[HN Gopher] Removal of Heroku free product plans ___________________________________________________________________ Removal of Heroku free product plans Author : countspongebob Score : 640 points Date : 2022-08-25 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (help.heroku.com) (TXT) w3m dump (help.heroku.com) | highwaylights wrote: | This sounds very much like Salesforce wants to shutter Heroku, | but draw out whatever blood might be left in the stone first. | | Without a free tier you're essentially drawing a line under your | uptake and saying no to new customers. That means providing | existing infrastructure to larger customers who are going to feel | increasingly squeezed by this. | | On one hand, I get that they want to get some value out of it | before shutting it down, but I have such fond memories of the old | Heroku from back in the early cloud days that it still makes me a | bit sad - even if it's a very different company today. | bombcar wrote: | You never _ever_ shutter services in the Enterprise world if | you can avoid it. So you turn off the free ones, eventually | turn off the "spin up for new customers" feature, and support | the existing as long as you think you need to. | | The whole point of _Enterprise_ is to keep it running forever | so they keep paying without having to think about it. | anotherfounder wrote: | I hate the corporate speak of 'Next Chapter', 'Public Roadmap' - | just be direct and confident enough to say upfront that you are | removing the free tier, instead of hiding it in the blog post. | Come on, Bob! | paulcarroty wrote: | Good riddance! Should say: Heroku definitely busted my interest | in web dev and "git-push-deploy" magic. Just develop a simple | app, put it on Heroku and it's alive! That was so cool in good | old days! Thanks for the memories. | mark_l_watson wrote: | I think they will support the $7/month hobby demos, right? | | Google and Oracle can afford to provide a free micro VMS, smaller | companies like Heroku can not. Google and Oracle probably get | good value for letting people have free, never expires, micro | VMSs. | icodestuff wrote: | That was sarcastic, right? Heroku is owned by Salesforce. | Pretty sure they can afford just about anything Oracle can. | mark_l_watson wrote: | Not sarcastic, I forgot. | | I am not sure I will ever use them again but I used to find | their $7/month plan useful. | FBISurveillance wrote: | Summary: | | * Announcing Public roadmap launch - we'll probably see what they | are working on. | | * Discontinue free product plans and delete inactive accounts. | | Rest of it: corpspeak. | sgmoore wrote: | There are 66K thousand forks of | https://github.com/nightscout/cgm-remote-monitor and I suspect | the vast majority are using the free heroku version, so I would | guess there are going to be quite a few unhappy diabetics! | Exuma wrote: | Oohhh wow | kasia66 wrote: | Check out https://www.cloud66.com/ you can run your applications | on all major cloud providers including bare metal + native | support for MySQL, Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch, MemcachD + | handy features to deploy and manage your apps and team. | desireco42 wrote: | This is an end of an era. Rails which kind of is reviving a | little bit, it was a huge driver of Heroku success, they were | amazing service for reasonable amount. | | I had paid services on them and it wasn't trivial but it was for | Heroku so it was OK. I don't know, they will go back to free at | some point but it will be too late. | TheRealDunkirk wrote: | I keep expecting a droll announcement like this from GitHub, | since the Microsoft acquisition. Hopefully, Heroku's cautionary | tale will keep them in check. | simonw wrote: | An important detail: If you have a free PostgreSQL database | running on Heroku it will be deleted three months from today. | | You'd better be paying attention to their emails! | | I think this is a particularly tough part of this. | | Heroku: please consider instead stashing a backup of that data | somewhere, so that users who wake up on November 29th and find | that their application has vanished can sign in and at least | recover their data to migrate it somewhere else. | danenania wrote: | For small enough DBs, they could even literally just email you | the data zipped up as an attachment. I'd guess most hobby | projects are a few MB if that. | | That said, I don't really get the feeling that Heroku is | willing to put an ounce of extra effort into this, | unfortunately. | simonw wrote: | That's a great idea. Free databases are limited to 10,000 | rows so they are likely to be very small in most cases, would | totally fit in an email attachment. | The_John wrote: | And I just finished migrating my portfolio database from MongoDB | Atlas to Heroku pg | Atlas-Marbles wrote: | https://caprover.com Is a great open-source alternative that | seeks to offer Heroku-like functionality. You just need to host | it on your VPS, which is far cheaper than paying for Heroku (From | their docs: "Heroku charges 250USD/month for their 2gb instance, | the same server is 5$ on Hetzner!"). | miki123211 wrote: | I wonder if crypto mining was one of the reasons why the had to | shut the free tier down. Other platforms offering free computing | resources, whether as a coding platform, as a CI/CD service, or | in any other way, suffered from that kind of abuse. People | working at both Sourcehut and Replit indicated that, and if these | (relatively) small platforms had that kind of trouble, I can't | imagine what the people at Heroku had to go through. | arihant wrote: | They mention abuse as one of the reasons to kill all 3 free | products. Wouldn't just turning off free dynos, and making $7 as | the new $0, have solved that? Why kill all three and take the | minimum to $31 and make sure next generation will see you as | rackspace? It appears the decision is taken by people who don't | really understand the product beyond what they see in Excel. | brad0 wrote: | TBH I'm surprised that it took this long to move to this! | | Back when Heroku first arrived, PaaS was a new idea. It was | available ~2009, well before services like AWS Lambda existed. | | This was such a paradigm shift that no one knew what to think of | it. It takes time to build trust around such a big shift. The | best way to do this is to offer to try it for free. Hence, the | Free Tier. | | People tried it, and were blown away by how easy it was to build | services. It was so much easier than managing hosts directly. | Fast forward to today. Engineers are generally comfortable with | higher-level services. They know what to expect. | | So the free tier is used as as part of the funnel to onboard new | customers. Back in 2010, that funnel had a /lot/ of customers | going in! Here in 2022, that funnel may be basically zero. On top | of that, the free tier costs heroku to run. | | Cutting off the free tier is in Heroku's best interest. It saves | them money and allows them to focus on their current customers. | But it does mean that there's no growth in the product any more, | unless they offer something new. | diminish wrote: | cutting free plans signals the fading growth moment for an old | star(tup). | anm89 wrote: | And they made a big press release today on how they are | "focusing on the future". | [deleted] | joshstrange wrote: | > Back in 2010, that funnel had a /lot/ of customers going in! | Here in 2022, that funnel may be basically zero. | | That's not because 12 years passed, it's because Heroku didn't | innovate or even keep abreast of the competition in that | timeframe. | | > Cutting off the free tier is in Heroku's best interest. It | saves them money and allows them to focus on their current | customers. | | It cuts off the only onramp they had for entry developers or | developers who can't afford to pay their ridiculous prices (I | mean come on, $25/mo for 512MB of ram? Is this a joke? It was | expensive but understandable when they launched and has only | gotten worse while the product has not improved which | competitors have blazed past them). | | > But it does mean that there's no growth in the product any | more, unless they offer something new. | | I won't hold my breath, it seems clear they are life support at | this point. | freeqaz wrote: | 100% agreed with this. Having fewer customers using the free | tier in 2022 would make it cheaper to run. | | It's the stagnation and the realization that they can't | compete that's pushing them to sell based on their brand | instead of their merit. "Life support" is one way of phrasing | that. The other might be "bleeding the tech dry". | joshstrange wrote: | > It's the stagnation and the realization that they can't | compete that's pushing them to sell based on their brand | instead of their merit. | | What a beautifully succinct way of putting it, and I | couldn't agree more. They aren't competitive on tech, they | aren't competitive on price, and this is has already pissed | off a number of customers who have been with them from the | beginning (starting on the free tier, growing to 10's of | thousands of dollars a month) and who are now looking | elsewhere. All they have is their Heroku/Salesforce name, | neither of which are compelling IMHO. | downrightmike wrote: | Salesforce bought them in 2012 and didn't do anything with | them. | Exuma wrote: | Can anyone answer how fly.io compares to render.com? | TheGoodBarn wrote: | One sad use-case is a few days ago I was able to one click deploy | a dyno for an ESPN Fantasy Football discord bot that runs daily. | I didn't have to configure a thing and was able to have this cool | thing added to our discord. | | Now overnight it's just gone. | j-rom wrote: | This is really disappointing. I've used Heroku for many years to | build out small proof-of-concept apps. It was one of the first | platforms that I used to make my small projects public. Sad to | see the free tier go. | thebiglebrewski wrote: | Will there be any way to easily download or back up existing apps | and their data stores? Something like Google Take Out. Otherwise | I'm going to have a lot of apps to go through and see if there's | anything important in before this date... | duxup wrote: | Why did Salesforce buy Heroku if they're just going to sort of | wind it down? | yencabulator wrote: | Well, it did take them 12 years after the purchase to shut it | down.. Apart from that, it sounds like the standard acquihire. | Salesforce bought Ruby/Java/etc experts to make their | platform(s) more amenable to Ruby/Java/etc developers. | countspongebob wrote: | We are not "sort of winding it down". | krallja wrote: | How are you going to acquire new users? | simulosius wrote: | Well you've done a pretty good job convincing everyone that | you do. | | Good luck trying to get the tooth paste back into the tube. | aaronbrethorst wrote: | Salesforce bought Heroku more than a decade ago. Company | strategies change. | petercooper wrote: | Consider it was for "just" $212m as well - | https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/08/breaking-salesforce- | buys-h... - rather than the ridiculous valuations similar | companies would have nowadays. I imagine Salesforce made a | fantastic return on it even ignoring any remaining value. | brundolf wrote: | Why don't other (smaller!) providers with free tiers, like | render.com, have a problem with "fraud and abuse"? | tpetry wrote: | They all have the problem, but they invest the time and | knowledge to find more and more of them. They know that a free | tier is vital for getting developers on their platform. | | Heroku is already a big name. They are bought by salesforce. | They just don't care anymore. | zippergz wrote: | I've barely used Heroku, just playing with it for a day or two | when it was in its heyday to see what it was about. But my | incredibly anecdotal sense is that Heroku's real sweet spot was | apps that started out on the free plan and then grew to be paying | customers. Is that not really accurate? I know that's kind of a | hard business model because only a tiny percentage of free | customers will ever start paying. But do companies that can | afford to pay from day 1 really use Heroku? | ryantgtg wrote: | Also anecdotally, we were on heroku for like 10 years. Started | on free tier, and as our hobby project grew, we moved up in | tiers (ending at $59/mo - after that any "upgrade" would double | our costs). | | Heroku was great for us. But they didn't seem to stay | competitive with the alternatives. | bombcar wrote: | That's a style of business that can work for various companies, | but it is NOT the type of business that Salesforce, et al want | to chase. | | They want to work with accounts and upsell those accounts. It's | an entirely different business model, and isn't really | compatible. | cdubzzz wrote: | > Open source programs: If you are a maintainer on an open-source | project, and would like to request Heroku support for your | project, contact the Salesforce Open Source Program office at | ospo-heroku-credits@salesforce.com. | | Both the text version of this email (ospo-heroku- | credits@salesforce.com) and the mailto it actually links | (ospo@salesforce.com) appear to be invalid. | | I tried both and got: | | > We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to | contact ($GROUP) may not exist, or you may not have permission to | post messages to the group. | jrochkind1 wrote: | classy! | | I was just about to write an email too, I guess I won't... yet? | cdubzzz wrote: | 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. | jimjag wrote: | This should be fixed now... | | FTR: The correct address is ospo-heroku-credits@salesforce.com | cdubzzz wrote: | Thank you! | shadowgovt wrote: | I just got a JavaScript game working on a heroku instance | recently, and it looks like I'll be hunting down another hosting | option. Sucks, but it happens sometimes. | tonyfader wrote: | that's a damn shame, just as I was starting to investigate using | it more frequently as well... | arberx wrote: | Since the Salesforce acquisition the life has been sucked out of | Heroku and the product has suffered. | | Sad day for the service. | linuxhansl wrote: | Heroku never made any money before the acquisition. | | Don't get me wrong, Heroku is (was?) great, but in the end at | some point you have to stop losing money. | Croaky wrote: | I've been writing notes on Heroku alternatives (mostly Fly, | Railway, Render) at https://croaky-webstack.deno.dev/ Maybe | something useful in there for others. | aeyes wrote: | Link to the public roadmap: | https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130 | | Blog post says "Salesforce has never been more focused on | Heroku's future." but this looks like they are just keeping the | lights on by deprecating and keeping security up to date. Which | isn't bad if the product has reached maturity but I wonder if | these really are the most important features users ask for. | | Why does the feedback link on the blog post go to a personal | LinkedIn page? What is wrong with these companies? | countspongebob wrote: | We are doing more than keeping the lights on. Purpose of the | public roadmap (which just launched, we'll need some time to | really get it right, I'm sure) is to show what we are working | on. Any comment on the work around github integration safety as | an example? | | Watching for feedback here, but it's nice to know when I'm | getting reachouts on product feedback directly who is touching | base. Linked-in is great for that. But also, if you want to | provide feedback we launched the roadmap on github if that's | your preference. Trying to cover both kinds of