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Removal of Heroku free product plans

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Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#261

Post by bradgessler »

knubie wrote: post #213
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…

I have a production rails app that I've been thinking of migrating to Fly from Heroku. After reading the Turboku[0] docs, it seems that the process only migrates the rails app itself, and continues to connect to the Postgres database on Heroku. Is that right? Are there any plans to "upgrade" Turboku or release a similar tool that makes migrating Heroku Postgres databases to Fly just as easy?

You're correct! The tool stops short of migrating the database from Heroku to Fly. I'm actually going to start working on this soon. Here's what that will look like:

1. A doc will appear at https://fly.io/docs/rails/ that walks through how to move over a Heroku app, including the database. I'm going to start drafting this next week since I have a few SaaS apps running on Heroku that I want to move over.

2. If the docs are complicated and have lots of steps, I'll look into automating most of this process. I don't think I'll be able to 100% migrate Heroku apps to Fly without any intervention, but I do think moving over the app code, ENV vars, and database would be a pretty big win.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#262

Post by zdragnar »

shrewduser wrote: post #238
swyx wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Presumably, "nazi" here is a stand-in for any form of communication not protected by free speech laws and / or is actively forbidden by government censors (or perhaps merely undesirable by social standards). Hate speech, anti-government advocacy, promotion of violence and terrorism etc will use "free" tier accounts because they want as little capability of being tracked to in-real-life people as possible.

They may or may not fully utilize the bandwidth, but they will absolutely take advantage of access to resources that don't require real identification, and that adds an extra burden of regulatory compliance on the company offering it (even if it is just hiring a few extra people to manage takedown orders, etc).

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#263

Post by joshstrange »

freeqaz wrote: post #254
joshstrange wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

> 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.

What a beautifully succinct way of putting it, and I couldn't agree more. They aren't competitive on tech, they aren't competitive on price, and this is has already pissed off a number of customers who have been with them from the beginning (starting on the free tier, growing to 10's of thousands of dollars a month) and who are now looking elsewhere. All they have is their Heroku/Salesforce name, neither of which are compelling IMHO.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#264

Post by chuckgreenman »

Heroku's final chapter was being acquired, we are now entering the afterword. It was revolutionary when it was introduced and for a long while after that - but their mistake was getting sold to Salesforce, they can't even make a competent CRM, of course they can't innovate a developer experience platform.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#265

Post by swatcoder »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#266

Post by toyg »

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. It's a typical move from a business stuck in a death spiral, desperately searching for profits by blindly slashing expenses.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#268

Post by MoroCode »

This seems like a pretty bad idea and one thats going to choke Heroku's growth. The only realistic reason one would actually build on Heroku is that they started with the free tier and decided it would take too much time to switch to anything else. I get the reasoning behind wanting to reduce the amount of time the engineering team spends trying to prevent abuse of the free tier but there are much better strategies to go about it then remove it all together. Sounds like Salesforce basically wants to milk Heroku and squeeze as much profit out of it before its completely dead

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#269

Post by jannikarndt »

I visited their pricing page many times, thinking "this is awesome, I SHOULD pay something for it". But the difference between the free dyno and free postgres to the 16$/month-version is so minuscule that it never made sense. I think you need a lower threshold to upsell from "free".

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#270

Post by bombcar »

zippergz wrote: post #47

I've barely used Heroku, just playing with it for a day or two when it was in its heyday to see what it was about. But my incredibly anecdotal sense is that Heroku's real sweet spot was apps that started out on the free plan and then grew to be paying customers. Is that not really accurate? I know that's kind of a hard business model because only a tiny percentage of free customers will ever start paying. But do comp…

That's a style of business that can work for various companies, but it is NOT the type of business that Salesforce, et al want to chase.

They want to work with accounts and upsell those accounts. It's an entirely different business model, and isn't really compatible.

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