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Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?

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Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?

#41

Post by charrondev »

ysavir wrote: post #36

My biggest take away from trying to find a Heroku alternative is that Heroku is late to the game of charging for a basic app. Other service might be free, but seem to have some sort of catch--only static, or requires a certain infrastructure, or whatever else--and only Heroku had the unopinionated free tier. And while I haven't used their competitors, I'm skeptical they can match Heroku's interface, CLI, add-on ecosy…

I’ve found Vercel to work well for my personal projects. It’s supports dynamic applications and static ones, custom domains, CI for deployment and has a useable CLI all available on its free tier.

Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?

#42

Post by poopypoopington »

larrymyers wrote: post #35

The article calls out having to learn how to create a Docker image for Fly.io as though it's a bad thing. I consider it a huge bonus if you like taking advantage of free tiers for services. The whole point is that if you're going to take advantage of a free tier you should do so in a way that switching is trivial. Docker goes a long way to achieving that. I personally just pay $10/month to Linode and self host these…

the real story here is that a coffee and a bagel costs $10 \s

Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?

#43

Post by weaksauce »

fragmede wrote: post #29
gbourne wrote: post #15

All the free alternatives will eventually get rid of their free tier too - could be 1 year, could be 10 years. As the author stated, they had 25 free instances running. They converted over to paid, so maybe they became a profitable client. However, all the users who have 25+ instances and never pay over the course of 10 year isn't sustainable for a business.

It's been 12 years since Amazon announced their free tier, and it's still going strong. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/10/21/announ...

> new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year

I don't see how that's comparable. it's one instance of a micro server(and a few other things) for one year for a new AWS user and then it's over. heroku was an unlimited number of apps free tier forever with a limit on cpu/database usage for each app.

Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?

#44

Post by michaelbuckbee »

No discussion of Heroku and the free tier should happen without the context of the massive cryptomining scheme that was directly targeting their free tier:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-crypt...

Note, oddly the article doesn't state Heroku by name, but the network diagrams all do.

Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?

#45

Post by tyingq »

paxys wrote: post #37

Every conversation on this topic can be summed up as: "Heroku charging $7/mo for hosting is evil. Switch to instead."

You can get pretty far for free on Cloudflare, and the next tier up is $5/mo. Though it does mean either JS or WASM, which doesn't work for everyone.

Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?

#47

Post by jeroenhd »

weaksauce wrote: post #43
fragmede wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been 12 years since Amazon announced their free tier, and it's still going strong. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/10/21/announ...

> new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year I don't see how that's comparable. it's one instance of a micro server(and a few other things) for one year for a new AWS user and then it's over. heroku was an unlimited number of apps free tier forever with a limit on cpu/database usage for each app.

If you don't need a lot of bandwidth: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

Four CPUs, 300GiB of storage and 24GiB of RAM should last for quite some time.

If you do need the compute and bandwidth: pay someone. Pay Heroku or set up a Dokku (or similar) system on your own server.

Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?

#48

Post by the_lonely_road »

krashidov wrote: post #24
the_lonely_road wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of these projects have no revenue and only exist because a free plan existed. Paying is a non starter so asking where that next free alternative is is a logical intermediary step before shutting it down and moving on to something else.

Why is paying a non starter? There’s a lot of hobbies in the world that require money. I can’t just barge into a climbing gym and say “I’m sorry this hobby will give me no revenue so I refuse to pay”

No one barged into Heroku. The company offered a free service because they considered it a worthwhile marketing strategy. It has to be free because no one, including the authors, are interested in paying for the projects that are looking for another free option.

I created an Ember.js and Ruby on Rails clone of an old video game called Heroes of Might and Magic because it was fun to show my old buddies what I could do and play through some mock battles. I have no interest in paying for a server to host this so it’s just going to disappear from the internet. I have no interest in doing the work to port it over to even another free service. It never would have existed had Heroku not been an option when I had the idea. Obviously I could pay for it, it’s just not worth paying for. It’s similar to piracy, I consumed a lot of content back in the day simply because it was free. I never would have paid money for those music or to watch those movies.

Re: Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?

#49

Post by nathants »

you don’t want a free tier. what you want is reasonable usage based pricing and scale to zero.

all the actual tiny projects on free tiers have actual costs approaching zero. everything else shouldn’t be on a free tier.

if it’s not possible to monitor usage (not billing) and automatically unplug dns if usage spikes above some threshold, it’s probably not a good provider. having confidence that some project will never cost above x/month is a reasonable ask, and not challenging.

hint: use aws. like python and linux, it's not very good, but everything else is worse.

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