customers. | aeyes wrote: | You are honestly trying to tell me that a developer-focused | company has no better way to get user feedback? | | Issue tracker? Idea tracker (check this as an example: | https://circleci.canny.io/)? Customer support? Email? | snowwolf wrote: | My wish list: | | * HTTP/2 (3?) (on the roadmap) * a refresh of the dyno line- | up - at least pass on some of the cost savings of | removing/supporting free tier by reducing dyno pricing or | preferably bumping specs * auto-scale for all dyno tiers * | rebuild security team with reputable lead * edge / multi | region active-active DX * edge ssl termination * iterate on | chat ops (underrated feature) * more metrics * more alerting | (e.g. crashed apps) * better user/access team management | (default app roles) * enhanced secrets management in env (2 | layers of env view/roles - config vs secrets) * DDOS | protection * Treat CI env vars as secrets! | rsoto wrote: | > Why does the feedback link on the blog post go to a personal | LinkedIn page? | | That's how you know they really don't want to hear from you. | japhyr wrote: | 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. | gday2020 wrote: | > 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? | | Yeah, that's accurate. If you need a worker (like celery), then | that's another $7, as that's an extra dyno. If you need redis, | then that will be another $15. | | > 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. | | They charge you per minute (or per second?) iirc. | gkoberger wrote: | We 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 why they made this decision, and I'm excited for Fly.io, | Render, etc who can run the same playbook Heroku did 15 years | ago. But also a bit sad, from a nostalgic standpoint. Many of us | are here because of Heroku's free tier, and I'm very thankful for | it. | MuffinFlavored wrote: | What alternative platforms would you consider moving to that | have the same features you use/need? | gkoberger wrote: | Fly, Render, or (blah) straight AWS. If I was starting from | scratch, I'd go all in on Next + Vercel. | MuffinFlavored wrote: | 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... Terraform? | vorpalhex wrote: | As someone who does what you suggest, it's great but it | is a lot of overhead and not zero click. Updates, | reboots, lambda functionality (autoscale, blue/green, | etc) and database hosting is always complex. | tills13 wrote: | Sorry but what? You're suggesting someone go from a SaaS, | all-bells-and-whistles-included offering to bare metal? | gkoberger wrote: | 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. | MuffinFlavored wrote: | > 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 between | "our company would rather pay somebody to manage all of | this for us" | laundermaf wrote: | 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. | MuffinFlavored wrote: | > 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? | gkoberger wrote: | I think you just proved my point, no? I don't want to do | any of this; I want to pay someone to do it. | mbrameld wrote: | https://vercel.com/solutions/nextjs | | If you scroll down a little there's a section titled | "Out-of-the-box features" that answers your question. I | think the edge functions would be the hardest thing to do | on your own. | Exuma wrote: | Can anyone compare Fly with Render? | SomeCallMeTim wrote: | 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 droplet at DigitalOcean and | you get the equivalent of a $50/month dyno at Heroku. Yes it's | easier to deploy to Heroku, but it's only a couple hours to set | up some kind of CI/CD deploy, and then you can control it more | precisely. | | Heroku has basically been a "first one is free, but as soon as | the business gets big, soak them" company from the start. Given | the number of companies offering free levels of cloud functions | and hosting, I think that's where most new experimental | development will migrate to in the future. | | I sympathize with them for giving up in the fight against abuse | of their free services, but ... well, I think they're likely to | transition to irrelevance if they don't pivot or slash prices | soon. | jarek83 wrote: | I got the same sentiment. Heroku for us was number one because | of the free tier. They could consider keeping an option to have | 1-2 free instances for already paying customers. It also feels | to me that their business will slowly fade since now. | copperx wrote: | Probably free plans have tons of overhead. If this results in | drastically lower prices, I'm all for it. | distrill wrote: | it won't | toyg wrote: | It won't. It's a typical move from a business stuck in a | death spiral, desperately searching for profits by blindly | slashing expenses. | MuffinFlavored wrote: | Is Heroku stuck in a death spiral? Source needed? | dwaite wrote: | I don't know if I would classify it as an unrecoverable | death spiral, but it does seem very short-sighted and | ignorant of their customer base. | | Heroku has two core tenets - developer experience and | upgrade to paid tier for production workloads. | | As a result, at least the Heroku customers I know use the | free tier for a good portion of their _non_ customer- | facing production workloads - prototypes, staging, | administrative functions, and so on. | | This both increases their cost and makes budget planning | a lot less stable. It means developers may become | motivated to start coming up with workflows that target | other environments where they would normally target | Heroku, which like robs Heroku of a source for future | revenue. Once you take on the devops work yourself, | Heroku is no longer price competitive. | | In other words, this new cost makes the unique value of | Heroku look quite a bit more like a detriment. Thats | rather unfortunate. | mixmastamyk wrote: | There's a search box at the bottom of each page here. | Quite a few recent stories of decline, though death an | exaggeration. | the_sleaze9 wrote: | All it would take is a quick google... | | Heroku stock price is down roughly %50 from less than a | year ago. | | Death spiral? I don't know. But slashing costs is | certainly not indicative of Heroku having a super awesome | fun time. | lddemi wrote: | all tech cos are down 50% from a year ago | typeofhuman wrote: | Box isnt. Up almost 21%. Just saying. | yebyen wrote: | But Heroku also had a major GitHub integration that | devolved into CVE which could not be fixed for about a | month (among other bad news parts of that story, such as | lying about the scope and slow walking the disclosures, | that all seemed to just get worse.) | | This is ostensibly all the result of the brain drain | after SalesForce acquisition has set in. It's a death | spiral. | beckingz wrote: | You mean salesforce's stock price? | xenadu02 wrote: | No, this is about optimizing profitability. They were | bought by Salesforce and that whole cohort (Salesforce, | Oracle, et al) are machines optimized to extract as much | money as possible from the Fortune 1000. | | Salesforce doesn't need a free tier to generate product | leads. They have an army of sales people to push the | product to customers that will write them big fat checks, | then hand down edicts from the CTO's office requiring | their internal devs use the technology. | toyg wrote: | Yes, but that's all stagnant tech - dead in all but name. | rrix2 wrote: | yup, and their enterprise clients don't care, maybe they | even prefer that. in the mean time, it gets salesforce | enough capital to leverage to acquire the next generation | of leaders to stagnate and extract. the wheel spins on... | alexflashdrive wrote: | Qoddi.com launched a couple of years ago as a credible Heroku | alternative. Our free tier is here to stay and our apps never | sleeps! Contact us if you need help to migrate from Heroku | major505 wrote: | And today is the day I will no longer use heroku. There's goes | their free tier. | joshfraser wrote: | Heroku's business model was getting developers hooked w/ their | free plan, and then making up the lost revenue by overcharging | them once they needed to scale. This worked because the last | thing you want to deal with when your business starts blowing up | is moving everything over to a new stack. It's hard to imagine | businesses choosing to start with Heroku's overpriced plans w/o | first getting hooked with the free samples. | | On the other hand, I can only imagine the amount of bitcoin | mining and DDOS farms that people must try to deploy on their | platform every day. It sounds like a never-ending game of cat and | mouse. It's remarkable that they offered free accounts for as | long as they did. | chuckgreenman wrote: | Heroku's final chapter was being acquired, we are now entering | the afterword. It was revolutionary when it was introduced and | for a long while after that - but their mistake was getting sold | to Salesforce, they can't even make a competent CRM, of course | they can't innovate a developer experience platform. | gavin_gee wrote: | all appears like the classic playbook of "Acquisition by a big | company who predominantly has an enterprise sales GTM which then | kills the self serve channel as they cannot evaluate the value it | brings". in a few years said company goes, "why have we lost our | acquisition funnel and aren't relevant to the developer community | and why is X new service taking share from us?" | ravivyas wrote: | Alternatives | | - https://Railway.app | | - https://fly.io | | - https://render.com/ | | - https://northflank.com/ | stepri wrote: | Open source alternative https://dokku.com | rcarmo wrote: | https://github.com/piku/piku if you're self-hosting. | throwaway_4ever wrote: | It's a little annoying to do it each time, but please always | put a disclaimer you're the founder / project-creator when | recommending it. | mtmail wrote: | The page requires to login. Screenshot: | https://imgur.com/a/zVx9Ss7 | tech234a wrote: | It doesn't require a login when accessed using a private | browsing window or a browser profile that hasn't been logged | into Heroku before. | chitowneats wrote: | I wonder what purpose this particular dark pattern serves? | | Edit: Perhaps accounts that authenticate on this page, and | that are also taking advantage of free tiers, are being | segmented for upsell. It is at least an indicator they are | interested enough to read this news. | aendruk wrote: | I've noticed the AWS Forums does this too. In practice it | just means I avoid using it. | nightpool wrote: | Could just be a caching thing? I know most | `help.heroku.com` pages are customer-only (as opposed to | their public-facing docs at devcenter.heroku.com). Maybe | they have a very rare "publicly available" option that | doesn't see a lot of testing | joshstrange wrote: | 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 dead and the product is on life support at this | point to eek some more money from people who haven't already | moved on to greener pastures. It's really say to be honest, | Heroku felt like magic and was amazing for a number of years and | then just stopped being relevant, coasted, and hemorrhaged | talent. | | The downfall started before Salesforce IIRC but at this point | it's clear the heart of Heroku is dead and gone. | | I'm sure the other PaaS that have innovated, moved with the times | (fly.io/render/etc) are popping bottles today at this news. | donmcronald wrote: | IMO the big winners in this space will be the ones that provide | feature parity in self-hosted runtimes (meant for dev and | testing) in addition to consumption based entry level plans. | | If the appeal of all these systems is horizontal scalability on | managed infrastructure, is there much harm in giving away a | free local runtime that's vertically scalable with no HA or | SLA? The incremental cost for me to self-host something like | that is pretty low (near $0) and the benefit of having a non- | revocable, free forever runtime for dev deployments has a lot | of value (to me). I create a lot of throw away projects to | learn and being able to keep them runnable for the long term is | useful if I want to go back and reference them / re-learn | something. | | I also think a consumption based entry level offering is a good | option to reduce abuse. If I'm a hobbyist sized user I can use | my existing self-hosted resources for dev and testing and the | cost of using the paid service is going to be low for me, but | can cover costs for the infrastructure provider. I know it's | viewed at untenable, but I'd gladly take a community only / | per-incident support offering at that level to keep the costs | low. | jrochkind1 wrote: | > 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. | joshstrange wrote: | I apologize for mixing up my timelines. I guess I thought | they had a longer run before SF bought them. I still believe | Heroku was horribly managed under SF and they must have had | at least some of that stuff in the pipeline before being | bought. I always give a few years of time after acquisition | before I consider something to be due to the company that | bought them (and not just existing work/ideas from the | previous leadership). With a lot of companies like it it | feels like the passion/energy just dies after acquisition | (not immediately but in a relatively short period of time), | which feels like what happened with Heroku. They went from | being an HN darling to hearing next to nothing about them | until their security issues earlier this year. | swatcoder wrote: | jacooper wrote: | Isn't this against HN rules? | joshstrange wrote: | It comes from a lifetime of watching leaders/visionaries sell | their companies to corporations that don't care about | anything but the bottom line (to be specific the short-term | bottom line) who then proceed to run the company into the | ground because they don't "get" the company. I'm not sure how | many times you had to see that phenomenon to recognize the | patterns but it's pretty clear to me. | | It also comes from being a former user of Heroku and being | ennammered by it for years until they stopped innovating. | Today's move means I will never touch it again. Do I know all | the internal stats? No but I'll say 2 things: | | 1. Salesforce made over $4B in gross profit in 2021, they | aren't hurting for money. | | 2. Heroku's failures are due to poor leadership and being | completely surpassed by their competitors. | | #1 means they have the money to invest in Heroku but are | choosing not to and #2 is due to a decade of mismanagement. | Now they want to stop some of the bleeding by cutting off the | free tier, the problem is they are also guaranteeing they | won't ever recapture developer mindshare in the future. Saves | some money today but destroys the future of the product (as a | developer platform at least, I'm sure it will go on to be | Salesforce Cloud or something like that which people only use | because they have to). | shostack wrote: | I don't understand this sentiment sometimes. There may be fraud | and abuse. There may also be a material cost to a company whose | detailed financial situation I'm assuming you are not purvey | to. | | Someone doesn't need to be "a stupid MBA" to have made this | decision (in fact my guess would be it involved many cross | functional and leadership perspectives given its nature). | | Also, this is quite possibly something necessary for the future | continued health of the business and the jobs it supports. If | so, I'd consider it anything but stupid. | joshstrange wrote: | Salesforce made 4.34B in gross profit in 2021, they aren't | hurting for money and the "health of the