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Removal of Heroku free product plans

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Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#271

Post by duxup »

joshstrange wrote: post #252
duxup wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They didn't make much of that money from Heroku I bet.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#273

Post by bradgessler »

5fnheluzdj wrote: post #211
bradgessler wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By local repo, do you mean like how Heroku's `git push heroku` works? Or do you mean you want to deploy from your local machine's repo? The `fly deploy` command is a local deployment in the sense that it copies the files of your application and deploys it to the server, regardless if you have git or not. If you launch Fly from the CLI to test the free tier, you don't need a credit card. Obviously when you exceed the…

With `local repository` I meant not involving a thirdparty like Github or Gitlab which is a requirement for some Heroku-like providers. `git push heroku` is very nice to have - for me it would be enough to not having to leave the terminal as it seems to be the case. Last time I tried fly.io I had to provide payment information before doing something useful. I'll give it another try as you suggested.

Got it! There's no plans to implement git repos in the same way Heroku is doing it (FWIW I love how Heroku does this). When Heroku introduced this feature, cloud CI services were practically non-existent. Today a similar effect can be achieved in Github, Gitlab, etc. with their CI integrations (See https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/continuous-deployment-with-gi... for Github)

I realize that's what you're trying to avoid. In your case I'd recommend running `fly deploy` from your CLI If you don't want to leave the CLI. You could wire this up as a git hook either on your workstation or third-party git server. I recognize this isn't the same thing as Heroku, so I'm calling these work arounds :-)

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#274

Post by downrightmike »

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…

Salesforce bought them in 2012 and didn't do anything with them.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#275

Post by xavdid »

wilg wrote: post #219

I always wished I could pay Heroku like $50/mo for a "side project" plan where it was easy to spin up small apps and databases. I don't need it to be free, I just need it to be kind of easy and painless to spin up a bunch of random side projects. Some kind of limit is fine.

This is my problem as I'm evaluating competitors. I have a few tiny services that don't need constant uptime (the heroku sleep and wait-to-wake was perfectly fine).

Most places charge per-service and it's not clear that I can have 8 services that mostly sleep (and use less total uptime than a single always-on service).

I'm fine to pay a bit to keep these running, but $7 / service / month doesn't make sense for little toys (an actual business is a very different story)

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#276

Post by rcarmo »

malyk wrote: post #140
Varqu wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

porter.run, convox, render, fly.io, dokku...

Piku :)

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#277

Post by CoffeeOnWrite »

joshstrange wrote: post #233
CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is just wrong info. Search HN comments from ‘craigkerstiens, an early employee. Significant innovative product development continued for a few years after the acquisition.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#278

Post by rcfox »

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…

Since they specifically called out abuse of free services, I wonder if they would be open to continuing free dynos for paying customers. It'd be worth reaching out at least.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#279

Post by joshstrange »

swatcoder wrote: post #265
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…

Quoted post unavailable.

It comes from a lifetime of watching leaders/visionaries sell their companies to corporations that don't care about anything but the bottom line (to be specific the short-term bottom line) who then proceed to run the company into the ground because they don't "get" the company. I'm not sure how many times you had to see that phenomenon to recognize the patterns but it's pretty clear to me.

It also comes from being a former user of Heroku and being ennammered by it for years until they stopped innovating. Today's move means I will never touch it again. Do I know all the internal stats? No but I'll say 2 things:

1. Salesforce made over $4B in gross profit in 2021, they aren't hurting for money.

2. Heroku's failures are due to poor leadership and being completely surpassed by their competitors.

#1 means they have the money to invest in Heroku but are choosing not to and #2 is due to a decade of mismanagement. Now they want to stop some of the bleeding by cutting off the free tier, the problem is they are also guaranteeing they won't ever recapture developer mindshare in the future. Saves some money today but destroys the future of the product (as a developer platform at least, I'm sure it will go on to be Salesforce Cloud or something like that which people only use because they have to).

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