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Removal of Heroku free product plans

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Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#431

Post by japhyr »

Can anyone clarify what the minimum cost of say, a demo Django project would be now? I come up with $16/month, using a $7 dyno and a $9 postgres instance. Is that accurate?

Also, if you're testing the deployment process, what's the minimum charge? Say I push a project, test it to see that the deployment worked, and then destroy the project in less than three minutes. Will I be charged for three minutes of resources, or is there some hourly/daily/monthly minimum? I can't find that kind of info anywhere.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#432

Post by ryantgtg »

cercatrova wrote: post #221
jszymborski wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:/…

DigitalOcean for example has one click Dokku installs. They also have the more morern managed containers thing that many PaaS are offering, where you can git push your app and it'll run in a container.

Once dokku is installed, the deployment method is `git push dokku master`

And how is that any more modern than heroku?

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#434

Post by cercatrova »

ryantgtg wrote: post #432
cercatrova wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DigitalOcean for example has one click Dokku installs. They also have the more morern managed containers thing that many PaaS are offering, where you can git push your app and it'll run in a container.

Once dokku is installed, the deployment method is `git push dokku master` And how is that any more modern than heroku?

Did Heroku use containers? I seem to remember it didn't since back in the day.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#436

Post by ignoramous »

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…

> But, so many developers deployed their first app on Heroku and was a staple for so many bootcamps.

Heroku was a product for its time. These days, I see most students use replit.com (in India, at least), including as part of course curricula at universities (paid plans). I'd say replit has since replaced heroku as the getting started tool of choice.

As for heroku, there are many NewCloud companies waiting to pounce: fly.io, deno.com, vercel.com, netifly.com, railway.app, workers.dev some of the popular ones here, while there's also resurgence in packaged / DIY PaaS FOSS alternatives like supabase.com, encore.dev, temporal.io et al.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#437

Post by lagrange77 »

criley2 wrote: post #178
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?

What do you mean? There's so many Heroku competitors these days that the perception has changed towards Heroku being a relic of "how it used to be done". Competitors like Vercel don't just do what Heroku does, they do everything better. (And now edge-first ideas like fly.io are catching on) Another start-up I've been playing with is Railway, who offers 5-10$ of free usage per month, certainly enough to play with reac…

> Competitors like Vercel don't just do what Heroku does, they do everything better.

Vercel does not do, what Heroku does, besides a CDN, they do serverless functions. Correct me, if i'm wrong.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#438

Post by 8note »

strongbond wrote: post #161
joshstrange wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, some beancounters/MBAs found they could they could save a tiny amount of money and completely ignored the knock-on effects, tale as old as time. That said Heroku hasn't been relevant in many years now so maybe removing the free tier won't matter. They just have the people who are stuck there or for those who are neck-deep into Salesforce crap and Heroku is the best option. Neither of which sound like a winning s…

I think the situation may be perhaps different to the one you describe. Heroku seems to have been pretty clear about the abuse and fraud that led to this move. It's a shame all round. I don't have an MBA and am not a beancounter, but have some experience on the economics of the free tier. It's not pretty.

Open question: does Heroku consider the usecase as described as fraud/abuse?

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#439

Post by ev1 »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #72
cfiggers wrote: post #57

Speaking as a pure hobbyist with no formal background in programming or computer science, I've learned a ton playing around with free Heroku dynos. That "holy shit, it worked" feeling is a hell of a drug. My proudest achievement so far is a dumb-as-rocks little Clojure program that runs on a schedule in a free Heroku dyno. It sends alerts to a Slack channel when there's updates to a Trello board we use at work. All i…

Well, it's worth asking, how long something like this could remain free. Even that six or seven seconds costs somebody something.

I think back in the day, that six or seven seconds was likely someone learning, someone playing around with something, but these days people are signing up millions of accounts to try to mine shitcoins six seconds at a time.

Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans

#440

Post by criley2 »

lagrange77 wrote: post #437
criley2 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? There's so many Heroku competitors these days that the perception has changed towards Heroku being a relic of "how it used to be done". Competitors like Vercel don't just do what Heroku does, they do everything better. (And now edge-first ideas like fly.io are catching on) Another start-up I've been playing with is Railway, who offers 5-10$ of free usage per month, certainly enough to play with reac…

> Competitors like Vercel don't just do what Heroku does, they do everything better. Vercel does not do, what Heroku does, besides a CDN, they do serverless functions. Correct me, if i'm wrong.

I mean Vercel has a lamdba/serverless feature but you can absolutely point a git repo at it and have it build your site and run your node backend. It's a little more abstracted away, but then again Heroku is just an abstraction on Aws, and the newer era of tools are a bit more abstract than Heroku.
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