business" seems | perfectly fine. I'm sure someone got a raise for cutting this | program, it will save the company some money in the short | term, and that person will have left to screw up another | company before the chickens come home to roost. It's a tale | as old as time and something we've seen enough times to | notice the signs. | ubertaco wrote: | This is Salesforce we're talking about, the company that | pledged not to do any layoffs during the pandemic, then | announced that they were laying off 1000 people literally | the day after announcing what they called "the best quarter | in company history." [0] Worst of all? Many of the people | who worked at Salesforce found out they were laid off _by | reading the news article_ (source: I worked at Salesforce | at the time, and there was a _lot_ of commotion internally | to try to track down which managers had the audacity to | give the laid-off employees advance notice before the | public announcement, and lots of internal all-hands-meeting | outrage directed at people who dared to "break trust" by | telling reporters that they had been laid off). | | [0] https://abcnews.go.com/Business/salesforce-announces- | layoffs... | N_A_T_E wrote: | Someone doesn't need to be "a stupid MBA" to have made this | decision | | They might not have an MBA but it seems like a "bean counter" | sort of decision. Maybe it's easier to just blame the MBAs | than assess the whole leadership team's motives when we see | short sighted strategies that improve profitability today and | kill the product's ecosystem in the long term. I'm getting | flashbacks of the Boeing documentary just writing this. | nebula8804 wrote: | 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 be outsourced was R&D(to | suppliers). For example: Car companies shutting down one | division after another and just relying on suppliers. Ford | used to have in house seat development, their own | metallurgical teams etc. All of it outsourced to suppliers | who are trying to spread out their costs so everyone gets the | bare minimum because all of the fundamental tooling is reused | for every customer. The MBA dream was to outsource everything | including manufacturing and just stick a badge on the | finished car at the end. | | It is a cancer that has permeated a lot of western | business(so many MBA grads have to go somewhere right? They | ended up at almost every company regardless of industry) | | We are finally starting to swing back to pre-MBA. Tesla for | example was criticized heavily for doing things like bringing | seat manufacturing in house. They understood that everything | a user touches and feels should be in house profound | knowledge and I believe it is benefiting them in terms of | customer satisfaction. Furthermore material science knowledge | sharing with SpaceX is very exciting to see and will | hopefully increase innovation in the industry. | | Its not only Tesla, small business is turning the ship around | as well. Another example is Origin USA. They wanted to bring | back jiu jitsu gis manufacturing but discovered that most | industrial looms were rusting away or shipped overseas. They | found one loom in Maine and pulled the old guys who knew how | to run it out of retirement to help teach a new young | generation to slowly start bringing that experience and | capability back into the US. | | A lot of profound knowledge has been lost. People forget that | technology and what we enjoy does not magically come out of | nowhere. It requires sustained effort and on the ground | knowledge that has to be maintained or it will be lost. | anotheracctfo wrote: | 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 activity on Porter's value chain, | and as such should be cut cut cut cut cut cut and cut some | more. | | Hilariously we're also taught to adopt best-of-breed | software for ERPs, CRMs, and SCM tools AND CHANGE OUR | BUSINESS PROCESSES TO MATCH THE SOFTWARE. You know, like | Target did when they moved to Canada, adopted SAP, and | ended up failing hard, because their entire competitive | advantage came from a custom in-house developed supply | chain management tool that beat all of their competitors. | nebula8804 wrote: | 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. | donmcronald wrote: | > A lot of profound knowledge has been lost. People forget | that technology and what we enjoy does not magically come | out of nowhere. It requires sustained effort and on the | ground knowledge that has to be maintained or it will be | lost. | | This is something that I wish people would understand when | it comes to the right-to-repair movement. For example, if | nothing changes, in a couple of generations the only | knowledge that will exist for repairing farm machinery will | be dictated by manufacturers and will only include | processes that are profitable for those manufacturers. The | worst outcome would be one with parts serialization and | keys that are controlled by a foreign country. | | A really good example that shows the importance of | independent knowledge is board level laptop repair. Until I | watched Rossman's YouTube channel I though a bad | motherboard was unrepairable. Then, after a bit of | watching, I started to realize there are a lot of repairs | that are practical, but the knowledge has almost been wiped | out by large manufacturers that benefit from whole part or | whole machine replacement rather than repair. | nebula8804 wrote: | >The worst outcome would be one with parts serialization | and keys that are controlled by a foreign country. | | This is one way how the US keeps its partners in line. | Sure they will sell tons of aircraft and destroyers to | countries like Saudi Arabia/Israel/etc. Hell they will | even give money to these countries to then have it be | spent right back to American companies. But the actual | maintenance/parts/upgrades are controlled 100% by the US. | They force the country to accept that it is better than | nothing and at the same time help the US keep a leash on | the country purchasing the equipment. | | This concept is being expanded even further. At DEFCON in | 2019 there was a talk about retrofitting older war tech | with DRM and custom parts to better control who can | utilize the equipment should it get out of the hands of | the "intended customers". For example, in the Soviet war | on Afghanistan, one amazing piece of equipment that | helped tip the scales of the war in favor of the US | backed Mujahideen fighting the Soviets was the Stinger | portable missile system. More recently it has been | discovered that systems like these are provided under the | table to groups that the US wishes to unofficially | support but sometimes tend to go missing and end up being | used against the US. As a result, there are now efforts | to bolt on digital parts serialization + access control | modules to prevent "unauthorized" use/track whereabouts. | I find the thought of adding DRM to 1980s technology | hilariously silly but then I was treated to Single Sign | On/DRM being added to DOOM....yes that DOOM, the one from | 1993. | | [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh7nZ9t2eJA | countspongebob wrote: | Thanks Shostack. As it happens, I don't have an MBA, but I | have considered in the past as I think it is important for | people who come up through the engineering ranks to GM jobs | to be well rounded. Instead I've done a lot of learning on | the job, which also works. | duxup wrote: | Is it possible that a bunch of free stuff where they don't sell | you as a product (and maybe even when they do sometimes) just | isn't a viable thing to do on the web? | | Generally on the web we as consumers seem to cycle through | these companies, often pay nothing, and we're bummed each time | they quit doing the thing... | | Seems like a pattern. | joshstrange wrote: | It's possible, though that doesn't really apply to a company | who made $4.34B in gross profit in 2021. I'm sure they will | save some money but by making this move they are signalling | (intentionally or not) that Heroku is on life support and | they don't care about developers anymore. | duxup wrote: | They didn't make much of that money from Heroku I bet. | joshstrange wrote: | 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 "choose" to use their platform. That tells me | they don't care about Heroku as anything more than | "Salesforce Cloud" something people almost have to use | rather than choose. | duxup wrote: | 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? | joshstrange wrote: | > 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. | duxup wrote: | It might convert users, but that might not matter aid we | see these companies continually fall / vanish. | gosukiwi wrote: | Guess I'll be moving my hobby projects to render! | antonio-ramadas wrote: | As an occasional hobbyist user of Heroku's free tier, what other | providers do you recommend? Fly.io? | | A bit more context if it matters, I use it very lightly, and I'm | interested on ease of use and ability to have a DB attached to it | (I was using PostgreSQL, but any SQL DB would do it). | wikitopian wrote: | You are ungrateful for the free candy and want to complain about | getting locked in the van that you chose to get into. | | Entitled millennials. | rngname22 wrote: | Would be great if they define inactive - I have a production site | that's been running unchanged for probably 6-8 years that I throw | on my portfolio but haven't really done any work on. Not even | sure anymore how I'd set up my dev env. Won't be the biggest loss | if it gets deleted but wouldn't like it. Other than seeing my | credit card get billed, I'm about as inactive as it gets. I don't | know if some of my resources are paid but others are free? (saw | someone else talking about free instances of postgres in the | comments here), I literally don't remember how the whole 'dyno' | systems and add-on systems work anymore, just know that I'm | paying for the webserver node or whatever. So won't be surprised | if the DB or caching or something just shuts off. | ebiester wrote: | Inactive likely means not paying. | Aeolun wrote: | Do you ever see an announcement and just wonder how long it'll be | before the 'this has been an incredible journey'? | badotnet wrote: | fullofdev wrote: | For anyone looking for heroku alternative with free offer (not | all free, some have free offer) | | Alternative for Heroku Runtime (server) | https://finddev.tools/alternative-to/heroku-runtime | | Alternative for Heroku Postgres (database) | https://finddev.tools/alternative-to/heroku-postgres | | Or here in general with "what's free" information: | https://freestuff.dev/alternative/heroku/ | | Hope it helps for someone who wants to start side project! | balentio wrote: | Headline: Formerly free account in tech that got many adopters on | the free platform isn't going to have a free account option | anymore. "Users are "Tied into" the solution now, so we can | afford to piss them off," says CEO. "Also, we'd like to pick | their pocket now that we got them hooked on our crack rock." | MoroCode wrote: | This seems like a pretty bad idea and one thats going to choke | Heroku's growth. The only realistic reason one would actually | build on Heroku is that they started with the free tier and | decided it would take too much time to switch to anything else. I | get the reasoning behind wanting to reduce the amount of time the | engineering team spends trying to prevent abuse of the free tier | but there are much better strategies to go about it then remove | it all together. Sounds like Salesforce basically wants to milk | Heroku and squeeze as much profit out of it before its completely | dead | countspongebob wrote: | Transparency on direction. | The_John wrote: | And I just finished migrating my portfolio database from MongoDB | Atlas to Heroku pg | sdf4j wrote: | And still you are in a better place now | outworlder wrote: | Another entry for https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ | [deleted] | aarondf wrote: | 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! | Kye wrote: | Fly was the subject of a front-page story a few months ago: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31390506 | csjh wrote: | They have crazy low bandwidth limits though... puts me off | quite a bit | Varqu wrote: | Is it possible to import the app from Heroku (like in the top | link) and then detach it and deploy directly from command line | to Fly? | turtlebits wrote: | IME, Fly does not have as good a developer experience than | Heroku does. I've tried several of their guides but run into | hiccups each time. The web admin UI isn't very useful - almost | looks like a simple wrapper around Nomad. | bradgessler wrote: | 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 | ya'll. | greenie_beans wrote: | managed postgres | bradgessler wrote: | 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. | spiralganglion wrote: | 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. | bradgessler wrote: | Would it be OK if service like | https://www.crunchydata.com was integrated with Fly? | craigkerstiens wrote: | We're definitely thinking about a deeper integration | here. As it stands you can absolutely connect a Crunchy | Bridge instance to fly and we have folks that do just | that, and it works for them. | robgough wrote: | It seems like managed pg improvements aren't high up on | the priority list (there's a mention of outsourcing it to | a third-party like supabase[1]), so I'd just like to +1 | this request -- for personal projects the snapshots are | fine, but I'm starting a new role where I wanted to use | fly but without easier backup/restore it's likely a non- | starter. | | A small request: it would also be useful if `fly volumes | snapshots list vol_123...