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Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

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Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#31

Post by mytailorisrich »

throwawaykai wrote: post #21
ericpauley wrote: post #4

This whole debacle has been such short-term thinking from Salesforce. That after carrying these free projects for years they couldn't stomach more than 30d of data retention is just the icing on the cake. In my view this has caused yet further reputational harm for Heroku, and is going to have a long-term effect on the bottom line from paid projects. The value prop of Heroku has always been being able to sleep at nig…

Herokai here. Unfortunately we had no choice on the data retention front — once we’ve disconnected your database, we aren’t ALLOWED to hold your data for more than 30 days. That’s part of the data scrubbing protocol that we agree to when you sign up. We fought hard for 90+ days internally, but in the end couldn’t get over the issue that we’d be in violation of our contracts with customers.

Please. You'd just need to ask if the customer is OK with 90 days instead of 30. Done.

The company has no commercial interest in doing that, though.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#32

Post by porpoisemonkey »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #31
throwawaykai wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Herokai here. Unfortunately we had no choice on the data retention front — once we’ve disconnected your database, we aren’t ALLOWED to hold your data for more than 30 days. That’s part of the data scrubbing protocol that we agree to when you sign up. We fought hard for 90+ days internally, but in the end couldn’t get over the issue that we’d be in violation of our contracts with customers.

Please. You'd just need to ask if the customer is OK with 90 days instead of 30. Done. The company has no commercial interest in doing that, though.

It doesn't sound like this would have helped in this particular case since they were unable to contact the customer.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#33

Post by jrochkind1 »

xp84 wrote: post #20
ericpauley wrote: post #4

This whole debacle has been such short-term thinking from Salesforce. That after carrying these free projects for years they couldn't stomach more than 30d of data retention is just the icing on the cake. In my view this has caused yet further reputational harm for Heroku, and is going to have a long-term effect on the bottom line from paid projects. The value prop of Heroku has always been being able to sleep at nig…

I assumed the value prop of being on Heroku in 2023 was purely "not having to do the pain in the butt to migrate your legacy app that you made on Heroku in the pre-2010 era" - in other words, I would be really shocked if Heroku got significant new business or any growth at all, now that it's just expensive AWS with some basic CI integration points. I also assume Salesforce only bought them as a cash generator and has…

"Pre-2010"? Heroku only launched in April 2009. So I would assume the vast majority of current customers are not actually from a "pre-2010 era". Heroku didn't even have a postgres add-on until November 2010 -- the salesforce purchase went through in Dec 2010. In fact, the heroku "golden years" were mostly during the early salesforce period. (Heroku put matz, creator of ruby, on staff in July 2011; there was no Heroku API until 2014!). (source for timeline: https://www.heroku.com/about)

Heroku is still quite a bit of value-added over "AWS with some basic CI integration", people chose it and still choose it because it requires a lot lot lot less in-house expertise and management hours than AWS for most kinds of standard apps. (I'm not totally sure what AWS services/architecutres you are thinking of when you say that; but I'll say: for pretty much all of them.)

(Heroku def has more competition in that space than it did 10 years ago, opinions differ on the relative merits)

AWS of course already existed when Heroku was launched, so if you do consider them just "AWS with some CI integration" then I guess they would have been from the start? What would have made that true now if it wasn't then?

I think Salesforce thought it would somehow be more "synergistic" with their other offerings than it has turned out to be. That they'd get Salesforce customers on heroku when they needed something beyond the "no-code" tools Salesforce already provided, or that they'd do better at converting heroku customers to salesforce customers than they have been. It does seem to be true that salesforce stopped really investing in new heroku features or improvements some years ago, and seem to be looking to minimize costs while continuing to collect revenue, I agree. (Sometimes I'm not even sure how much they care about continuing to collect revenue...)

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#34

Post by fireworks »

throwawaykai wrote: post #21
ericpauley wrote: post #4

This whole debacle has been such short-term thinking from Salesforce. That after carrying these free projects for years they couldn't stomach more than 30d of data retention is just the icing on the cake. In my view this has caused yet further reputational harm for Heroku, and is going to have a long-term effect on the bottom line from paid projects. The value prop of Heroku has always been being able to sleep at nig…

Herokai here. Unfortunately we had no choice on the data retention front — once we’ve disconnected your database, we aren’t ALLOWED to hold your data for more than 30 days. That’s part of the data scrubbing protocol that we agree to when you sign up. We fought hard for 90+ days internally, but in the end couldn’t get over the issue that we’d be in violation of our contracts with customers.

