Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Removal of Heroku free product plans

help.heroku.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 590 posts

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#331

Post by duxup »

joshstrange wrote: post #289
duxup wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "ch…

They have money to invest. And so do other companies offering free products and yet they often vanish.

Heroku is not new, they got investment ... maybe this whole cycle of free tier companies just isn't working?

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#332

Post by jrochkind1 »

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…

> The downfall started before Salesforce

Salesforce purchased heroku in Dec 2010. This was before, for instance, ruby creator Matz was an employee (he no longer is). Heroku had only existed for about 2 years when salesforce bought it. I think there are some other features we think of as core to heroku that actually weren't deployed until after the salesforce purchase.

I think a lot of people remember it this way, but I think they are wrong and heroku's golden age actually came a couple years after the salesforce acquisition.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#333

Post by csjh »

kretaceous wrote: post #63
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 relate to this. > We appreciate Heroku’s legacy as a learning platform. Many students have their first experience with deploying an application into the wild on Heroku. I'm one of those students. It's good that they will open up something free for students but I suspect it'll never be the same as just signing up and git push heroku master.

Render has pretty good free tier benefits, but no git push render master

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#334

Post by jacooper »

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.

Isn't this against HN rules?

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#335

Post by joshstrange »

duxup wrote: post #331
joshstrange wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "ch…

They have money to invest. And so do other companies offering free products and yet they often vanish. Heroku is not new, they got investment ... maybe this whole cycle of free tier companies just isn't working?

> maybe this whole cycle of free tier companies just isn't working?

That feels like a stretch. I can say for myself there are a number of developer services I pay for monthly that I don't think I would have tried if not for the free tier. Once you company starts stagnating (like Heroku) then sure, maybe it's time to kill the free tier since you aren't attracting people (other than scammers) but that's just a sign you are giving up in my eyes.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#336

Post by csjh »

aarondf wrote: post #15

Fly.io has a dedicated process for moving off of Heroku. Auth via Heroku and they'll launch your app onto Fly. They also have a free tier. The process: https://fly.io/launch/heroku The docs: https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/speed-up-a-heroku-app I haven't used it [the Heroku -> Fly process] myself, but it's been around for quite some time!

They have crazy low bandwidth limits though... puts me off quite a bit

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#337

Post by laundermaf »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #324
gkoberger wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Yeah of course you can do it all by yourself. You just need a server online.

Services like Herokus are useful because they save hundreds of hours of sysops.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#338

Post by tills13 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #307
gkoberger wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fly, Render, or (blah) straight AWS. If I was starting from scratch, I'd go all in on Next + Vercel.

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…

Sorry but what? You're suggesting someone go from a SaaS, all-bells-and-whistles-included offering to bare metal?

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#339

Post by shiftpgdn »

joshstrange wrote: post #214
tptacek wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That may all be true but I don't see any other way to frame this other than them throwing in the towel for the whole platform and/or conceding to other platforms that are better at spotting fraud/abuse. Require a credit card, require a deposit, allow free dynos for otherwise paying customers. Killing the whole program is a sign they don't care about growth, they don't care to be where a developer first launches a hob…

I don't think you understand how much fraud and abuse is in the hosting world.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#340

Post by jrochkind1 »

recursv_thnkng wrote: post #235
kenforthewin wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free apps will shut down after periods of no traffic, so these kinds of projects aren't costing compute, but i suppose there's some overhead in storage.

Not sure how sophisticated their traffic monitoring has become but to avoid this it used to be as simple as having the dyno ping itself. Doesn't avoid the hard cap on hourly compute though.

Do you think people working on tutorials that have them deploy a chapter's exercise to heroku, to never look at it again, are setting up things to have the dyno ping itself?
Post reply on HN