` included the time they were | taken, not just "n days ago". If I'm having to rollback, | it would be good to tell my team & users exactly when I'm | rolling back to! | | [1] https://community.fly.io/t/postgresql-database- | backup-restor... | imjonse wrote: | The main drawback I saw compared to Heroku is no longer a | drawback now that Heroku will have no free plans. But Fly's | 256M free apps just OOM-ed for a hobby project whereas they | ran fine with Heroku's 512M free dynos so I moved there. | stickfigure wrote: | A Java/JVM stack. | bradgessler wrote: | This is an unsatisfactory answer, but Fly does run Java/JVM | apps via Dockerfiles. The best docs we have for it at the | moment are at https://fly.io/docs/getting- | started/dockerfile/, but its clearly not written for folks | who want to deploy Java apps. | | If somebody deploys a Java app to Fly, please consider | documenting it at | https://github.com/superfly/docs/tree/main/getting-started | and we'll merge it into https://fly.io/docs/ | sammy2255 wrote: | Better Frontend UI. I feel like everything is CLI | mpd wrote: | 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. | bradgessler wrote: | Could you go into one more level of detail about your app? | I think this will help me better understand content for | some documentation. | | Here's the rough bits of what Fly has: | | 1. There's a release command | (https://fly.io/docs/reference/configuration/#run-one-off- | com...) that runs after the container is built, but before | its deployed. In Rails that's when a database migration | would be run. | | 2. To run a task after the application is deployed, there's | shell access. Here's what that looks like for running Rails | tasks: https://fly.io/docs/rails/the-basics/run-tasks-and- | consoles/ | | 3. Pre-deployment/build commands can be run from the | Dockerfile, like a Rails asset compilation. Here's a link | to that https://github.com//superfly/flyctl/blob/master/sca | nner/temp... | | I recognize that this is a lot for folks who aren't | comfortable configuring stuff and want the "no-config ease" | of Heroku, but it's at least possible on Fly. | mpd wrote: | Oh, it looks like the release command would fit the | `build` step I mention. | | As far as the after-deployment tasks go, we automate | those just like migrations - they're (occasionally very | slow) one-offs that we don't want to hold up a restart | for. Really, an analogue to the release command that can | run _after_ restart is all that I 'm talking about here. | anurag wrote: | 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. | polynox wrote: | I recently migrated a few systems to Fly | | - volume snapshot downloads (S3 or otherwise) | | - built in log drain rather than needing to deploy fly-log- | shipper | | - customizable Prometheus alert rules. As is to get alerting | using the fly-metrics.net "free" Prometheus we need to deploy | a copy of Prometheus and federate scrape back, which seems | like an anti pattern. | | - review environments (eg PR scope deployments) would be | ideal but I could see if that's out of scope for Fly | bvirb wrote: | We spend more on Heroku CI than we do running our app on | Heroku and it's well worth it. | | CI runs on (almost) the exact same platform as production and | we don't have to maintain any of it. When Heroku removes a | package from their base image it gets removed from CI and we | know if it broke anything. | | The pricing model is the same as running our app. Which means | if 10 people want to run 10 branches on CI at the same, and | each CI run runs 32 nodes in parallel, and takes ~15 min, | Heroku gives us 3200 nodes and we pay to run them for 15 | minutes. No waiting, no upgrading to a different tier, etc... | | I don't see many other people talking about Heroku CI, and | Heroku doesn't seem to push it that much in their marketing, | so either it's only really amazing for our use case or people | just don't know about it yet. | | For us it was a lot cheaper than other options when you | consider how costly sitting around waiting for CI to start | is. | | Anyways that would be really hard to leave for another | platform. | bradgessler wrote: | Yeah that sounds like an awesome CI! Fly won't ship | anything that integrated anytime soon because there's so | much great CIs out there now. What you will see is Fly | integrating into CIs for deployment steps, which could be | to a staging env per branch or a final deploy to | production. | | Here's a sense of what that looks like: | https://fly.io/docs/app-guides/continuous-deployment-with- | gi... | | This obviously doesn't come close to the way Heroku does it | and requires some effort. I have some ideas for fly CLI | commands that would make setting up a basic CI a little | easier, but again, not to the level Heroku is doing it. | knubie wrote: | I have a production rails app that I've been thinking of | migrating to Fly from Heroku. After reading the Turboku[0] | docs, it seems that the process only migrates the rails app | itself, and continues to connect to the Postgres database on | Heroku. Is that right? | | Are there any plans to "upgrade" Turboku or release a similar | tool that makes migrating Heroku Postgres databases to Fly | just as easy? | bradgessler wrote: | You're correct! The tool stops short of migrating the | database from Heroku to Fly. I'm actually going to start | working on this soon. Here's what that will look like: | | 1. A doc will appear at https://fly.io/docs/rails/ that | walks through how to move over a Heroku app, including the | database. I'm going to start drafting this next week since | I have a few SaaS apps running on Heroku that I want to | move over. | | 2. If the docs are complicated and have lots of steps, I'll | look into automating most of this process. I don't think | I'll be able to 100% migrate Heroku apps to Fly without any | intervention, but I do think moving over the app code, ENV | vars, and database would be a pretty big win. | knubie wrote: | That's great to hear! Thanks for the reply. | cnees wrote: | I'm looking forward to this! It'll make moving from | Heroku a lot easier. The other thing I'm looking for is a | way to put a hard cap on spend so it doesn't feel risky | to enter my credit card. | mik3y wrote: | 1) We would love an equivalent to the HEROKU_RELEASE runtime | variable: A strictly increasing int that is incremented with | any change to the environment (deploys or env/secrets). | | It's nice to have a single roll up for all of the knobs -- | "what was the state of the environment" -- to tag in things | like crash logs. | | (It's also something we can't easily tool ourselves.) | | 2) One click dashboard rollback button. Didn't realize how | much we missed this from Heroku. | | 3) Meta: Public roadmap and feature request tracker. Fly has | a habit of surprising, usually pleasantly!, but it'd be nice | to know how close or far off something on our wishlist is. | (Render seems to do this well.) | bradgessler wrote: | These are all really great ideas. I don't have any specific | replies to each, but I can say I'll check around internally | to see what it would take to ship some of these. | 5fnheluzdj wrote: | On the top of my list is being able to use a local repository | and providing no credit card. | okpx wrote: | +1 | Spivak wrote: | CC's are an abuse prevention tool and essentially a proxy | for real names since lots of companies ban "privacy" cards. | Would you be willing to instead turn other proof like a | government id with face recognition to auth it? | | Because yeah it sucks but Heroku is shutting down their | free tier because of abuse so it's not a theoretical | problem. Anyone who has even more lax requirements will get | run over as well. | 5fnheluzdj wrote: | While I do understand the trouble, having a way to try | the product without revealing my identity makes it `as | good` as Heroku. | bradgessler wrote: | By local repo, do you mean like how Heroku's `git push | heroku` works? Or do you mean you want to deploy from your | local machine's repo? The `fly deploy` command is a local | deployment in the sense that it copies the files of your | application and deploys it to the server, regardless if you | have git or not. | | If you launch Fly from the CLI to test the free tier, you | don't need a credit card. Obviously when you exceed the | limits of the free tier, you'll need to provide a credit | card. | 5fnheluzdj wrote: | With `local repository` I meant not involving a | thirdparty like Github or Gitlab which is a requirement | for some Heroku-like providers. `git push heroku` is very | nice to have - for me it would be enough to not having to | leave the terminal as it seems to be the case. | | Last time I tried fly.io I had to provide payment | information before doing something useful. I'll give it | another try as you suggested. | bradgessler wrote: | Got it! There's no plans to implement git repos in the | same way Heroku is doing it (FWIW I love how Heroku does | this). When Heroku introduced this feature, cloud CI | services were practically non-existent. Today a similar | effect can be achieved in Github, Gitlab, etc. with their | CI integrations (See https://fly.io/docs/app- | guides/continuous-deployment-with-gi... for Github) | | I realize that's what you're trying to avoid. In your | case I'd recommend running `fly deploy` from your CLI If | you don't want to leave the CLI. You could wire this up | as a git hook either on your workstation or third-party | git server. I recognize this isn't the same thing as | Heroku, so I'm calling these work arounds :-) | magicpointer wrote: | Fully managed PostgreSQL service, with point in time recovery | like in Heroku + ability to take manual snapshots if needed. | Daily snapshots are not flexible enough. | altilunium wrote: | I just tried it. Apparently, unlike heroku free tier, you need | to add payment information on fly.io in order to use their free | tier. | aarondf wrote: | Given that Heroku is killing their free tier because of | "fraud and abuse" I'm pretty ok with Fly requiring a CC for | their free tier. Requiring a legit CC has to cut that by a | substantial amount, I'd think. | mrkurt wrote: | Yes, this. We (Fly.io) get a lot of abuse from users with | stolen credit cards, too. But credit cards are the most | useful anti-fraud tool we have. | | When we've relaxed the credit card restriction (like on | https://fly.io/launch/livebook), it gets "exploited" within | about 48 hours. | | This sucks and we hate compromising the experience for | legit users. We _want_ people to run their side projects on | Fly.io without paying us money. The credit card gate makes | this happen less. | driverdan wrote: | Are you using Stripe's fraud protection, MaxMind's tools, | or something else to detect card fraud? | mrkurt wrote: | Stripe for CC fraud. That part of Stripe has been great. | shahsyed wrote: | I haven't used Heroku's free product plan myself, but I | personally use Fly for my personal blog and website and | thoroughly enjoy its pain free deployment process. They also | have built in secrets management which I was happy to see. | There is GitHub Actions for automating things too. | | They supposedly also decrease latency for your application if | you migrate your Heroku app there (again, I haven't used this | myself so YMMV): https://fly.io/launch/heroku | | You do need to enter credit card information as mentioned in | this thread. | samwillis wrote: | This is the next step in the nudge to move off Heroku for us. We | obviously use paid instances for production, however we use a | Pipeline and the free instances for staging as well as short | lived test instances for git branches. | | We were planning to move off anyway, but this isn't a change that | would keep us. A price change to make Heroku competitive would | have potentially kept us on board. | | I don't think Heroku can ever be competitive by remaining a layer | on top of AWS. | leemcalilly wrote: | Good news, Render is WAY better. | petercooper wrote: | This is an oddly dour announcement presented in a positive light. | The announcement is basically of deprecations and a roadmap where | very little is about actual features or improvements (outside of | security). | xena wrote: | Ex-herokai here. This post made me have feelings. I wrote them up | on my blog: https://xeiaso.net/blog/rip-heroku | [deleted] | aluminussoma wrote: | Heroku has had severe security and service outages over the past | year. A long time ago, Heroku was talked about in positive terms. | More recently, I've only heard negative things about them and | plans to migrate off. They poisoned their brand. | cnees wrote: | Bummer. I've found it really convenient, and I'll consider moving | to a paid tier, but they had a DNS outage earlier this week that | left my site down, and even though they said it was upstream, it | makes me wonder whether I shouldn't move to a more stable host. | Guess I won't be adding any user facing features for a while as I | work out the transition in my spare time. | bombcar wrote: | You'd think they'd delay this announcement just a bit after | having crashed hard. | | (I believe the "upstream DNS provider" was also Salesforce, so | they don't really get to switch blame.) | cmg wrote: | > Starting October 26, 2022, we will begin deleting inactive | accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been | inactive for over a year. Starting November 28, 2022, we plan to | stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down | free dynos and data services. We will be sending out a series of | email communications to affected users. | | Sad to see this, but not surprised after the Salesforce purchase. | Heroku was a great place for hobbyists and tiny one-off projects. | What's a good alternative? | iends wrote: | Haven't used them personally, but https://render.com/ has been | highly recommended here. | shafyy wrote: | I have just recently deployed a small Rails project on Render | and I really like it so far. Good docs, great UI. | aaronbrethorst wrote: | Render is great but doesn't offer a long-term usable free | tier for database-backed projects. | | However, if you're looking to move a project that costs you | money off Heroku, you're likely to be quite happy with the | price-performance ratio that Render offers. I certainly am. | | https://render.com/docs/migrate-from-heroku | TKAB wrote: | I've found https://dokku.com to be a great (self-hosted) | alternative to heroku. For hobby and small company size a cheap | root server will do great. I've been running one at Hetzner for | ~5EUR/month for more than a year now and had a very smooth | experience. | jacooper wrote: | There is also https://caprover.com, which seems to be more | advanced and supports compose and docker swarm. | intelVISA wrote: | Think even Azure has a (crappy) free app engine offering as | well | tf2_pyro wrote: | fly.io i think - never tried it but HN feedback has been pretty | positive on it | mcintyre1994 wrote: | Fly is really good. If you go over the free tier limits by | under $5 they don't charge too, which gives a bit more | flexibility on hobby projects. | intelVISA wrote: | It has potential, the VMM is a bit Rusty... | tptacek wrote: | Ok, that was terrible. | intelVISA wrote: | my apologies, seeing modern VMMs actually get used for | once always hits different. | tptacek wrote: | OK, but if you do it again we're converting to QEMU. | intelVISA wrote: | from Fly.io to Bye.io in one simple trick.. | shepherdjerred wrote: | I've tried it for a small project. It's about as easy to use | as Heroku. | aarondf wrote: | I have tried it and found it to be really really good. It's a | little more DIY than Heroku, but not by too much. They are | moving really fast too, hiring people to focus on specific | use cases (Laravel, Rails, etc.) | | If you're making heavy use of Heroku addons, you'll probably | miss that quite a bit. | asdajksah2123 wrote: | Digital Ocean has 3 free apps as far as I'm aware. Those have | basically been super easy to setup and forget for me. I have a | few websites running off it for a couple of years with no | maintenance on my part. | krthr wrote: | GCP Cloud Run | advisedwang wrote: | Google App Engine is still useable on the free tier | riadsila wrote: | I think https://www.koyeb.com/ could be what you are looking | for. Let me know what you think! (Disclaimer, I work for Koyeb) | theodorton wrote: | Haven't tried them out yet, but railway.app looks promising. | Same for fly.io | h1fra wrote: | I can't believe they are killing the free tier? :o | | What a drastic change in strategy ! | ab-dm wrote: | I'm finding it interesting that THIS is the reason that people | are now determined to move, rather than the constant | outages/issues they've had over the last 6 months. | | Nothing about this is remotely surprising. Over the last 12 | months their reliability has nose dived and their support has | become borderline useless. | | We're planning on migrating to Fargate in the next 6 months. I am | VERY much looking forward to shutting our Heroku account down. | ev0xmusic wrote: | Let's go all on Render, Qovery, Flyway, Vercel, Netlify... So | many very platforms are waiting for you :D | cdubzzz wrote: | Well shit. After the Heroku Dashboard issues I moved my OSS | project demo instances and PR reviews process to Fly.io, then | Render.com, then Railway, then back to Heroku because it was the | only one that had a truly free and well integrated process. | | Sigh. | anurag wrote: | What would make