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Removal of Heroku free product plans

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Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#221

Post by cercatrova »

jszymborski wrote: post #83
ghiculescu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Installing Dokku [0] is pretty easy on a VPS, and ergonomically it's felt a lot like (a cheaper) Heroku to me (although I only ever used the free apps). I just use the Heroku docs to create apps I can run on Dokku. Now, you need to deploy Dokku so I get how the two are dissimilar, but I wonder what it would look like for a company to try to offer managed dokku instances (perhaps this is already a thing?). [0] https:/…

DigitalOcean for example has one click Dokku installs. They also have the more morern managed containers thing that many PaaS are offering, where you can git push your app and it'll run in a container.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#222

Post by jensneuse »

riskycodes wrote: post #85

We pay Heroku thousands of dollars a month for our Staging and Production environments, and one of the reasons we chose them is that we can spin up a toy widget or proof of concept in seconds for free : we probably do a few of those a day, play around with them for a few days or weeks, and then kill them. Now that these toys aren't free, I would guess likely to move them to AWS or GCP (since they're likely to be chea…

We'd like to provide exactly this. Git push to deploy, free Serverless backend including SQLite-based storage. Please have a look and sign up for the private beta if you're interested: https://wundergraph.com/cloud-early-access

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#223

Post by pythonaut_16 »

wutangisforever wrote: post #188

I don't get why heroku would do this, it's killing any customer who would start off small and scale up. I mean how much money could they possibly be losing from hobby dynos etc...

They want it to die. They don't want to keep supporting Heroku but they don't want the bad press of killing it outright. Or at least they're pivoting from independent hosting to an enterprise value add for SalesForce.

Or they're really short-sighted.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#224

Post by mark_l_watson »

icodestuff wrote: post #186
mark_l_watson wrote: post #169

I think they will support the $7/month hobby demos, right? Google and Oracle can afford to provide a free micro VMS, smaller companies like Heroku can not. Google and Oracle probably get good value for letting people have free, never expires, micro VMSs.

That was sarcastic, right? Heroku is owned by Salesforce. Pretty sure they can afford just about anything Oracle can.

Not sarcastic, I forgot.

I am not sure I will ever use them again but I used to find their $7/month plan useful.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#225

Post by joshstrange »

strongbond wrote: post #161
joshstrange wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you take them at face value that's the reason, personally they've lost nearly all my trust so I'm wary of accepting that as the reason. Also fraud and abuse are not unique to Heroku, every hosting provider with a free tier has to worry about that. This is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater as well as showing they don't really care about new developers coming to their platform.

In this thread and the other on the frontpage currently there are many people who started using Heroku on the free tier and now run or work at companies that spend thousands or tens of thousands a month on Heroku. This change is causing at least some of them to start looking around or even say for sure they plan on moving off of Heroku. This will effect Heroku today (people leaving) as well in the future (people never coming in the first place). To me that's a sign of them giving up (if it wasn't already clear by their actions over the last years).

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#226

Post by ramanujank »

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?

Have you considered Cloud Foundry?

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#227

Post by bombcar »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #73
cfiggers wrote: post #57

Speaking as a pure hobbyist with no formal background in programming or computer science, I've learned a ton playing around with free Heroku dynos. That "holy shit, it worked" feeling is a hell of a drug. My proudest achievement so far is a dumb-as-rocks little Clojure program that runs on a schedule in a free Heroku dyno. It sends alerts to a Slack channel when there's updates to a Trello board we use at work. All i…

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.

Salesforce is not a developer goodwill company.

They're a management goodwill company. Developers work with salesforce because they are told to, not because they want to.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#228

Post by decidertm »

hazzamanic wrote: post #218
decidertm wrote: post #62

The public roadmap is a good idea but highlights how stale the product has become. https://github.com/heroku/roadmap/issues Only now researching adding Cloud Native Build Packs and HTTP2. This will reaffirm for many the sense that Heroku is being dismantled from within. Feature sunsetting and removal of a free on-ramp doesn't help. If you're looking for a production alternative to Heroku checkout Northflank. https://…

Is the free plan comparable to heroku? So I could get a free Dyno (equivalent) with postgres dB on Northflank? And you can't scale back down to free once you go paid?

Yes you can create a service and a postgres db in Northflank's free tier. Once upgraded there isn't a downgrade, nothing stopping you making another free project however!

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#229

Post by anm89 »

diminish wrote: post #182
brad0 wrote: post #171

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 b…

cutting free plans signals the fading growth moment for an old star(tup).

And they made a big press release today on how they are "focusing on the future".

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#230

Post by anm89 »

ThePadawan wrote: post #185
cultofmetatron wrote: post #81

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

> Its a real shame how far salesforce dropped the ball on heroku I mean, was there any sign to the opposite? Reading the sentence "Salesforce acquires Heroku" basically reads to me as "Giant megacorp buys trendy internet-y company so their name appears in newspapers positively and they have a department where they can put their employees that are too smart for their current job and would otherwise quit".

A shame but not a surprise.

Salesforce will be percieved like IBM or Oracle in 10 or 15 years. I already see them that way but it seems like many don't

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