Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)

disclaimer: former Heroku person here too

Some examples of the things I've missed around developer experience for a database, that Craig and the team made possible at Heroku Postgres, include:

- fork: ever had one of those "why does this bug only exist in production?" problems? It was so trivial to fork the DB and run your tests/hypothesis/whatever without the risk of actually impacting production. Same thing for _really_ testing a migration script or load test.

- follow: a similarly easy approach for getting a read replica which is super useful for generating reporting.

- dataclips: "hey, can you tell me X?" sure, and here's a URL to the results that you can refresh if you need an updated number in the future. So great for adhoc queries.

All of these are obviously doable with RDS and/or other solutions too. But the time taken to do any of the above was often measured in seconds, at most minutes. It's difficult to communicate just how impactful those kind of improvements are to your workflow. It's like it subconsciously gives you permission to tackle whole new problems, build better solutions, get answers to questions you never thought to ask before. Because the barrier to entry is so low you just do these things. You don't sit around wondering if you could.

A great developer experience around a database (one that goes beyond setup and basic ops) is a severely under appreciated thing IMO.

Well here is you (with your disclosure) participating in a discussion on the topic a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31053504

You’re as capable as I am of searching HN for mentions of your service.

He's responding to someone who specifically mentioned their experience using Render. I don't consider that shilling. I personally like seeing that kind of direct engagement from founders on HN.

I agree 100% on the misdirection happening on many of these so-called Heroku replacements.

Offering me 'kube-as-a-service' over a layer of AWS or whatever on top of some massive cloud provider isn't really a heroku competitor. Thats just throwing some plywood over a ball of mud and trying to offer some hand holding with all the rough edges. I don't wanna have to decide between AWS or GCP (see one of the first docs on Porter: https://docs.porter.run/getting-started/provisioning-infrast...), or even think about them. I don't want to learn k8s to spin up some side-projects, and ultimately if you go with one of these the abstractions _will_ leak. I don't wanna go look at AWS UIs to see the status of my database (see https://docs.porter.run/deploying-addons/postgresql#persiste...).

The fact is if you need k8s, then you probably need a team of smart people setting it up and continually managing it who are very knowledge about your app and its specific needs, because you better have the scale that requires. Because if you are spinning up a k8s cluster for a monolith or a few microservices w/ 200 customers, you are just going to burn thru dev time and cash.

Heroku has been constantly praised since it took off because it does massive amounts of things behind the scenes to abstract away all the operations you don't want to worry about. You can launch a tiny prototype or small to medium startup in under an hour. You can add a DB and Redis w/ snapshots and automated backup and monitoring all w/i the Heroku API or UI. Does it expose the full power of the datastore and let you do everything you can do with RDS or a VPS? Of course not, but thats a totally valid trade off when you are just trying to get something shipped to see if it has traction.

So if you are looking for Heroku alternatives: know that things like Porter aren't really direct competitors, no matter how much they are marketing themselves as. From what I've seen Render and Railway are much more in line to be the next Heroku-replacement.

edit to mention, since the parent brought it up: I have no horse in this race. I'm still a fan of Heroku and use it daily, but don't work for anything to do with dev tools or PaaS.

Yuuup. That is the genius of Heroku. They make almost everything very simple and the tougher stuff relatively easy to understand and configure. All of that took many many years of iteration and refinement, which is why the competitors are going to take awhile to get there.