the process more integrated on Render? | cdubzzz wrote: | I should have taken more notes on this... | | I think my primary issue with Render.com was the shared | database for PR previews. The way I am setup on Heroku is I | run a demo instance that resets hourly and build PR reviews | from the Heroku Dashboard when necessary. All with no cost. | The shared database makes the PR reviews effectively useless | because of the need for the ongoing demo database. | | I was also turned off by the default service plan being a | non-free one. I got a surprise bill in my first month of | testing this because I had not specified the free plan in the | service configurations. | | Also one of the weirdly nice things from Heroku was the | ability to run cron jobs for free. Lacking that I had to | create a GitHub Action to handle resetting the demo data | every few hours. Just an additional pain. | jannikarndt wrote: | I visited their pricing page many times, thinking "this is | awesome, I SHOULD pay something for it". But the difference | between the free dyno and free postgres to the 16$/month-version | is so minuscule that it never made sense. I think you need a | lower threshold to upsell from "free". | evtothedev wrote: | Does anyone else find the roadmap to be really uninspiring? Every | tasks seems either like housekeeping ("Migrate from Github OAuth | to Github App Model") or like far-too-late table stakes ("Support | HTTP/2"). | | What am I supposed to get inspired about on this page? | | For items that look like they ?might? be exciting, they seem | hidden behind vagueness: "Official Cloud Native Buildpacks for | Heroku languages" | | Contrast this with Render's public roadmap: | https://feedback.render.com/ | | That has nice, plain english. I know what they're building, and I | can start dreaming about what I might build with it. | sleepyhead wrote: | Yeah it was a bit disappointing to see it. For me I was looking | for two important features that is essential for a European | SaaS company or in the Enterprise segment: | | 1) No plans to do regional Postgres backups. Today PG backups | are transferred out of the database region and to us-east-1. | This is problematic for anyone who takes GDPR seriously and | unacceptable for any customer with strict compliance | requirements. | | 2) No possibility of wildcard + ACM TLS. We have to implement | our own cert automation using Let's Encrypt instead of relying | the fully functional Heroku ACM because we also need to use a | wildcard cert. This is something that most SaaS vendors would | require. | | Heroku are aware of both these issues. For #1 it seems like | they don't care. For #2 it seems like it is a result of legacy | infrastructure. | countspongebob wrote: | Could you jump in on the cloud native buildpack issue above and | ask for clarification? Goal of the public roadmap is to gather | input and feedback and make it better. | gkoberger wrote: | I'm with you, but to play devil's advocate... | | 1. Heroku already has most of the features on Render's roadmap | | 2. It's clear Heroku (well, Salesforce) is going all-in on | Enterprise, and Enterprise doesn't reward cool new features. | They like stability (and jargon-y words). | cpursley wrote: | Heroku doesn't handle distributed Elixir nor static sites. | Render does. | tf2_pyro wrote: | Pretty frustrated by this. I run a UAT instance on heroku free | which I will now need to start paying for effectively doubling my | cloud cost. Think i will migrate to fly.io instead which I guess | is what they want to happen | jeromegv wrote: | That's correct, they do not want people getting service and not | paying for it. | pgm8705 wrote: | I imagine this will be an unpopular opinion here due to the VPS | provider, but if anyone is looking for a completely free way to | spin up hobby apps, Dokku running on Oracle's very generous free | tier is tough to beat. 24GB RAM and 4 VCPUs (granted, ARM Ampere | processor) is enough to spin up a ton of small hobby apps and | even good enough to run a few production apps at decent scale. | riffic wrote: | fine by me - too many freeloaders ruining things for everyone | else. | 1270018080 wrote: | Just got the email saying free Dynos and Postgres will be gone. I | guess there's no point then? | pks016 wrote: | Sad. I'm not from computer science background. I have a few small | projects on heroku. Guess I will have to somewhere else. | moe wrote: | Friends don't let friends buy Salesforce (or Oracle) has been | common sense in engineering circles for at least a decade. | | It seems founders should adopt a similar stance: Friends don't | let friends get bought by Salesforce. | | I wonder if James et al regret having fed their baby to the | devil. Surely a better buyer could have been found, one that | doesn't destroy everything they touch. But no blame here. They | had their well-deserved payday and we shall remain grateful for | all the good patterns, ideas and years of solid service they | contributed to our craft. | | R.I.P. Heroku! | m3nu wrote: | For hosting simple open source apps there is also | https://www.pikapods.com. Not free forever, but fairly cheap at | around $1.5/month for the typical app. | | I'm a founder and we specifically don't focus on running custom | apps, but a moderated selection that also gets updates and | optimizations. Like an app store for open source web apps. | craigkerstiens wrote: | 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 tools talk about and try to | emulate that experience. I recall polling on twitter a few months | back which the key feature was: | | - git push heroku master | | - Heroku add-ons | | - Heroku Postgres | | - Review apps | | And the reality is any one of those could standard on their own. | But put together, Heroku simply lets you forget about ops and | focus on shipping, and shipping is king. | | I fully get it's a business, but can't help but feel this is the | writing on the wall for the future. | | Gonna pour one out tonight for Heroku. | | Edit: And may be trying to figure out how to offer free Postgres | databases, cause shutting down databases with 3 months notice | feels pretty short. Not sure if that means deleting the data | itself or what, but ouch. | arcbyte wrote: | > git remote heroku push | | This was amazing back in the day. I'm much more impressed | either digitalocean's App stuff. It just hooks right up to | github, autoconfigures, and my devops workflow is reduced to | `git push` | craigkerstiens wrote: | Heroku's got effectively the same and with review apps it's a | great experience. | | Heroku was early in the integration to GitHub. It was | surprising to see how many apps were "broken" and "unable to | deploy" with the security incident a bit ago because they did | know how to git push they'd only connected their apps to | GitHub. | systemvoltage wrote: | > Without it I'm confident we'd have less developers in the | world. | | Heroku are training wheels that never come off. I see an | overall benefit to dev community, while painful initially, it | will be a net-good for people to learn how to deploy an app on | a bare metal server. | tdjsnelling wrote: | I agree that the Heroku developer experience has been second to | none. I'm a front-end & DX engineer at Northflank and we're | working hard to evolve and create a next-gen iteration of the | Heroku experience anchored around 12 Factor Applications in a | Kubernetes/cloud native era. We're getting very close, come and | see for yourself: https://northflank.com. Some key features: | | * As simple as `git push` to build & deploy services | | * One-click addons for Postgres, Mongo, Redis, MySQL and more | | * A generous free tier to get developers on board with minimal | friction | | * Great out of the box observability | | * The option to set up pipelines for more complex | build/preview/release workflows | jacquesm wrote: | Heroku also started out with that generous free tier and look | where we are now. Make sure your business works and is solid | and protected against abusers before you start handing out | free tiers because that's the hard part of anything free. | ormax3 wrote: | https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/billing/project-t. | .. | | > You can have one free project on your user account, and the | resources you create within it will be limited. You will not | be billed for any usage within a free project, but you must | add a card to your account for verification first. | | not having to add credit card info before using the free tier | is one of the main reasons for Heroku being so popular with | students and toy projects, truly a friction-free experience. | btown wrote: | > preview workflows | | This please, a thousand times! We're in the midst of a | complex transition from Heroku, where we relied heavily on | Review Apps for getting stakeholder feedback and QA'ing | complex data model changes, to a k8s-on-EKS setup where we | have a Helm chart that can duplicate our normal deploy in | isolated namespaces for previewing new feature branches based | on Github Actions. | | Our data cloning and routing needs are rather custom (white | labels on top of feature branch releases, with complex | fixture-loading processes), so I don't know that we'd make a | great initial customer, but there are so many companies out | there that should be using preview apps aggressively and | don't know what they're missing. If you can make this happen | in a modern environment without people needing to know what | Argo and Flux are, or how to make a "for" loop in Helm, it | could be a significant differentiator - and also provide a | lower barrier to entry where prospective customers use you | first for low-impact preview environments, then start using | you for production as well. | butterfly771 wrote: | A platform that looks good (similar to railway), has added | card information and is ready to try it out for some time. | kelnos wrote: | > _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 seems quite a bit | premature. | | Let's remember that the purpose of a free tier isn't just to | give free stuff away. It's a marketing expense. The hope is | that you get people to use the platform without the huge amount | of friction involved in pulling out a credit card, and hope | that they not only stay, but require more services that push | them out of the free tier. You also hope that these free users | will tell their friends and colleagues, who might also become | paid users. | | I'd guess that many bootcamp users would just use Heroku for | their class projects, and after the bootcamp was over, never | use it again. Their projects would just sit there, deployed on | Heroku, active, without being used. Sure, some would end up | using Heroku at whatever job they end up at; but, critically, | most of them will be going into an org where it's _already_ in | use, so the free tier would not have acted as a customer | acquisition tool in that case. And sure, some much fewer number | would continue using Heroku in a capacity where they wouldn 't | otherwise do so. And finally, sure, some even much fewer number | would both continue to use it, and start paying for it. | | I'm sure Heroku's new-customer funnel will suffer somewhat | without a free tier. But presumably they believe it's better | for them not to have all that fraud and garbage on their | platform. And they've been around long enough that they don't | really need to work on increasing mindshare all that much. | freeformz wrote: | It would be a poor business decision to exclude boot camp | students from the upcoming student plan(s). That obviously | doesn't cover all types of learning/getting started though. I | too mourn the loss of free, but also think it is the right | decision for the times. | craigkerstiens wrote: | > If you want a Heroku trial, please contact your account | executive or reach us here. | | Maybe I'm over skeptical here, but I don't see this being an | easy thing for a bootcamp study to acquire or deal with. | koolba wrote: | Why even bother with contacting an account executive? It's | $7 per dyno per month for the cheapest hobby tier. That's | peanuts compared to any fees for a paid bootcamp. Heck, | with inflation, that barely buys a bag of peanuts. | | Plus the students would have an incentive to learn about | shutting down unused resources that would pay dividends if | they ever deploy to AWS. It'd be like a home economic | lesson for hosted services. | | $7/mo and access to a payment method might be a stopper for | someone in the third world. But it's a private company, not | a charity. Somebody else can solve that problem for the | truly deserving. | | I think it's incredible they've provided free services for | over a decade and would love to know what percent of their | free compute resource have simply be hijacked by crypto | miners, torrent downloaders, and VPNs. It's got to be | enormous and the simple requirement of a payment card would | add enough KYC to eliminate all of them. | throwaway_4ever wrote: | Yes, but you also really need Postgres and that's now an | extra $9/month too. | | $0 -> $16 | nxss wrote: | Stop giving up, we tested several alternatives not too | long ago and it's possible to get a small DB for free: | https://nixsanctuary.com/best-paas-backend-hosting- | heroku-vs... | bochoh wrote: | Heroku Dyno + free cochroachdb instance, reasonable | enough | [deleted] | nikodunk wrote: | As someone who made their first ever deploy on free Heroku, and | realized server-software development was a doable and not | expensive thing, this is a sad day indeed. Maybe online | tutorials will use alternatives to Heroku, or maybe they'll | suggest self-hosting your website in the future? Time will | tell. End of a (web development) era for sure. | vagabund wrote: | 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. | base wrote: | I think that's one of the reasons, but the main one is | economical. | | For a long time they dealt with the free accounts, so in a | way they have already a lot of protections in place, and if | they wanted they could keep the existing free accounts and | just not accept further signups for this account type. | swyx wrote: | 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 everyone views it as | competitive advantage for some reason so it didnt go | anywhere. | shrewduser wrote: | Porn and crypto sure, but what are nazi's using free | hosting and bandwidth for? | zdragnar wrote: | Presumably, "nazi" here is a stand-in for any form of | communication not protected by free speech laws and / or | is actively forbidden by government censors (or perhaps | merely undesirable by social standards). Hate speech, | anti-government advocacy, promotion of violence and | terrorism etc will use "free" tier accounts because they | want as little capability of being tracked to in-real- | life people as possible. | | They may or may not fully utilize the bandwidth, but they | will absolutely take advantage of access to resources | that don't require real identification, and that adds an | extra burden of regulatory compliance on the company | offering it (even if it is just hiring a few extra people | to manage takedown orders, etc). | pjc50 wrote: | Things like Kiwifarms which provide a risk of substantial | reputational damage if you're seen to be supporting them. | There's a campaign on Twitter to deplatform KF from | Cloudflare after more SWATting incidents, for example. | brightball wrote: | Everyday I learn about a new dark corner of the internet. | alx__ wrote: | Only recently learned that crypto jerks will try to abuse | free compute during the build step for hosting services | epolanski