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Removal of Heroku free product plans

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Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#241

Post by bradgessler »

bvirb wrote: post #207
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…

We spend more on Heroku CI than we do running our app on Heroku and it's well worth it. CI runs on (almost) the exact same platform as production and we don't have to maintain any of it. When Heroku removes a package from their base image it gets removed from CI and we know if it broke anything. The pricing model is the same as running our app. Which means if 10 people want to run 10 branches on CI at the same, and e…

Yeah that sounds like an awesome CI! Fly won’t ship anything that integrated anytime soon because there’s so much great CIs out there now. What you will see is Fly integrating into CIs for deployment steps, which could be to a staging env per branch or a final deploy to production.

Here’s a sense of what that looks like: https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/continuous-deployment-with-gi...

This obviously doesn’t come close to the way Heroku does it and requires some effort. I have some ideas for fly CLI commands that would make setting up a basic CI a little easier, but again, not to the level Heroku is doing it.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#242

Post by pyb »

tptacek wrote: post #197
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're telling you why: having a free tier means allocating a lot of resources to fraud and abuse, which are rampant in hosting, especially now that you can convert hosting dollars almost directly to cash. It's a big problem, and I have every reason to believe they're being forthright about why they've made this decision.

But, in other terms, it means they no longer have enough tech talent in-house to solve hard problems.

This points to further decline down the line.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#243

Post by butterfly771 »

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…

A platform that looks good (similar to railway), has added card information and is ready to try it out for some time.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#244

Post by slg »

Unlike most of their competitors, I don't think I have ever heard of someone migrating to Heroku. Seemingly the only people who are still using it are using it because they started with it, usually with their free product. I'm no expert or anything, but it seems like a bad idea to cut off that funnel of future customers by eliminating that free product.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#245

Post by duxup »

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…

Is it possible that a bunch of free stuff where they don't sell you as a product (and maybe even when they do sometimes) just isn't a viable thing to do on the web?

Generally on the web we as consumers seem to cycle through these companies, often pay nothing, and we're bummed each time they quit doing the thing...

Seems like a pattern.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#246

Post by Dma54rhs »

joshstrange wrote: post #214
tptacek wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're telling you why: having a free tier means allocating a lot of resources to fraud and abuse, which are rampant in hosting, especially now that you can convert hosting dollars almost directly to cash. It's a big problem, and I have every reason to believe they're being forthright about why they've made this decision.

That may all be true but I don't see any other way to frame this other than them throwing in the towel for the whole platform and/or conceding to other platforms that are better at spotting fraud/abuse. Require a credit card, require a deposit, allow free dynos for otherwise paying customers. Killing the whole program is a sign they don't care about growth, they don't care to be where a developer first launches a hob…

They do require credit card for free dynos. Maybe it wasn't so in the beginning I can't remember.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#248

Post by joshstrange »

shostack wrote: post #237
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 f…

Salesforce made 4.34B in gross profit in 2021, they aren't hurting for money and the "health of the business" seems perfectly fine. I'm sure someone got a raise for cutting this program, it will save the company some money in the short term, and that person will have left to screw up another company before the chickens come home to roost. It's a tale as old as time and something we've seen enough times to notice the signs.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#249

Post by bombcar »

highwaylights wrote: post #168

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 shut…

You never ever shutter services in the Enterprise world if you can avoid it. So you turn off the free ones, eventually turn off the "spin up for new customers" feature, and support the existing as long as you think you need to.

The whole point of Enterprise is to keep it running forever so they keep paying without having to think about it.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#250

Post by cpursley »

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…

Check out Render.com. I switched over several apps in less than a full day.
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