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

371–380 of 590 posts

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#371

Post by TillE »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #365
joshstrange wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never said there wasn't any. Just that if you value a free tier (which you should if you want to attract developers) you find a way to deal with the fraud (or eat the cost). The fact that Salesforce either couldn't figure out (or didn't care to) the fraud and didn't want to pay for it spells bad news for the future of Heroku.

Again I don't think you understand the amount of resources that goes into anti-fraud teams in the hosting world. I used to work at a big hosting company and we had a team of 50+ people working around the clock to stop fraud ontop of tens of thousands of hours in engineering time to automate as much as possible. It STILL wasn't enough. I can only imagine how much worse it is when you have a free product offering.

They could've converted the entire free tier offering to a $2-5/month thing, which would still be very attractive for legitimate users. Fraud is a big problem, but it didn't mandate this specific solution.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#372

Post by MuffinFlavored »

laundermaf wrote: post #337
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Which they know, and can charge you accordingly for, right?

If a single sysop engineer cost $100k/yr (without anybody managing them), they can charge you $50k/yr to replace them and it'd still be a steal, right?

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#373

Post by dicriseg »

anurag wrote: post #361
csjh wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Render does have auto deploys from GitHub/Lab so just `git push` is how people use us. Are you using a different Git host?

If anything this saves a step. For me, git push heroku master was more often git push && git push heroku master at least when starting out.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#374

Post by spiralganglion »

bradgessler wrote: post #315
greenie_beans wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

managed postgres

Heroku's pg is ridiculously good. I recently wrote a document that demonstrates what Fly's pg is capable of at https://fly.io/docs/rails/the-basics/backup-and-restoring-da... . It obviously not nearly as extensive as Heroku's pg offering, but for some people its enough—for others not so much.

Second this — Heroku pg is the main reason I've stayed with them, paying $$$/month to host my service. If Fly (or Render) can match the seamlessness of that experience, that'll be where I host next.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#375

Post by joshstrange »

strongbond wrote: post #368
joshstrange wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take them at face value that's the reason, personally they've lost nearly all my trust so I'm wary of accepting that as the reason. Also fraud and abuse are not unique to Heroku, every hosting provider with a free tier has to worry about that. This is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater as well as showing they don't really care about new developers coming to their platform. In this thread and th…

I agree with most of what you say. The question I have is why would anyone care about new developers coming to their platform unless they had a plan, one day, to monetize those folks?

I think that’s part of the problem. They have no good plan on how to monetize them which is a problem. Instead of fixing that problem they just threw the baby out with the bath water.

Removing the free tier signals they can’t compete so they decided to remove something that only costs them money. Removing the free tier might even be a good/right decision, given their circumstances. What I am saying is removing the free tier appears to be them giving up on Heroku. It’s not like I’ve ever heard of someone migrating TO Heroku, especially not with their prices (and what you get for it). $25/mo per 512MB dyno? That’s just insane.

So if they aren’t trying to court new developers and they aren’t compelling as a PaaS to new customers then it seems the only place they can go is down. The lack of investment in the platform has already caused them to shed developers and today’s news will only accelerate that. All that’s left are people who are using it with Salesforce’s other products. Maybe that’s enough to make plenty of money but the Heroku we all knew (and some of us loved) seems to be gone, and that’s sad.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#376

Post by nebula8804 »

anotheracctfo wrote: post #355
nebula8804 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MBAs have destroyed the US/Europe. How? Outsourcing all the jobs/manufacturing to China. This caused so many knock on effects. Some include an angry unemployed population electing Trump/other populists, the west being caught with its pants down during COVID when things we needed could not be obtained from China...many others as well. Then subsequently after all the manufacturing jobs were outsourced the next thing to…

The lowest grade I got in my business degree was Information Systems. The reason I got that grade is that I made a case for in-sourcing development based on my personal experience, where we provide services for cheaper than consultants, that aligns with OUR business processes. The only answer to any and all business IT questions in non-IT companies is to outsource. The reasoning is that it is considered a support act…

You know its interesting you bring this up. My first internship out of college was with Colgate-Palmolive which from what I recall was one of the largest SAP users in the US at the time (early 2010s). I heard among the grapevine that it was a massive effort to change the whole company around to the "SAP" way of doing things and that competitors (like P&G I think?) attempted but failed to implement SAP and suffered due to it. I don't know if P&G eventually managed to convert to SAP and I often wondered if Colgate could have been run better without SAP?