wrote: | They injected miners in websites and even free CI | pipelines on GitHub and similar. | [deleted] | rjh29 wrote: | > It's likely also the reason Google's moved away from | unlimited storage for educational institutions. | | Absolutely, piracy forums have guides to fake being a student | to get an unlimited account, then mirror huge (1TB+) gdrives | full of pirated content to your own. This was (is?) happening | on a huge scale. | eastbound wrote: | What prevents adults from sharing movies from their GDrive, | is the consciousness that Google might revoke this account, | the backup account and all of your identity for life. | Unfortunately, if you did this to youngsters, they're too | young to have read enough horror stories. | effingwewt wrote: | No, young kids use google for nothing other than search, | and they are getting off that too. I'm more and more | hearing 'search' or 'look up' instead of 'google' as a | verb. | | My kid's circles of friends consider email to be like | snail mail/phone calls- nothing but spam. | | I warned them about g-products for years while they were | growing up, but I needn't have worried- they see | g/fb/insta/snap et al for the garbage it is. | | Most of them use telegram or whatsap for communication. | | Kids im speaking of are 15/17 (both girls). My | youngest(boy) at 12 is more worried about football. | | They use plex or whatever for sharing. They schooled me | hard. | Kinrany wrote: | Do they still use WhatsApp despite it being owned by | Facebook? | EToS wrote: | its a shame they didn't move to having a CC linked to the | account, and keeping the free dyno tier | ignoramous wrote: | > _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. | oofdere wrote: | https://deta.sh is another serverless option but I do worry | about their path to profitability. | pastor_bob wrote: | > Heroku and was a staple for so many bootcamps | | Some would say bootcamps exploited a free service and a nice- | to-have became an expectation | ryanbrunner wrote: | I think bootcamps did what it said on the box. It showed | their students to have small toy hobby projects, which is | exactly what the free tier is for. | | Also having taught a bootcamp, I think costs to Heroku for | bootcamp students would be basically negligible. Their apps | tend to only be accessed by them and maybe 1-2 others, and | only are really actively used for a few months. | hgsgm wrote: | fullstackchris wrote: | Free postgres you say? Check out Supabase: | https://supabase.com/ | MuffinFlavored wrote: | > Our product, engineering, and security teams are spending an | extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the | Heroku free product plans. In order to focus our resources on | delivering mission-critical capabilities for customers, we will | be phasing out our free plan for Heroku Dynos, free plan for | Heroku Postgres, and free plan for Heroku Data for Redis(r), as | well as deleting inactive accounts. | | > Starting October 26, 2022, we will begin deleting inactive | accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been | inactive for over a year. Starting November 28, 2022, we plan | to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting | down free dynos and data services. We will be sending out a | series of email communications to affected users. | | In case anybody was wondering in the article where it says free | is going away. | buf wrote: | I just bought villainku.com. Will forward to heroku.com when | the DNS is done. | | You die the heroku, or live long enough to become the | villainku. | kelnos wrote: | Ah yes, because a company that decides to stop giving away | its time and resources for free is now a "villain". Right. | buf wrote: | Mate, this was a joke. I hope that came across. | | I've been a paying member of heroku for nearly a decade, | and pay them $1000s of my personal income monthly. I think | their product has been brilliant. I just defended them | yesterday in a HN comment. | | I do, however, use their free tier to test things daily. | This news puts me in a bind. It's work that I hadn't | planned, and I only have 3 months to find a solution for it | when I have my own roadmap already planned. | [deleted] | jamesy0ung wrote: | Sarcasm and jokes in text don't usually come across to | most people due to the lack of context. No criticism | intended. | Varqu wrote: | In our case, this would mean increasing our Heroku bill by 400% | (we run a few paid apps and >40 free dynos with super low | monthly activity) | | Does anyone have a recommendation how to re-create the Heroku | experience on AWS or Azure? | Andugal wrote: | Maybe you could try the auto idle heroku add-ons? | dougbarrett wrote: | AWS beanstalk allows you to run on very cheap instances, even | cheaper if you get a plan and commit to a term. | | It's not a 1:1 experience, but I've enjoyed it as an | alternative to Heroku for sure. Alternatively, you could spin | up a server and install dokku which is pretty close to a | shipping experience, but still requires some maintenance and | hand holding. | ryantgtg wrote: | I switched from heroku to dokku (and DigitalOcean) last | month. Overall: easy to adapt from heroku since so many of | the concepts (and commands) are the same. | | I tried to get too fancy and set two web services on the | same app (since the DO droplet was giving me more CPU and | 4x the RAM for half the price) but they seemed to battle | each other for control of the database and/or were | exceeding resources. So I chilled out and used 1 web | service and set CPU and RAM resource limits. And... it's | been smooth since then! Much faster than heroku, too. | | Price-wise: we were on the $50/mo dyno plus $9/mo | postgresql, and with DO we beefed up the managed database | specs, and now get 4x the RAM on the droplet, and the total | cost is the same as heroku. | | We do still have a free tier staging server on heroku that | we only use a couple times a year. | | Oh shoot, I just remembered that I use staticman for | processing comments on a couple jekyll blogs, and those use | free heroku tiers. Argh! | eyberg wrote: | I'm completely biased as I work on the nanos/ops unikernel | toolchain but unikernels offer a very PaaS like feel as the | app and server become one. You simply build your image (ops | image create) and then deploy it (ops instance create) - two | commands. Takes tens of seconds to have something running on | AWS. If you are on a AWS/GCP free tier it costs nothing but | even a a g1-small costs only ~$20/month and a f1-micro goes | for ~ $5/month which can go a long way. We've had a go | unikernel be on the front page of HN on a f1-micro and it | barely registered any resources being used. | | Besides the perf/security boost you aren't locked in to | anything. You could take the same application and deploy it | to multiple clouds simultaneously if you wanted to as it is | making use of cloud primitives - nothing cloud-specific | unlike some of the various serverless offerings. | ivalm wrote: | With some investment in infra as code we have a similar | experience on aws. GitHub actions + terraform targeting ECS | on fargate (pay for usage). Push to main build the container, | pushes to elastic registry, makes the task/service, | configures alba, etc. | Varqu wrote: | Would you mind sharing how many working days went into | building it? | | This was exactly what we tried to avoid with our (rather | small) dev team. | ivalm wrote: | Hard for me to say what it would take for a normal small | dev team as I am a beneficiary/stakeholder of this work | but wasn't involved in the development. In our case we | hired a dedicated senior infra swe who had experience in | building IaC and other automation. I think given our | startup at the time (b-round startup working in | healthcare with duck-taped infra and security) it was | absolutely the right decision for us. | | It took our infra swe a few months to get MVP version | working but he also did other infra related work at the | same time. Complexity can change a lot depending on | requirements, and ours are probably more stringent that | Heroku ever supported. Because of sensitivity of the data | we deal with there is now a relatively sophisticated | identity management/permissioning/what-can-see-what-data | component in how our infra is deployed which probably | would not be the case for most companies. We also deploy | ML models so there is additional issues with automation | around keeping track of reproducability/provenance/ml | pipeline regression/drift/deidentification/etc (which now | a year later we haven't fully solved either!). | ptman wrote: | Run dokku, caprover (or write a better heroku alternative, | I'm sure now would be the time) on another free cloud | service. I wrote a comparison of a few major ones: | https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ | malyk wrote: | porter.run, convox, render, fly.io, dokku... | rcarmo wrote: | Piku :) | driverdan wrote: | GCP Cloud Run is very inexpensive if you use docker. | Varqu wrote: | Thanks, however, we will never use GCP (avoiding Google | products due to their random AI bans) | ramanujank wrote: | Have you considered Cloud Foundry? | kretaceous wrote: | 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. | csjh wrote: | Render has pretty good free tier benefits, but no git push | render master | anurag wrote: | Render does have auto deploys from GitHub/Lab so just `git | push` is how people use us. Are you using a different Git | host? | dicriseg wrote: | 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. | ndneighbor wrote: | _Disclaimer: I work at Railway.app as a Support Engineer_ | | You might be interested in Railway's CLI deployments: | `railway up` from your project root gets ya going. | | https://docs.railway.app/deploy/railway-up | duxup wrote: | 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 they don't want to just be handing out mass | quantities of free stuff too / I'm sure people abuse that to | no end. | ghiculescu wrote: | 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? | dominotw wrote: | I have often wondered about this. I was looking forward to | this new world of easy ops but instead we got k8s yaml hell. | | I personally think now there is great demand of complexity | from all levels of tech hierarchy. see this: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32439601 | criley2 wrote: | 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 react/nextjs app and a postgres db to your | hobbyists hearts content (as long as you turn if off when | you're done). | | If I were to host a bootcamp on starting a web app from | scratch I'd do something like stand-up a T3 App | https://github.com/t3-oss/create-t3-app on Vercel Hobby | https://www.vercel.com . Not sure I'd even consider Heroku | for teaching anymore. | lagrange77 wrote: | > 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. | criley2 wrote: | 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. | lagrange77 wrote: | > and run your node backend | | I didn't know that, thanks. | fooey wrote: | I've been very happy with CloudFlare Pages, and I hear good | things about Vercel, but those aren't as expansive as Heroku | (yet?) | jonplackett wrote: | Vercel is great. That's where I'll be moving everything for | now | aledalgrande wrote: | They're great and Netlify is too, until you need | background jobs or Redis. | craigkerstiens wrote: | There are some that have emulated it, but the team that was | there and created Heroku cared deeply about developer | experience. When you just "clone" that you miss pieces, one | PM friend that I worked with at Heroku called them papercuts. | We would obsess over such things and the quality of something | being shipped. | | Even now if you emulate that it's one thing, but Heroku has | been frozen in time for at least the last 5 years, maybe | closer to 7-8 years. There was more to do and more to improve | and advance, and it stalled out for reasons. Now just being a | clone wouldn't be enough you need to continue advancing the | experience. | ghiculescu wrote: | Sorry, I'm not proposing a team that not care clone it. I'm | hoping that a team that cares very much do so. I agree that | UX is the differentiator here. | | What I am challenging is the idea that the last 8 years of | missed advancement are a requirement. I'm sure there's | necessary under the good improvements; I question if | there's necessary user facing ones. Lots of people (me at | least) are very happy with Heroku's exact current feature | set, minus the recent and future stability issues. We just | want that to exist forever. | jrochkind1 wrote: | I think it's a good question I've thought about and discussed | a lot. | | I'm not sure. | | One guess is that heroku actually started with quite a bit | less than we now see -- for instance, initially only | supported Rails. The bar was so much lower then, since there | had been nothing else like it, that they had enough runway to | start with much less than would be "table stakes" today and | build up to it. | | Also they just had a really really really good team, and | really good management that let the team go. | | And luck maybe? | | Not sure what their funding was, if they had funding runway | that's hard to get today for a similar product? | | But honestly I don't know. There are _several_ competitors | _trying_. None of them have in my opinion yet reached heroku | in DX. And it 's hard to talk about because it's not just an | issue of listing significant features; it's also a million | tiny things that are _just right_ and work together just | right. | | I think it's _something_ about them being the "first mover", | and building out initially when there was pretty much nothing | like it, and when expectations were lower. | countspongebob wrote: | There is no intent to shut Heroku down. Quite the opposite. | jszymborski wrote: | 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://dokku.com/ | dicriseg wrote: | 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. | jszymborski wrote: | Ya, certainly a concern when going from well-funded org | with hired experts to just yourself. | | For myself, I just run automated security updates (uptime | is not a pinnacle concern for me), do the basic fail2ban | set-up, ensure I have a bit of reporting. Most | importantly, I pray to Cthulhu I'm enough of a low- | priority target that all I need to fend off is drive-by | attacks. | | I try as much as possible to isolate e.g. credentials and | sensitive information from public infrastructure. | Everything else that is more sensitive I stick behind | tailscale, usually hosted at home on Pis or my NAS. | cercatrova wrote: | 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. | ryantgtg wrote: | Once dokku is installed, the deployment method is `git | push dokku master` | | And how is that any more modern than heroku? | cercatrova wrote: | Did Heroku use containers? I seem to remember it didn't | since back in the day. | josegonzalez wrote: | Heroku implemented their own container system and expose | it to end users as a "Dyno". | giobox wrote: | In part, I think development of containers for software has | meant its much, much easier today to automate | packaging/deployment of web apps in easy to deploy containers | that work natively on all the major VPS providers, not just | Heroku. My own journey with Heroku certainly largely ended | once I was able to replicate much of what I used it for just | using docker/docker-compose, occasionally k8s if the | size/complexity of project demands it. | | Docker/docker-compose has much of the "easy to ship" magic | that Heroku had for me in its