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

251–260 of 590 posts

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#251

Post by 5fnheluzdj »

Spivak wrote: post #170
5fnheluzdj wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While I do understand the trouble, having a way to try the product without revealing my identity makes it `as good` as Heroku.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#252

Post by joshstrange »

duxup wrote: post #245
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.

It's possible, though that doesn't really apply to a company who made $4.34B in gross profit in 2021. I'm sure they will save some money but by making this move they are signalling (intentionally or not) that Heroku is on life support and they don't care about developers anymore.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#254

Post by freeqaz »

joshstrange wrote: post #240
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…

100% agreed with this. Having fewer customers using the free tier in 2022 would make it cheaper to run.

It's the stagnation and the realization that they can't compete that's pushing them to sell based on their brand instead of their merit. "Life support" is one way of phrasing that. The other might be "bleeding the tech dry".

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#255

Post by desireco42 »

This is an end of an era. Rails which kind of is reviving a little bit, it was a huge driver of Heroku success, they were amazing service for reasonable amount.

I had paid services on them and it wasn't trivial but it was for Heroku so it was OK. I don't know, they will go back to free at some point but it will be too late.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#256

Post by donmcronald »

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…

IMO the big winners in this space will be the ones that provide feature parity in self-hosted runtimes (meant for dev and testing) in addition to consumption based entry level plans.

If the appeal of all these systems is horizontal scalability on managed infrastructure, is there much harm in giving away a free local runtime that's vertically scalable with no HA or SLA? The incremental cost for me to self-host something like that is pretty low (near $0) and the benefit of having a non-revocable, free forever runtime for dev deployments has a lot of value (to me). I create a lot of throw away projects to learn and being able to keep them runnable for the long term is useful if I want to go back and reference them / re-learn something.

I also think a consumption based entry level offering is a good option to reduce abuse. If I'm a hobbyist sized user I can use my existing self-hosted resources for dev and testing and the cost of using the paid service is going to be low for me, but can cover costs for the infrastructure provider. I know it's viewed at untenable, but I'd gladly take a community only / per-incident support offering at that level to keep the costs low.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#257

Post by Atlas-Marbles »

https://caprover.com Is a great open-source alternative that seeks to offer Heroku-like functionality. You just need to host it on your VPS, which is far cheaper than paying for Heroku (From their docs: "Heroku charges 250USD/month for their 2gb instance, the same server is 5$ on Hetzner!").

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#259

Post by j-rom »

This is really disappointing. I've used Heroku for many years to build out small proof-of-concept apps. It was one of the first platforms that I used to make my small projects public. Sad to see the free tier go.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#260

Post by cpursley »

gkoberger wrote: post #65
evtothedev wrote: post #55

Does anyone else find the roadmap to be really uninspiring? Every tasks seems either like housekeeping ("Migrate from Github OAuth to Github App Model") or like far-too-late table stakes ("Support HTTP/2"). What am I supposed to get inspired about on this page? For items that look like they ?might? be exciting, they seem hidden behind vagueness: "Official Cloud Native Buildpacks for Heroku languages" Contrast this wi…

I'm with you, but to play devil's advocate... 1. Heroku already has most of the features on Render's roadmap 2. It's clear Heroku (well, Salesforce) is going all-in on Enterprise, and Enterprise doesn't reward cool new features. They like stability (and jargon-y words).

Heroku doesn't handle distributed Elixir nor static sites. Render does.
Post reply on HN