Are you allowed to inform paying customers that you are going to do this? This is my primary complaint here. I don't understand how this oversight happened. This is going to cause an enormous amount of time and energy to recover from this.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#36

Post by gwillen »

throwawaykai wrote: post #25
shortcake27 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or let me share dynos across all my projects. $5-$10 per month for all projects, sounds good! $5 per month for each project adds up very quickly.

That was the new “eco” plan that was introduced alongside the ending of free plans — $5/mo for 1000 hours shared across all eco dynos.

I definitely wish you guys had advertised that earlier / better. I feel like I got lucky because I put off migrating until just before the sunset, at which point I discovered eco dynos. I swear they either didn't exist or were harder to find when the sunset was first announced. Thanks for making them available at all, though.

(Context: I maintain an app for an event that runs about one week a year. The ability to use free dynos the other 51 weeks means we retain the ability to do one-off analytics queries, minor development work, etc. during the off-season, without having to delete and recreate the app or something every year. Eco isn't quite as good as free, but it means we can still have separate staging and production instances during the off-season, without paying extra for staging to be idle, and without having to destroy and recreate staging every year.)

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#38

Post by mytailorisrich »

porpoisemonkey wrote: post #32
mytailorisrich wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. You'd just need to ask if the customer is OK with 90 days instead of 30. Done. The company has no commercial interest in doing that, though.

It doesn't sound like this would have helped in this particular case since they were unable to contact the customer.

I was replying to a bullshit claim that they cannot retain for more than 30 days no matter what.

That's hiding behind the T&Cs instead of owning their decision not to even try because there is nothing in it for them.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#39

Post by amenghra »

xp84 wrote: post #20
ericpauley wrote: post #4

This whole debacle has been such short-term thinking from Salesforce. That after carrying these free projects for years they couldn't stomach more than 30d of data retention is just the icing on the cake. In my view this has caused yet further reputational harm for Heroku, and is going to have a long-term effect on the bottom line from paid projects. The value prop of Heroku has always been being able to sleep at nig…

I assumed the value prop of being on Heroku in 2023 was purely "not having to do the pain in the butt to migrate your legacy app that you made on Heroku in the pre-2010 era" - in other words, I would be really shocked if Heroku got significant new business or any growth at all, now that it's just expensive AWS with some basic CI integration points. I also assume Salesforce only bought them as a cash generator and has…

I used Heroku’s free tier for small projects/prototype. I continue to use their cheapest offering for new projects because it saves me time. If a project grows, I can reevaluate my choice. I don’t think anything in Heroku is a pain to migrate away from. I would miss the intuitive/familiar UI.

Re: Tell HN: Heroku deleted my database with no warning

#40

Post by yamtaddle »

fireworks wrote: post #34
throwawaykai wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Herokai here. Unfortunately we had no choice on the data retention front — once we’ve disconnected your database, we aren’t ALLOWED to hold your data for more than 30 days. That’s part of the data scrubbing protocol that we agree to when you sign up. We fought hard for 90+ days internally, but in the end couldn’t get over the issue that we’d be in violation of our contracts with customers.

Are you allowed to inform paying customers that you are going to do this? This is my primary complaint here. I don't understand how this oversight happened. This is going to cause an enormous amount of time and energy to recover from this.

> Are you allowed to inform paying customers that you are going to do this?

I can't be the only one who's basically completely blind to emails from major companies, including SaaS providers, because they're so fucking spammy that the SNR is like 1:99. Notifying me by email, for one of these places, is functionally the same as not notifying me at all.

[EDIT] Sorry, didn't mean to imply the parent wasn't paying attention, just that I'd fully expect a very high percentage of their users to miss the warning in all the noise even if they emailed everyone—even if they emailed them a couple times, actually. That's the cost of every company sending out tons of "join our online seminar on [product]!" and "hey, look, it's our newsletter you never read!" and "it's time for our weekly TOS modification!" emails.

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