early years, I very quickly | abandoned Heroku for my own container stacks not long after | Docker launched in 2013. Its not quite as friendly or easy as | Heroku was at its best, but its a completely open format and | works with so many different providers etc etc. | | When you can just get a database in a container with one line | in docker or a handful of lines of yaml in a compose file, | the magic of heroku deploying a production database instance | easily isn't quite as special as it once was. | | That Dokku, the open source Heroku alternative, is at heart a | Docker container manager suggests I wasn't the only person | with these thoughts. | deckard1 wrote: | CapRover is another self-hosted PaaS. | | The problem with straight Docker is you're left to deal | with iptables and everything else on your own. Even the | self-hosted PaaS offerings don't do a _whole_ lot for you | here, either. You 're still on your own to configure | backups, automatic package updates, system reboots, | monitoring (?), and other system admin tasks. | | It's borderline on whether Docker is worth it at that | scale. You could just as easily setup a git hook to | redeploy on push. Maybe use SQLite instead of Postgres. | Configure nginx + Let's Encrypt. Without Docker you get | sane iptables again, which is a benefit. And systemd can | replace most functionality of docker-compose. Plus cron | tasks are kinda awkward with Docker, which you'll probably | need to do at some point. | driverdan wrote: | We're a large Heroku user currently spending $10-20k/month. This | change may lead us to switching to another platform. | | We host a lot of individual apps, many that only need free tier | DBs and Redis. This change will roughly double the cost of a | basic app on pro dynos + DB + redis, from $25/m to $49/m, with no | additional benefit. | | Heroku is already very expensive. $25/m for 512MB RAM is | laughable. At $49/m we could get a decent bare metal server for | each of our apps. | | If this change included a reduction in pricing to better match | alternatives it would be fine. If they only eliminated the free | tier for dynos but kept free tiers of add-ons that would be fine. | But as is this change will significantly increase the cost for | anyone using some free resources. | MuffinFlavored wrote: | > At $49/m we could get a decent bare metal server for each of | our apps. | | From where/with what kind of specs? $49/m sounds still well | within VPS territory unless I'm wrong. | bastawhiz wrote: | I expect the parent doesn't mean one bare metal server per | dyno, but one bare metal server per application (which | currently runs across multiple dynos). | driverdan wrote: | There are a lot of companies that offer dedicated servers for | under $50/m. | turtlebits wrote: | Hetzner has dedicated server auctions for ~35 USD/mo. All are | in EU datacenters though. | | https://www.hetzner.com/sb | icelancer wrote: | We use two of these and have been very happy! | MuffinFlavored wrote: | What's a US data center equivalent? OVH? What's their | lowest price for a dedicated server monthly? | andrewmunsell wrote: | OVH has dedicated servers around that cost in Canada: | https://eco.us.ovhcloud.com/ | | Based on their current availability, US looks to be more | in the neighborhood of $50 a month | jensneuse wrote: | If you're looking for a platform where you can run small | experiments on free tier backends, we'd love to have you on our | platform. We're looking to provide Serverless backends | including SQLite-based storage for free: | https://wundergraph.com/cloud-early-access | driverdan wrote: | I don't think that would fit this use case but I will check | it out, I always like looking at new hosting services. | cfiggers wrote: | Wow, I didn't think about paying customers who supplement their | pricey apps with free ones for lower-volume or less-critical | functions. This change makes Heroku objectively worse even for | shops that are already paying top dollar. | | Thanks for writing. | gkoberger wrote: | +1, same for us. We spent tens of thousands of dollars a month | on Heroku, and still get nickel and dimed for free repos. | | Including my own personal side projects. I like being in one | ecosystem, and rather than just move free repos somewhere else, | we're going to just move everything. | cpursley wrote: | Check out Render.com. I switched over several apps in less than | a full day. | rcfox wrote: | Since they specifically called out abuse of free services, I | wonder if they would be open to continuing free dynos for | paying customers. It'd be worth reaching out at least. | driverdan wrote: | We pay for all of our dynos so that doesn't concern me. I'm | much more concerned with Redis going from $0 to $15 since 95% | of our apps don't need the paid tier of redis. | matus_congrady wrote: | If you'd like something that gives you way more control and | flexibility, yet is similarly easy to use, try | https://stacktape.com | | Also, the Stacktape pricing works way better for companies | spending $10-20k/month on infrastructure. With Stacktape, you | pay a single monthly fee for the "deployment simplicity" (+AWS | fees, which are in general way below PaaS providers). You're | not paying the "deployment simplicity fee" for every running | instance. | | Dislcaimer: I'm a founder at Stacktape. | hgsgm wrote: | Thaxll wrote: | "The priority going forward is to support customers of all sizes | who are betting projects, careers, and businesses on Heroku" | | Who in 2022 is actually using Heroku at serious scale? This is a | dying service, no one sane want to bet on that. | ryantgtg wrote: | Substack! They were down - again - a couple days ago, and the | message was: | | > You've requested a page on a website (substack.herokuapp.com) | that is on the Cloudflare network. Cloudflare is currently | unable to resolve your requested domain | (substack.herokuapp.com). | cultofmetatron wrote: | fly.io is better anyway. Its a real shame how far salesforce | dropped the ball on heroku | ThePadawan wrote: | > Its a real shame how far salesforce dropped the ball on | heroku | | I mean, was there any sign to the opposite? | | Reading the sentence "Salesforce acquires Heroku" basically | reads to me as "Giant megacorp buys trendy internet-y company | so their name appears in newspapers positively and they have a | department where they can put their employees that are too | smart for their current job and would otherwise quit". | anm89 wrote: | A shame but not a surprise. | | Salesforce will be percieved like IBM or Oracle in 10 or 15 | years. I already see them that way but it seems like many | don't | adrr wrote: | When companies are acquired by salesforce, do they ever get | become better in terms of features, reliability etc? There are | more example than just Heroku like Exact Target. | specialp wrote: | Yes Heroku was so far ahead of its time, and they could have | been a leader in this field. They didn't even tie it in very | well with Salesforce CRM as well which would have gained them | cloud business. Free tier is probably the only thing that has | kept them relevant. With this move, all I see is Heroku | conceding defeat that they have not caught up, and they just | want to milk existing larger customers for money. | buf wrote: | This is good news for existing paying Heroku users. | | This is good news for Fly, Render, etc. | | This is bad news for Heroku in the long term. Free tiers are a | gateway to users. | samwillis wrote: | > This is good news for existing paying Heroku users. | | I don't think it is, as a paying customer the free instances | are such a useful part of the offering enabling us to have a | free staging environment and test branches. As a small | business, the free instances offset the excessive cost of | Heroku. | buf wrote: | I wonder if this means they will explicitly remove review | apps. | [deleted] | bvanvugt wrote: | Our community recently pulled together a guide for comparing | different free hosting providers. | | https://blog.battlesnake.com/deploying-web-servers-for-free-... | | It's really a shame, given how much we've relied on Heroku free | tiers to lower barriers fr all. | gregsadetsky wrote: | Great guide, thanks! | | You might want to add a note regarding Railway's free plan: | | "Render's free database plan allows you to run a PostgreSQL | database that automatically expires 90 days after creation" [0] | | So it's more a trial than a free plan like Heroku's was (e.g., | free forever under 10k rows) | | [0] https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases | danjac wrote: | Chapter 11? | krallja wrote: | ...you think Salesforce is going into bankruptcy because Heroku | is getting rid of its one good on-ramp? | | Slack _alone_ is enough to keep Salesforce profitable for | decades to come. | riekus wrote: | Salesforce is having a hiring stop and doing all sorts of | weird stuff such as targeting smb with 'easy salesforce' self | service. | | This feels like a company that is trying to lift numbers | somehow short term. | cfiggers wrote: | 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 it does is ping Trello's API, check for | changes in the new state against a Postgres Heroku add-on that | stores the last seen state, and then send formatted messages | based on the diff to a Slack channel for me and the few coworkers | of mine who pay attention to it. It starts up hourly in a Heroku | free dyno, runs for six or seven seconds (JVM lol) and then goes | back to sleep. But I'm super proud of it because it's actually | useful and I made it myself instead of relying on Zapier or IFTTT | or something like that. It sparks joy for me every time I see | that it ran correctly. | | Now I'll have to find somewhere else to host the little thing, I | reckon. | solidsnack9000 wrote: | Well, it's worth asking, how long something like this could | remain free. Even that six or seven seconds costs somebody | something. | ev1 wrote: | 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. | TheRealDunkirk wrote: | Salesforce reported an almost $20B profit last year. They can | afford it to buy developer goodwill. | Ancapistani wrote: | Its costs something, yes - but the fact that effectively the | entire professional development community is well aware of | Heroku's offerings, have had good experiences with them, and | most have direct knowledge of how it all works is _also_ | worth something. | | I'd wager that's worth significantly more than the few | seconds of compute most of us have gotten in exchange. | TheRealDunkirk wrote: | You'd think a company the size of Salesforce would have the | long-range vision to use a tiny fraction of their resources to | capture developer "goodwill" from projects just like this. But | apparently you'd be wrong. | joshstrange wrote: | 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 strategy long term. | | Developer interest has moved on (due to Heroku's | mismanagement) and I'd bet the majority of talent has long | since left Heroku. It's in a death spiral now. | strongbond wrote: | 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. | 8note wrote: | Open question: does Heroku consider the usecase as | described as fraud/abuse? | joshstrange wrote: | 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 the other on the frontpage currently | there are many people who started using Heroku on the | free tier and now run or work at companies that spend | thousands or tens of thousands a month on Heroku. This | change is causing at least some of them to start looking | around or even say for sure they plan on moving off of | Heroku. This will effect Heroku today (people leaving) as | well in the future (people never coming in the first | place). To me that's a sign of them giving up (if it | wasn't already clear by their actions over the last | years). | strongbond wrote: | 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? | joshstrange wrote: | 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. | [deleted] | bombcar wrote: | Salesforce is _not_ a developer goodwill company. | | They're a management goodwill company. Developers work with | salesforce because they are told to, not because they want | to. | dang wrote: | We've changed the url from https://blog.heroku.com/next-chapter | to one that has more specific information and isn't a CPR (https: | //hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). | wilg wrote: | I always wished I could pay Heroku like $50/mo for a "side | project" plan where it was easy to spin up small apps and | databases. I don't need it to be free, I just need it to be kind | of easy and painless to spin up a bunch of random side projects. | Some kind of limit is fine. | xavdid wrote: | This is my problem as I'm evaluating competitors. I have a few | tiny services that don't need constant uptime (the heroku sleep | and wait-to-wake was perfectly fine). | | Most places charge per-service and it's not clear that I can | have 8 services that mostly sleep (and use less total uptime | than a single always-on service). | | I'm fine to pay a bit to keep these running, but $7 / service / | month doesn't make sense for little toys (an actual business is | a very different story) | matthewfcarlson wrote: | I deleted my heroku account. Like many others, I'm sad to see the | end of an era. | niklasmerz wrote: | First Netlify and now Heroku. I need to migrate some things which | is very sad. | pyb wrote: | Not sure how Heroku is hoping to attract new customers without a | free tier ? Do they think their reputation will suffice? | riekus wrote: | Salesforce reputation? Have you worked with their ecosystem? | Their pardot marketing platform van only use date fields in | YYYYMMDD, no way to convert this to a European format. And i | can drum up like a 100 of these insane things we have to work | with on a daily basis. I work in the Salesforce ecosystem, and | love my job but funny enough I fucking hate Salesforce in so | many ways. | Shank wrote: | > 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 customer in the past and not taking up very | many resources. | | > Starting November 28, 2022, we plan to stop offering free | product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data | services. | | I understand this from a business perspective, but wow this | sucks. There's a lot of projects hosted on Heroku that are just | SPA-like demos of OSS tools -- things like theme demos for static | site generators and the like. Sure, these are all good candidates | for the myriad of other hosts that exist, but I'm sure that a lot | will go down and linkrot will creep into the OSS ecosystem. Not a | lot of people are eager to migrate projects off on someone else's | schedule. | | I wish Salesforce the best of luck with Heroku, but this sounds | like a "we care about the numbers" move. I hope this means that | they actually invest in their product. | turtlebits wrote: | I haven't used Heroku in a while, but don't they rely on git? | You shouldn't be losing anything specific to re-deploying your | service. Otherwise, they have no obligation to maintain/run | anything that isn't being paid for. | dangus wrote: | I don't wish Salesforce the best of luck with anything. | slg wrote: | Unlike most of their competitors, I don't think I have ever heard | of someone migrating to Heroku. Seemingly the only people who are | still using it are using it because they started with it, usually | with their free product. I'm no expert or anything, but it seems | like a bad idea to cut off that funnel of future customers by | eliminating that free product. | xtracto wrote: | I never 'got' what heroku was all about , but i have