease, since AWS keeps reducing prices. I can understand they wanting to decrease the 'freeloaders', but it seems shortsighted, those people are their future paying customers. Their new pricing makes it more economical to just get a small droplet from digitalocean, i'm surprised they chose to be above that point.
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