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Removal of Heroku free product plans

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Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#321

Post by xtracto »

slg wrote: post #244

Unlike most of their competitors, I don't think I have ever heard of someone migrating to Heroku. Seemingly the only people who are still using it are using it because they started with it, usually with their free product. I'm no expert or anything, but it seems like a bad idea to cut off that funnel of future customers by eliminating that free product.

I never 'got' what heroku was all about , but i have been working with linode, aws and similar for more than 10 years. I find it pretty easy to spin something up in aws

Otoh i know of a medium company (500 employees) that started in heroku and is moving to aws. Apparently they got to the top tier of the DB , and they've stumbled with several limitations by some lack of access .

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#322

Post by throwaway_4ever »

koolba wrote: post #147
craigkerstiens wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want a Heroku trial, please contact your account executive or reach us here. Maybe I'm over skeptical here, but I don't see this being an easy thing for a bootcamp study to acquire or deal with.

Why even bother with contacting an account executive? It's $7 per dyno per month for the cheapest hobby tier. That's peanuts compared to any fees for a paid bootcamp. Heck, with inflation, that barely buys a bag of peanuts. Plus the students would have an incentive to learn about shutting down unused resources that would pay dividends if they ever deploy to AWS. It'd be like a home economic lesson for hosted services…

Yes, but you also really need Postgres and that's now an extra $9/month too.

$0 -> $16

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#323

Post by mixmastamyk »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #282
toyg wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There's a search box at the bottom of each page here. Quite a few recent stories of decline, though death an exaggeration.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#324

Post by MuffinFlavored »

gkoberger wrote: post #316
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not bare metal servers or VPS from like... DigitalOcean? What is DigitalOcean missing for your use case/preference specifically compared to Next + Vercel? I'm not a DigitalOcean shill or employee, I'm just curious what I'm missing from a "what do other competitors out there offer". I always thought it was like... spinup Debian/Ubuntu VPS, ssh to it, install Docker, run docker-compose or Docker Swarm or... Terrafo…

For just the hosting, maybe. But there's so much more Heroku does, from spinning up test environments for PRs to storing secret keys (across different repos) to being a CI to monitoring to... so so much more.

> from spinning up test environments for PRs

Hooking up some kind of CI/CD to GitHub through webhooks

> storing secret keys

Built into GitHub (or an instance of Hashicorp Vault which can be hosted for free)

> to monitoring

Can run your own Grafana/Promtheus

Obviously there's a cost running all of this yourself as opposed to just paying them to do it. Just making sure I wasn't missing something obvious tradeoff wise between "our company would rather pay somebody to manage all of this for us"

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#325

Post by ptman »

Varqu wrote: post #88
craigkerstiens wrote: post #17

This is a sad day. Pricing changes are always hard, and having been through some of the earlier pricing changes at Heroku you can't make everyone happy. But, so many developers deployed their first app on Heroku and was a staple for so many bootcamps. Without it I'm confident we'd have less developers in the world. It is still one of the gold standards for developer experience. Years after its heyday companies and to…

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?

Run dokku, caprover (or write a better heroku alternative, I'm sure now would be the time) on another free cloud service. I wrote a comparison of a few major ones: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#326

Post by buf »

craigkerstiens wrote: post #17

This is a sad day. Pricing changes are always hard, and having been through some of the earlier pricing changes at Heroku you can't make everyone happy. But, so many developers deployed their first app on Heroku and was a staple for so many bootcamps. Without it I'm confident we'd have less developers in the world. It is still one of the gold standards for developer experience. Years after its heyday companies and to…

I just bought villainku.com. Will forward to heroku.com when the DNS is done.

You die the heroku, or live long enough to become the villainku.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#327

Post by matus_congrady »

Varqu wrote: post #95
riskycodes wrote: post #85

We pay Heroku thousands of dollars a month for our Staging and Production environments, and one of the reasons we chose them is that we can spin up a toy widget or proof of concept in seconds for free : we probably do a few of those a day, play around with them for a few days or weeks, and then kill them. Now that these toys aren't free, I would guess likely to move them to AWS or GCP (since they're likely to be chea…

As a CTO of a company which has a very similar situation - I can fully agree on that. We already started looking into a possible migration to another cloud provider. The biggest decision point would be a similar developer experience as with git push heroku master.

Would you mind elaborating on what does the "similar developer experience as with git push heroku master" mean for you?

I'm a founder at https://stacktape.com, and we're trying to provide full power of AWS with a developer-friendly experience, similar to Heroku or serverless framework.

Even after doing a ton of research, I'm still not 100% sure which of the Heroku's features are the killer features that the competing PaaS platforms must replicate in order to have the "Heroku-like" experience.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#329

Post by yebyen »

lddemi wrote: post #304
the_sleaze9 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All it would take is a quick google... Heroku stock price is down roughly %50 from less than a year ago. Death spiral? I don't know. But slashing costs is certainly not indicative of Heroku having a super awesome fun time.

all tech cos are down 50% from a year ago

But Heroku also had a major GitHub integration that devolved into CVE which could not be fixed for about a month (among other bad news parts of that story, such as lying about the scope and slow walking the disclosures, that all seemed to just get worse.)

This is ostensibly all the result of the brain drain after SalesForce acquisition has set in. It's a death spiral.

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