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Removal of Heroku free product plans

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Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#231

Post by greenie_beans »

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…

managed postgres

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#232

Post by driverdan »

jensneuse wrote: post #217
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…

If you're looking for a platform where you can run small experiments on free tier backends, we'd love to have you on our platform. We're looking to provide Serverless backends including SQLite-based storage for free: https://wundergraph.com/cloud-early-access

I don't think that would fit this use case but I will check it out, I always like looking at new hosting services.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#233

Post by joshstrange »

CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #210
arthurcolle wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salesforce acquired Heroku if you weren't aware. There's your "why" right there!

Um that was 11 years ago.

Which coincides with about the last time Heroku was relevant/competitive. This is just an example of the parent company tightening the screws some more (see also [0]).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32174596

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#234

Post by distrill »

copperx wrote: post #220
gkoberger wrote: post #177

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…

Probably free plans have tons of overhead. If this results in drastically lower prices, I'm all for it.

it won't

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#235

Post by recursv_thnkng »

kenforthewin wrote: post #164
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.

Not sure how sophisticated their traffic monitoring has become but to avoid this it used to be as simple as having the dyno ping itself. Doesn't avoid the hard cap on hourly compute though.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#236

Post by syntheticnature »

arthurcolle wrote: post #199
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...

Salesforce acquired Heroku if you weren't aware. There's your "why" right there!

As someone in a number of non-corporate/dev Slacks on the free tier, I do wonder when/if Salesforce will tighten up on those as well. There are some I know were just for organization during a one-time event...

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#237

Post by shostack »

joshstrange wrote: post #205

IF we want to take them at face-value that this is because of fraud and abuse (a trust/respect they have not earned IMHO, or rather they lost many years ago) then this a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Otherwise it's some stupid MBA finding a way to save some money which will ultimately only speed up Heroku's demise. Either way the writing is on the wall. The Heroku that delighted us all is long dea…

I don't understand this sentiment sometimes. There may be fraud and abuse. There may also be a material cost to a company whose detailed financial situation I'm assuming you are not purvey to.

Someone doesn't need to be "a stupid MBA" to have made this decision (in fact my guess would be it involved many cross functional and leadership perspectives given its nature).

Also, this is quite possibly something necessary for the future continued health of the business and the jobs it supports. If so, I'd consider it anything but stupid.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#238

Post by shrewduser »

swyx wrote: post #172
vagabund wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

Porn and crypto sure, but what are nazi's using free hosting and bandwidth for?

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#239

Post by btown »

tdjsnelling wrote: post #149
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…

I agree that the Heroku developer experience has been second to none. I'm a front-end & DX engineer at Northflank and we're working hard to evolve and create a next-gen iteration of the Heroku experience anchored around 12 Factor Applications in a Kubernetes/cloud native era. We're getting very close, come and see for yourself: https://northflank.com . Some key features: * As simple as `git push` to build & deploy se…

> preview workflows

This please, a thousand times! We're in the midst of a complex transition from Heroku, where we relied heavily on Review Apps for getting stakeholder feedback and QA'ing complex data model changes, to a k8s-on-EKS setup where we have a Helm chart that can duplicate our normal deploy in isolated namespaces for previewing new feature branches based on Github Actions.

Our data cloning and routing needs are rather custom (white labels on top of feature branch releases, with complex fixture-loading processes), so I don't know that we'd make a great initial customer, but there are so many companies out there that should be using preview apps aggressively and don't know what they're missing. If you can make this happen in a modern environment without people needing to know what Argo and Flux are, or how to make a "for" loop in Helm, it could be a significant differentiator - and also provide a lower barrier to entry where prospective customers use you first for low-impact preview environments, then start using you for production as well.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#240

Post by joshstrange »

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…

> Back in 2010, that funnel had a /lot/ of customers going in! Here in 2022, that funnel may be basically zero.

That's not because 12 years passed, it's because Heroku didn't innovate or even keep abreast of the competition in that timeframe.

> Cutting off the free tier is in Heroku's best interest. It saves them money and allows them to focus on their current customers.

It cuts off the only onramp they had for entry developers or developers who can't afford to pay their ridiculous prices (I mean come on, $25/mo for 512MB of ram? Is this a joke? It was expensive but understandable when they launched and has only gotten worse while the product has not improved which competitors have blazed past them).

> But it does mean that there's no growth in the product any more, unless they offer something new.

I won't hold my breath, it seems clear they are life support at this point.

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