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Removal of Heroku free product plans

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Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#161

Post by strongbond »

joshstrange wrote: post #99
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think a company the size of Salesforce would have the long-range vision to use a tiny fraction of their resources to capture developer "goodwill" from projects just like this. But apparently you'd be wrong.

Nah, some beancounters/MBAs found they could they could save a tiny amount of money and completely ignored the knock-on effects, tale as old as time. That said Heroku hasn't been relevant in many years now so maybe removing the free tier won't matter. They just have the people who are stuck there or for those who are neck-deep into Salesforce crap and Heroku is the best option. Neither of which sound like a winning s…

I think the situation may be perhaps different to the one you describe. Heroku seems to have been pretty clear about the abuse and fraud that led to this move. It's a shame all round.

I don't have an MBA and am not a beancounter, but have some experience on the economics of the free tier. It's not pretty.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#162

Post by mrkurt »

aarondf wrote: post #115
altilunium wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried it. Apparently, unlike heroku free tier, you need to add payment information on fly.io in order to use their free tier.

Given that Heroku is killing their free tier because of "fraud and abuse" I'm pretty ok with Fly requiring a CC for their free tier. Requiring a legit CC has to cut that by a substantial amount, I'd think.

Yes, this. We (Fly.io) get a lot of abuse from users with stolen credit cards, too. But credit cards are the most useful anti-fraud tool we have.

When we've relaxed the credit card restriction (like on https://fly.io/launch/livebook), it gets "exploited" within about 48 hours.

This sucks and we hate compromising the experience for legit users. We _want_ people to run their side projects on Fly.io without paying us money. The credit card gate makes this happen less.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#163

Post by specialp »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #81

fly.io is better anyway. Its a real shame how far salesforce dropped the ball on heroku

Yes Heroku was so far ahead of its time, and they could have been a leader in this field. They didn't even tie it in very well with Salesforce CRM as well which would have gained them cloud business. Free tier is probably the only thing that has kept them relevant. With this move, all I see is Heroku conceding defeat that they have not caught up, and they just want to milk existing larger customers for money.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#164

Post by kenforthewin »

bluedino wrote: post #141

I can't remember what book it was that was I reading, working through some language/framework of the month. They had you register an account on GitHub, and then on Heroku. You'd push the chapter's exercise up there, deploy it, and then never look at it again. I always wondered how many millions of repos/apps were out there because of stuff like that.

Free apps will shut down after periods of no traffic, so these kinds of projects aren't costing compute, but i suppose there's some overhead in storage.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#165

Post by hgsgm »

pastor_bob wrote: post #100
craigkerstiens wrote: post #17

This is a sad day. Pricing changes are always hard, and having been through some of the earlier pricing changes at Heroku you can't make everyone happy. But, so many developers deployed their first app on Heroku and was a staple for so many bootcamps. Without it I'm confident we'd have less developers in the world. It is still one of the gold standards for developer experience. Years after its heyday companies and to…

> Heroku and was a staple for so many bootcamps Some would say bootcamps exploited a free service and a nice-to-have became an expectation

No post body was provided.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#166

Post by linuxhansl »

arberx wrote: post #150

Since the Salesforce acquisition the life has been sucked out of Heroku and the product has suffered. Sad day for the service.

Heroku never made any money before the acquisition.

Don't get me wrong, Heroku is (was?) great, but in the end at some point you have to stop losing money.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#167

Post by hgsgm »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#168

Post by highwaylights »

This sounds very much like Salesforce wants to shutter Heroku, but draw out whatever blood might be left in the stone first.

Without a free tier you're essentially drawing a line under your uptake and saying no to new customers. That means providing existing infrastructure to larger customers who are going to feel increasingly squeezed by this.

On one hand, I get that they want to get some value out of it before shutting it down, but I have such fond memories of the old Heroku from back in the early cloud days that it still makes me a bit sad - even if it's a very different company today.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#170

Post by Spivak »

5fnheluzdj wrote: post #113
bradgessler wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the top of my list is being able to use a local repository and providing no credit card.

CC’s are an abuse prevention tool and essentially a proxy for real names since lots of companies ban “privacy” cards. Would you be willing to instead turn other proof like a government id with face recognition to auth it?

Because yeah it sucks but Heroku is shutting down their free tier because of abuse so it's not a theoretical problem. Anyone who has even more lax requirements will get run over as well.

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