Removal of Heroku free product plans • Hacker News Board

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#281

Post by MuffinFlavored » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 6:17 PM UTC

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…

What alternative platforms would you consider moving to that have the same features you use/need?

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#282

Post by MuffinFlavored » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 6:18 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #266

copperx wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is Heroku stuck in a death spiral? Source needed?

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#283

Post by tzs » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 6:18 PM UTC

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.

OT: your HN profile says:

I'm curious. If you were to continue that sequence would the continuation be:

A. 2044, 2065, 2099, 2154, 2242

B. 2044, 2065, 2099, 2154, 2243

C. Something else?

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#284

Post by MuffinFlavored » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 6:18 PM UTC

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…

> At $49/m we could get a decent bare metal server for each of our apps.

From where/with what kind of specs? $49/m sounds still well within VPS territory unless I'm wrong.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#285

Post by intelVISA » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 6:19 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #204

intelVISA wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my apologies, seeing modern VMMs actually get used for once always hits different.

OK, but if you do it again we're converting to QEMU.

from Fly.io to Bye.io in one simple trick..

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#286

Post by joshstrange » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #277

joshstrange wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's always the case which is why I said "about the last time" instead of "the last time". There is always stuff in the pipeline, there are always still people who care for a while but they see the writing on the wall just like the rest of us, they leave, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm not saying there aren't/weren't good developers/managers at Heroku, I'm saying the sale to Salesforce started the end for Heroku.

If the security incident a few months ago wasn't a clear "we don't care about Heroku" then I don't know what will wake some people up.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#287

Post by driverdan » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

mrkurt wrote: post #162

aarondf wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that Heroku is killing their free tier because of "fraud and abuse" I'm pretty ok with Fly requiring a CC for their free tier. Requiring a legit CC has to cut that by a substantial amount, I'd think.

Yes, this. We (Fly.io) get a lot of abuse from users with stolen credit cards, too. But credit cards are the most useful anti-fraud tool we have. When we've relaxed the credit card restriction (like on https://fly.io/launch/livebook ), it gets "exploited" within about 48 hours. This sucks and we hate compromising the experience for legit users. We _want_ people to run their side projects on Fly.io without paying us m…

Are you using Stripe's fraud protection, MaxMind's tools, or something else to detect card fraud?

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#288

Post by intelVISA » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 6:21 PM UTC

cmg wrote: post #3

> Starting October 26, 2022, we will begin deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year. Starting November 28, 2022, we plan to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data services. We will be sending out a series of email communications to affected users. Sad to see this, but not surprised after the Salesforce purchase…

Think even Azure has a (crappy) free app engine offering as well

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#289

Post by joshstrange » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 6:22 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #271

joshstrange wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Obviously they didn't make that much on Heroku but they don't report per-division numbers as far as I could find, just top-level.

My point is they have the money to invest in Heroku if they wanted to. To combat fraud/abuse, to breathe some life into it, to respond to security events quicker, to innovate, to be competitive. They've done none of those things and instead are cutting off the last funnel of people who "choose" to use their platform. That tells me they don't care about Heroku as anything more than "Salesforce Cloud" something people almost have to use rather than choose.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#290

Post by knubie » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 6:23 PM UTC

bradgessler wrote: post #261

knubie wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doc…

That’s great to hear! Thanks for the reply.