Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Removal of Heroku free product plans

help.heroku.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 590 posts

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#171

Post by brad0 »

TBH I'm surprised that it took this long to move to this!

Back when Heroku first arrived, PaaS was a new idea. It was available ~2009, well before services like AWS Lambda existed.

This was such a paradigm shift that no one knew what to think of it. It takes time to build trust around such a big shift. The best way to do this is to offer to try it for free. Hence, the Free Tier.

People tried it, and were blown away by how easy it was to build services. It was so much easier than managing hosts directly. Fast forward to today. Engineers are generally comfortable with higher-level services. They know what to expect.

So the free tier is used as as part of the funnel to onboard new customers. Back in 2010, that funnel had a /lot/ of customers going in! Here in 2022, that funnel may be basically zero. On top of that, the free tier costs heroku to run.

Cutting off the free tier is in Heroku's best interest. It saves them money and allows them to focus on their current customers. But it does mean that there's no growth in the product any more, unless they offer something new.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#172

Post by swyx »

vagabund wrote: post #79
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…

It's worth mentioning there's a very vibrant piracy community that abuses heroku's free tier for torrent to direct-download bots and myriad other purposes. Thousands and thousands of fake accounts using the resources to their limits 24/7. It's likely also the reason Google's moved away from unlimited storage for educational institutions. I can understand why Salesforce has felt the need to restrict access.

i belatedly came to this realization that this is a common problem for all hosting (CDNs, because free bandwidth, and CI/CD, because free compute, and anything that offers free storage) companies. I call this the PCN problem - free tier hosting for anything means you eventually have to deal with Porn, Crypto, Nazis.

everyone handrolls prevention measures, i once proposed an industry council where we swap tips, but everyone views it as competitive advantage for some reason so it didnt go anywhere.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#173

Post by Andugal »

Varqu wrote: post #88
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…

In our case, this would mean increasing our Heroku bill by 400% (we run a few paid apps and >40 free dynos with super low monthly activity) Does anyone have a recommendation how to re-create the Heroku experience on AWS or Azure?

Maybe you could try the auto idle heroku add-ons?

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#175

Post by stickfigure »

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…

A Java/JVM stack.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#176

Post by mpd »

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…

My big want here is containerized deployments with build + release steps to allow me to e.g. run migrations and after-deploy tasks (we use both). This prevented a move to Render for us previously.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#177

Post by gkoberger »

We pay Heroku many, many tens of thousands of dollars a year. And I still use free dynos, both personally and at work. For example, throwing up a quick app for testing (where I'm happy with dynos that sleep or are limited per-repo). By pushing us off the Heroku ecosystem for some stuff, we might as well just move everything.

The only reason we even use Heroku now is because I used it for free over a decade ago.

I get why they made this decision, and I'm excited for Fly.io, Render, etc who can run the same playbook Heroku did 15 years ago. But also a bit sad, from a nostalgic standpoint. Many of us are here because of Heroku's free tier, and I'm very thankful for it.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#178

Post by criley2 »

ghiculescu wrote: post #66
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…

Why do you think nobody has been able to fully emulate this experience? It seems to me like there’d be a big market for an identical feature by feature Heroku “clone” with a more dedicated (from the outside looking in) team. No more features, no less, just exactly what Heroku did but without the intent to shut down. What’s preventing that from existing?

What do you mean? There's so many Heroku competitors these days that the perception has changed towards Heroku being a relic of "how it used to be done". Competitors like Vercel don't just do what Heroku does, they do everything better. (And now edge-first ideas like fly.io are catching on)

Another start-up I've been playing with is Railway, who offers 5-10$ of free usage per month, certainly enough to play with react/nextjs app and a postgres db to your hobbyists hearts content (as long as you turn if off when you're done).

If I were to host a bootcamp on starting a web app from scratch I'd do something like stand-up a T3 App https://github.com/t3-oss/create-t3-app on Vercel Hobby https://www.vercel.com . Not sure I'd even consider Heroku for teaching anymore.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#180

Post by tpetry »

brundolf wrote: post #174

Why don't other (smaller!) providers with free tiers, like render.com, have a problem with "fraud and abuse"?

They all have the problem, but they invest the time and knowledge to find more and more of them. They know that a free tier is vital for getting developers on their platform.

Heroku is already a big name. They are bought by salesforce. They just don‘t care anymore.

Post reply on HN