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Removal of Heroku free product plans

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Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#151

Post by simonw »

danenania wrote: post #86
simonw wrote: post #43

An important detail: If you have a free PostgreSQL database running on Heroku it will be deleted three months from today. You'd better be paying attention to their emails! I think this is a particularly tough part of this. Heroku: please consider instead stashing a backup of that data somewhere, so that users who wake up on November 29th and find that their application has vanished can sign in and at least recover th…

For small enough DBs, they could even literally just email you the data zipped up as an attachment. I'd guess most hobby projects are a few MB if that. That said, I don't really get the feeling that Heroku is willing to put an ounce of extra effort into this, unfortunately.

That's a great idea. Free databases are limited to 10,000 rows so they are likely to be very small in most cases, would totally fit in an email attachment.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#153

Post by moe »

Friends don't let friends buy Salesforce (or Oracle) has been common sense in engineering circles for at least a decade.

It seems founders should adopt a similar stance: Friends don't let friends get bought by Salesforce.

I wonder if James et al regret having fed their baby to the devil. Surely a better buyer could have been found, one that doesn't destroy everything they touch. But no blame here. They had their well-deserved payday and we shall remain grateful for all the good patterns, ideas and years of solid service they contributed to our craft.

R.I.P. Heroku!

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#155

Post by upset_customer »

countspongebob wrote: post #82
joshstrange wrote: post #26

So their next chapter is obscurity followed by shutting down? It was clear even before their horribly bungled GitHub security incident that Heroku was on life support at best and it's been a long time since "Heroku" was the answer to "What PaaS should I use?". The beancounters took control a while back and are sucking all they can out of it before they discard it's empty shell. Having Heroku as your PaaS provider see…

We are not shutting it down. As I said in the blog, our priority is making sure that Heroku choice is a good business decision for critical apps of all sizes. This does have tradeoffs, but getting the rug pulled out is not one of them - the opposite.

It's incredibly frustrating to watch Heroku's leadership squander what they've been given stewardship of.

Heroku has a decade-plus of goodwill and developer recognition, and that is being burned to the ground rather quickly.

How about acknowledging that the Free tier is going away because Heroku is basically in keep-the-lights-on mode at this point? The number of engineers who have been laid off or quit has gutted the company, to the point that fighting abuse and spam is not possible, nor is active feature development.

I've submitted a support ticket several times and get a canned response from some poor sod in India who has no idea what is going on. Heroku's Support used to be the model of "how it's done." Now it's a joke.

And security is a joke, as demonstrated by the April "incident" that lasted two months. Reading between the lines, it seems that nobody knows what exactly happened, and the team is probably still waiting for more fallout.

I don't envy your position Bob, you've probably been told to kill Heroku by your leaders, all of whom have never used Heroku nor can explain what a dyno is.

A sad day in the developer world indeed.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#157

Post by cfiggers »

driverdan wrote: post #134

We're a large Heroku user currently spending $10-20k/month. This change may lead us to switching to another platform. We host a lot of individual apps, many that only need free tier DBs and Redis. This change will roughly double the cost of a basic app on pro dynos + DB + redis, from $25/m to $49/m, with no additional benefit. Heroku is already very expensive. $25/m for 512MB RAM is laughable. At $49/m we could get a…

Wow, I didn't think about paying customers who supplement their pricey apps with free ones for lower-volume or less-critical functions. This change makes Heroku objectively worse even for shops that are already paying top dollar.

Thanks for writing.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#158

Post by mik3y »

bradgessler wrote: post #80
aarondf wrote: post #15

Fly.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…

1) We would love an equivalent to the HEROKU_RELEASE runtime variable: A strictly increasing int that is incremented with any change to the environment (deploys or env/secrets).

It’s nice to have a single roll up for all of the knobs — “what was the state of the environment” — to tag in things like crash logs.

(It’s also something we can’t easily tool ourselves.)

2) One click dashboard rollback button. Didn’t realize how much we missed this from Heroku.

3) Meta: Public roadmap and feature request tracker. Fly has a habit of surprising, usually pleasantly!, but it’d be nice to know how close or far off something on our wishlist is. (Render seems to do this well.)

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#159

Post by gkoberger »

driverdan wrote: post #134

We're a large Heroku user currently spending $10-20k/month. This change may lead us to switching to another platform. We host a lot of individual apps, many that only need free tier DBs and Redis. This change will roughly double the cost of a basic app on pro dynos + DB + redis, from $25/m to $49/m, with no additional benefit. Heroku is already very expensive. $25/m for 512MB RAM is laughable. At $49/m we could get a…

+1, same for us. We spent tens of thousands of dollars a month on Heroku, and still get nickel and dimed for free repos.

Including my own personal side projects. I like being in one ecosystem, and rather than just move free repos somewhere else, we're going to just move everything.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#160

Post by PebblesRox »

brundolf wrote: post #58

> discontinue free product plans > If you want a Heroku trial, please contact your account executive Uhh. What I never ever would have given Heroku a try if it hadn't been a free place to spin up toy projects. I definitely did not have an "account executive". There's some vague language in here about people abusing the free plans for malicious purposes, but other, much smaller providers don't seem to have that proble…

Right, and stopping fraud doesn't mean you can't grandfather in a bunch of established free plans that don't have any problematic usage patterns.
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