Free (as in beer) Dynos • Hacker News Board

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#11

Post by Lockyy » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:19 PM UTC

mapleoin wrote: post #4

task_queue wrote: post #2

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?

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 si…

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).

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.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#12

Post by websitescenes » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:19 PM UTC

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.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#13

Post by yebyen » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:20 PM UTC

task_queue wrote: post #2

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?

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.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#14

Post by addandsubtract » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:20 PM UTC

mapleoin wrote: post #4

task_queue wrote: post #2

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?

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 si…

You could use the free heroku tier to build your projects and host the static pages somewhere else, like S3.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#15

Post by thinkbohemian » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:20 PM UTC

mapleoin wrote: post #4

task_queue wrote: post #2

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?

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 si…

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.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#16

Post by pvh » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:23 PM UTC

websitescenes wrote: post #12

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.

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.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#17

Post by pvh » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:24 PM UTC

task_queue wrote: post #2

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?

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.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#18

Post by Artemis2 » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:26 PM UTC

websitescenes wrote: post #12

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.

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.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#19

Post by pvh » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:27 PM UTC

hayksaakian wrote: post #3

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

Hobby dynos are real dynos. :) Professional dynos, like the new `standard-1x` will have scale-out, Heroku Metrics, preboot, and mix with other dyno types: all features we have found are most useful for apps at scale.

We hope that between the new `free` and `hobby` dynos you should have good choices that support almost any personal or small scale professional app you might want to build.

Re: Free (as in beer) Dynos

#20

Post by yebyen » Thu, May 07, 2015, 4:28 PM UTC

addandsubtract wrote: post #7

hayksaakian wrote: post #3

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

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...

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.