It was so ingrained into their operations and personally I don't think they could attract the caliber of engineer required to implement an in house system better. The lack of good devs in the industry is a massive problem for companies like Colgate. You just won't get the FAANG caliber devs working for a toothpaste company unless you really go way above and beyond in compensation and even then that might still not be enough to get the numbers you need.

My guess is that SAP(or other ERP) is better than in house for a company that has no competitors that have successfully implemented in house. As soon as you have a competitor that can implement in house better (maybe Amazon compared to their competitors?) then the balance shifts and SAP becomes a liability more than an asset. Not sure, just brainstorming.

I left after a year because coming out of an engineering college with a CS degree doing some complex stuff and then having to writing reports in ABAP depressed me immensely and resulted in one of my worst productive years in my career. I was eventually not offered a full time position because I was so depressed that I just did not complete my projects towards the end of the internship. On a positive note, Colgate was very accommodating and they treated me extremely well when I was there. It worked out though as I am much happier today doing Angular/Python dev.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#377

Post by cdubzzz »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #343
cdubzzz wrote: post #309

> Open source programs: If you are a maintainer on an open-source project, and would like to request Heroku support for your project, contact the Salesforce Open Source Program office at ospo-heroku-credits@salesforce.com. Both the text version of this email (ospo-heroku-credits@salesforce.com) and the mailto it actually links (ospo@salesforce.com) appear to be invalid. I tried both and got: > We're writing to let yo…

classy! I was just about to write an email too, I guess I won't... yet?

Yeah. I did some Internet sleuthing and found a potential contact for the Salesforce Open Source Program Office and reached out. We'll see if they get back.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#379

Post by dicriseg »

jszymborski wrote: post #83
ghiculescu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think nobody has been able to fully emulate this experience? It seems to me like there’d be a big market for an identical feature by feature Heroku “clone” with a more dedicated (from the outside looking in) team. No more features, no less, just exactly what Heroku did but without the intent to shut down. What’s preventing that from existing?

Installing Dokku [0] is pretty easy on a VPS, and ergonomically it's felt a lot like (a cheaper) Heroku to me (although I only ever used the free apps). I just use the Heroku docs to create apps I can run on Dokku. Now, you need to deploy Dokku so I get how the two are dissimilar, but I wonder what it would look like for a company to try to offer managed dokku instances (perhaps this is already a thing?). [0] https:/…

Im about to go down this path for fun with the saas template I’ve built for myself, but my concern is what am I going to screw up security-wise? Im not an expert by any stretch - I know the basics. I guess we’ll find out!

I just never worried about this with Heroku. I already use the paid tier there for some projects, but the writing seems to be on the wall, so I’m sampling the alternatives. Render is probably where I end up though.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#380

Post by anurag »

mpd wrote: post #176
bradgessler wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please let me know in the replies what you'd like to see at Fly that would make it as good, if not better, than Heroku. I recently started working at Fly to focus on making Rails & Ruby app deployments awesome, and of course Heroku set that benchmark almost a decade ago. I can't promise I'll get to everything, but I can promise that it will help me better prioritize what I should be focusing on to make Fly better for…

My big want here is containerized deployments with build + release steps to allow me to e.g. run migrations and after-deploy tasks (we use both). This prevented a move to Render for us previously.

We're going to start working on a release phase at Render in the next month. Stay tuned! We'll also update feedback.render.com.
Post reply on HN