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Free (as in beer) Dynos

blog.heroku.com

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Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#61

Post by yebyen »

yebyen wrote: post #40
danneu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 tie…

Ah. The e-mail clears it up:

Hobby — Run a small app 24x7 with the Heroku developer experience for $7 per dyno per month. Multiple worker process types for more complex apps. Run a maximum of one dyno per process type. 512 MB RAM.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#62

Post by yebyen »

arsenide wrote: post #52
arsenide wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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.

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.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#63

Post by yebyen »

tburch wrote: post #57
pvh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

why not allow 36 hours per day of 'heroku run' or 'heroku web'?

"We charge less than we pay our upstream, but it's ok because we'll make it up in volume."

Seriously though, they're saying that most deployments use less than 18 hours per day, and if they just let them stay up 24/7 regardless of that, they're basically leaving money on the table. Heroku pays Amazon for all of what we're getting for free. Their free tier is a loss-leader.

If they don't spin down your app when it's idle, it absolutely costs them more than if they do. Regardless of how much (or even whether) they bill you for it.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#64

Post by halostatue »

Shank wrote: post #25
briandear wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or pay $7 per month?

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.

It should be possible to install hubot on a small OpenShift gear.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#65

Post by rapcal »

adamesque wrote: post #48
danneu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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%!

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#66

Post by matt2000 »

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.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#67

Post by fooey »

arsenide wrote: post #27
pvh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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!

nearly all my free tier apps are worthless if they aren't up 24/7

i have a bunch of open source, public service sorts of things and I don't know what I'm going to do with them now :(

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#68

Post by fooey »

Shank wrote: post #25
briandear wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or pay $7 per month?

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.

I have a bunch of little open source, public service sorts of things too

Don't know what I'm going to do with them. They're useless if they're not up 24/7, but I can't justify wasting $84 a year on them either.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#70

Post by petitmiam »

zebracanevra wrote: post #50

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.

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-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?

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