Chapter 11?
lol, this is a response for this a bit obfuscated first announce https://blog.heroku.com/next-chapter
Removal of Heroku free product plans
501–510 of 590 posts
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#502> Starting October 26, 2022, we will begin deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year. Inactive for over a year? That's really interesting, because I was a paid Heroku customer for multiple years, but am no longer. I don't even have resources running, but I do have a few apps sitting in the dashboard. I guess I'm fair game for culling, despite being a paid c…
Late November is a crazy timeline. I have my personal website, wedding website, and tons of other projects on Heroku free stuff. So now it’s $7-$16/mo per app… thousands of dollars per year. Which is a reasonable price, I guess. It was probably entitled of me to think I could host so many websites for free.
…except now I have to migrate them in fucking 2 months of weekends or everything will be deleted?! Thanks for ruining my weekend plans, Salesforce
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#503[deleted]
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#504Some feedback on communications, especially given the backlash:
1. "Why are we doing this?" should be the very first item. Explain it in clear terms.
2. The blog post that explains the "why" is rather scant on details, with the real "why" buried in text. Nuh-uh. Make it front end center and make it detailed. Developers all across the world have to deal with fraud and abuse and are sympathetic to how expensive it is. We get it. So lay it all out for us! Explain why, in detail, it's so cost-prohibitive that you have no choice but to shut down the free tier! Maybe we'll have more empathy and believe you when you say you really are doubling down on other offerings. Maybe you'll learn that you can actually keep the free tier, since some people in the community have suggestions you hadn't considered yet, and in a few months' time you'll get to thank them for their contributions towards improving your practices and keeping the free tier free forever. Who knows? But without a lot of details, nobody can be of help.
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are not shutting it down. As I said in the blog, our priority is making sure that Heroku choice is a good business decision for critical apps of all sizes. This does have tradeoffs, but getting the rug pulled out is not one of them - the opposite.
It's incredibly frustrating to watch Heroku's leadership squander what they've been given stewardship of. Heroku has a decade-plus of goodwill and developer recognition, and that is being burned to the ground rather quickly. How about acknowledging that the Free tier is going away because Heroku is basically in keep-the-lights-on mode at this point? The number of engineers who have been laid off or quit has gutted th…
Completely agree on their support. I used to get support from actual engineers who would resolve my issues quickly, but now I get agents who know nothing and eventually connect me to an engineer after days of back and forth “tech support.”
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth mentioning there's a very vibrant piracy community that abuses heroku's free tier for torrent to direct-download bots and myriad other purposes. Thousands and thousands of fake accounts using the resources to their limits 24/7. It's likely also the reason Google's moved away from unlimited storage for educational institutions. I can understand why Salesforce has felt the need to restrict access.
i belatedly came to this realization that this is a common problem for all hosting (CDNs, because free bandwidth, and CI/CD, because free compute, and anything that offers free storage) companies. I call this the PCN problem - free tier hosting for anything means you eventually have to deal with Porn, Crypto, Nazis. everyone handrolls prevention measures, i once proposed an industry council where we swap tips, but ev…
missed the opportunity to call it NPC which lowkey fits better :)
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#507This 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. Without it I'm confident we'd have less developers in the world. Given that many (most?) bootcamps are for-profit, it stands to reason that they should be able to pay for a basic level of Heroku services that their students can use, no? > Gonna pour one out tonight for Heroku. You're acting like they're dead, but that…
> Given that many (most?) bootcamps are for-profit, it stands to reason that they should be able to pay for a basic level of Heroku services that their students can use, no?
I used to mentor at a not for profit bootcamp. We had students use Heroku because it was free and they could keep their applications running after the boot camp ended and continue to make updates, use it as a demo, part of their CV etc...
As a non profit we certainly didn't have money to spare. What little funding we had was spent on marketing/public awareness, fees for outside teachers, and space.
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#508We pay Heroku many, many tens of thousands of dollars a year. And I still use free dynos, both personally and at work. For example, throwing up a quick app for testing (where I'm happy with dynos that sleep or are limited per-repo). By pushing us off the Heroku ecosystem for some stuff, we might as well just move everything. The only reason we even use Heroku now is because I used it for free over a decade ago. I get…
When I looked at Heroku pricing way back when, I immediately had a "WOW that's expensive" reaction. I look at it now, and...well, I'm all-in on k8s for most things, and cloud functions for most everything else, so I'm really not sure what the advantage of using Heroku would ever be if it they don't have a free plan. For free databases there are multiple options like CockroachDB and Supabase; throw up a $6/month dropl…
Yeah, I really wonder just how out of touch they are with their customer base to believe this is the best course of action. So many of their paying customers ended up that way because it was free and easy to test out an idea. Then if you started making money it was still easy and you could afford to pay Heroku to scale. Then a lot of these paying customers will never outgrow Heroku scale so they stay forever.
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, it's worth asking, how long something like this could remain free. Even that six or seven seconds costs somebody something.
Salesforce reported an almost $20B profit last year. They can afford it to buy developer goodwill.
Maybe all that profit shows that they don't need to buy developer goodwill?
Re: Removal of Heroku free product plans
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It also misses anyone else looking to learn. Self study folks, anyone without a bootcamp connected to a sales team, non traditional schools ... you're out. I remember changing careers and studying and a lot of sites promised free stuff but if you weren't connected to whomever they worked with / a traditional school you were kinda SOL unless you wanted to go begging on twitter or something like that. Granted I get the…
> Self study folks, anyone without a bootcamp connected to a sales team, non traditional schools ... you're out.
Disagree. Traditionally you pay for education through property taxes or tuition or whatever. A determined person in this field can cough up $20 a month for a very capable server.
When I was young and poor 40 years ago, to teach myself programming I spent all my money on books that cost $35 a pop at least, which would be something like $100 in today’s money.