been | working with linode, aws and similar for more than 10 years. I | find it pretty easy to spin something up in aws | | Otoh i know of a medium company (500 employees) that started in | heroku and is moving to aws. Apparently they got to the top | tier of the DB , and they've stumbled with several limitations | by some lack of access . | gtirloni wrote: | Heroku is great for small teams but it's expensive. It also | offered automation that wasn't easily available anywhere else | 15 years ago. It's a different story in 2022. | brundolf wrote: | > discontinue free product plans | | > If you want a Heroku trial, please contact your account | executive | | Uhh. What | | I never ever would have given Heroku a try if it hadn't been a | free place to spin up toy projects. I definitely did not have an | "account executive". | | There's some vague language in here about people abusing the free | plans for malicious purposes, but other, much smaller providers | don't seem to have that problem. It sounds to me like they've | just decided to abdicate the low-end market and go full | enterprise, and are trying to hand-wave a justification. | | RIP Heroku | PebblesRox wrote: | Right, and stopping fraud doesn't mean you can't grandfather in | a bunch of established free plans that don't have any | problematic usage patterns. | pdntspa wrote: | Welp, back to cheapo DO droplets for my personal site I guess | eropple wrote: | Huh. I can't say I'm not a little conflicted on this one. I ran a | consultancy in the 2010s peeling sites off of Heroku and onto | AWS, so seeing this feels pretty weird to me. As 'craigkierstiens | says elsewhere in the thread, it feels a lot like the writing is | on the wall. End-of-an-era stuff. | | Mild plug: these days I'm in devrel at Render now, because I | think a modern, thought-out PaaS can target most folks' needs. If | you're on Heroku and looking for somewhere to jump to, feel free | to email me directly (ed@render.com). Happy to chat informally, | to give you a non-sales assessment of whether Render fits your | needs, and to help where I can--whether it's Render or to point | you somewhere else. | josephcsible wrote: | I wonder how many companies that pay for Heroku are only doing so | because their employees previously used the free tier for | personal projects at home. | bluedino wrote: | I can't remember what book it was that was I reading, working | through some language/framework of the month. They had you | register an account on GitHub, and then on Heroku. You'd push the | chapter's exercise up there, deploy it, and then never look at it | again. | | I always wondered how many millions of repos/apps were out there | because of stuff like that. | therockspush wrote: | Guilty, when I was learning django I probably orphaned like 20 | or 30 myself. | kenforthewin wrote: | 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. | recursv_thnkng wrote: | 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. | jrochkind1 wrote: | 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? | itake wrote: | There is some compute cost with supporting infra migrations | for them. | iLoveOncall wrote: | This feels like a company committing suicide. I've never used | Heroku but the only reason I've ever heard about it is because of | free apps being hosted there. | | They just became another cloud provider in a domain that already | has a lot. | Exuma wrote: | I grow tired of watching my favorite services self destruct. I | have yet to see even a single service that lasts without | destroying itself by either selling out or something similar. | bilsbie wrote: | Wouldn't a free tier be good advertising? Get people hooked and | upgrade them? | decidertm wrote: | The public roadmap is a good idea but highlights how stale the | product has become. https://github.com/heroku/roadmap/issues Only | now researching adding Cloud Native Build Packs and HTTP2. | | This will reaffirm for many the sense that Heroku is being | dismantled from within. Feature sunsetting and removal of a free | on-ramp doesn't help. | | If you're looking for a production alternative to Heroku checkout | Northflank. | | https://northflank.com | | https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/migrate-from-hero... | | https://northflank.com/heroku-pricing-comparison-and-reducti... | | Comprehensive support for stateful, ephemeral and scheduled | workloads. With a generous free developer tier including build, | runtime, databases and cron jobs. Always happy to help teams | migrate from Heroku. | | (I'm a Northflank engineer + co-founder) | s_severus wrote: | I'd like to +1 for Northflank. I've been using it for a few | months for smaller projects and experiments, and the dashboard | and overall experience has been great. Free tier is good enough | to run small apps, and pricing is very competitive. Also got a | lot of _rapid_ email support from the Northflank staff when I | ran into issues. | hazzamanic wrote: | Is the free plan comparable to heroku? So I could get a free | Dyno (equivalent) with postgres dB on Northflank? And you can't | scale back down to free once you go paid? | decidertm wrote: | Yes you can create a service and a postgres db in | Northflank's free tier. Once upgraded there isn't a | downgrade, nothing stopping you making another free project | however! | riskycodes wrote: | We pay Heroku thousands of dollars a month for our Staging and | Production environments, and one of the reasons we chose them is | that we can spin up a toy widget or proof of concept in seconds | _for free_ : we probably do a few of those a day, play around | with them for a few days or weeks, and then kill them. | | Now that these toys aren't free, I would guess likely to move | them to AWS or GCP (since they're likely to be cheaper), and at | that point we might as well migrate the rest of our stuff as | well. It's not just goodwill that Heroku generated from this, | it's actual revenue. | Varqu wrote: | As a CTO of a company which has a very similar situation - I | can fully agree on that. | | We already started looking into a possible migration to another | cloud provider. The biggest decision point would be a similar | developer experience as with git push heroku master. | matus_congrady wrote: | Would you mind elaborating on what does the "similar | developer experience as with git push heroku master" mean for | you? | | I'm a founder at https://stacktape.com, and we're trying to | provide full power of AWS with a developer-friendly | experience, similar to Heroku or serverless framework. | | Even after doing a ton of research, I'm still not 100% sure | which of the Heroku's features are the killer features that | the competing PaaS platforms must replicate in order to have | the "Heroku-like" experience. | gregsadetsky wrote: | I'm a long time user of Heroku, have built on top of it as | a developer, CTO, etc. | | My gut feeling from reading your homepage is that you're | automating a lot of AWS service deployments on my behalf, | but not "obfuscating" it that much from me either. | | Your pricing talks about "Resources" which I assume are | either AWS services or instances of those services. The | free plan says that a REST api needs 40 resources which | seems... like a lot? Is 40 good? bad? :-) | | Heroku specifically allows you to think of your app == 1 | dyno (depending on how much you scale it obviously), not 40 | services. | | I also note that the $290/month team plan talks about | unlimited resources but doesn't specify their | size/capacity. Heroku has sort of t-shirt sized tiers for | dynos (and addons as well, like Postgres). What size of | resources are you deploying on my behalf? | | I do see the value of what you're doing, I'm just not | getting a "as easy as Heroku" feeling. It seems potentially | more powerful, but also raw-er i.e. this is automated AWS | (that I might need to care for / understand), not... "git | push heroku master" :-) | Varqu wrote: | Sure, what I would expect when deploying a new service / | application: | | 1. Create a new app in the dashboard or command line (in | Heroku it's basically a single step: choosing app name and | region) | | 2. git push from my repository (it's a NodeJS app with | React frontend) | | 3. The app builds automatically and gets deployed to prod | inerte wrote: | I only pay $16 dollars for a web and a Postgres dynos, but I | have a free redis connected to my production instance. | | My staging environment, which I use very occasionally to | double-check major changes, is all free dynos. | | I know, I know... but they offered, and I took it. Now if I | have to pay for Redis that will be $31 per month - so more | expensive, for less functionality, unless I double it to $62. | | Just seems meh to go from $16 to $62 and not get anything in | return. | jensneuse wrote: | We'd like to provide exactly this. Git push to deploy, free | Serverless backend including SQLite-based storage. Please have | a look and sign up for the private beta if you're interested: | https://wundergraph.com/cloud-early-access | codegeek wrote: | Finally, the Salesforce blow. It was a matter of time. I have | never used Heroku personally but came across so many people who | absolutely loved it. Great example of a large company buying an | awesome product and destroying it. | wutangisforever wrote: | I don't get why heroku would do this, it's killing any customer | who would start off small and scale up. | | I mean how much money could they possibly be losing from hobby | dynos etc... | tptacek wrote: | 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. | tzs wrote: | OT: your HN profile says: | | > All comments Copyright (c) 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, | 2018, 2023, 2031 | | I'm curious. If you were to continue that sequence would the | continuation be: | | A. 2044, 2065, 2099, 2154, 2242 | | B. 2044, 2065, 2099, 2154, 2243 | | C. Something else? | tptacek wrote: | My HN test is an IQ test that I, myself, cannot pass. | bombcar wrote: | You can still offer a "free tier for existing customers" and | call it "development" or something. This lets people who are | already known/paying to spin up test instances, without | having to go through purchasing, which leads eventually to | more paid usage. | tptacek wrote: | I guess it depends on where you think the platform is | going, and which segment of the market you think the | revenue is going to come from. I'm just saying: it's a | significant cost. It's maybe the most important thing to | know about the hosting business. | joshstrange wrote: | 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 hobby that results in | paying later, and they are fully embracing their Salesforce | persona (not a good thing in my book). | shiftpgdn wrote: | I don't think you understand how much fraud and abuse is in | the hosting world. | joshstrange wrote: | 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. | shiftpgdn wrote: | 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. | TillE wrote: | 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. | Dma54rhs wrote: | They do require credit card for free dynos. Maybe it wasn't | so in the beginning I can't remember. | pyb wrote: | But, in other terms, it means they no longer have enough tech | talent in-house to solve hard problems. | | This points to further decline down the line. | arthurcolle wrote: | Salesforce acquired Heroku if you weren't aware. There's your | "why" right there! | syntheticnature wrote: | As someone in a number of non-corporate/dev Slacks on the | free tier, I do wonder when/if Salesforce will tighten up on | those as well. There are some I know were just for | organization during a one-time event... | CoffeeOnWrite wrote: | Um that was 11 years ago. | joshstrange wrote: | Which coincides with about the last time Heroku was | relevant/competitive. This is just an example of the parent | company tightening the screws some more (see also [0]). | | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32174596 | CoffeeOnWrite wrote: | This is just wrong info. Search HN comments from | 'craigkerstiens, an early employee. Significant | innovative product development continued for a few years | after the acquisition. | joshstrange wrote: | That's always the case which is why I said "about the | last time" instead of "the last time". There is always | stuff in the pipeline, there are always still people who | care for a while but they see the writing on the wall | just like the rest of us, they leave, and it becomes a | self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm not saying there | aren't/weren't good developers/managers at Heroku, I'm | saying the sale to Salesforce started the end for Heroku. | | If the security incident a few months ago wasn't a clear | "we don't care about Heroku" then I don't know what will | wake some people up. | arthurcolle wrote: | A quick Google of this dude's handle/name and the first | link is his blog with a reflective article about his | experience at and subsequent departure from Heroku: | | https://www.craigkerstiens.com/2022/05/18/unfinished- | busines... | pythonaut_16 wrote: | They want it to die. They don't want to keep supporting Heroku | but they don't want the bad press of killing it outright. Or at | least they're pivoting from independent hosting to an | enterprise value add for SalesForce. | | Or they're really short-sighted. | ChrisArchitect wrote: | Well damn. 3 months to figure out what to do with all my 'hobby' | apps eh. Hm. | bobx11 wrote: | Because Salesforce has been internally talking about killing | off heroku for quite some time, I've been trying alternatives | and found many (eg. DigitalOcean, Render) support buildpacks | already, so should be a very easy transition. | drusepth wrote: | This seems like really, really short notice. I have probably a | hundred or two apps that I'll need to migrate off before I even | get to my paid apps (which I'll also be migrating off after). | | I really appreciate all the alternatives people have mentioned in | the thread so far. Setting up a giant company cloud on AWS sounds | fun, but with this little notice I'll probably just check out | Fly/Render to get all my OSS demos/PoCs/etc moved somewhere... | And my guess is that wherever I decide to go for that will make | that platform the path of least resistance to move my paid apps | to, too. | ydnaclementine wrote: | No hate toward heroku whatsoever, but have a feeling this | decision will get reversed in 5 days | okpx wrote: | There goes my army of Discord bots | ZacharyPitts wrote: | Urgh. | | I have an open source hobby endpoint hosted for free on heroku | for many years. Used by a bunch of websites / discord bots / | desktop applications as a REST backend. | | Annoying to have to open a case just to continue operating. | rubyist5eva wrote: | This is the end of an era - no reason to really use Heroku | anymore. One of the best things about it was being able to "grow | into" the pricing. Looks like I'm looking at fly.io now. | coding123 wrote: | Does Heroku have k8s? I'm still looking for some vendor that can | do k8s single node for $5/mo. | lkki wrote: | civo.com | [deleted] | acejam wrote: | The fact that this guy routinely asks for you to send feedback to | his personal LinkedIn page says it all. | thinkingkong wrote: | Heres the roadmap. Mostly seems like minor improvements and | research so it will be interesting to see how the roadmap changes | over time. | | Overall it feels strange. Next chapter feels more like a "our | incredible journey" less of a bold goal. Also really want to make | everyone realize it's Salesforce Heroku now. | | https://github.com/heroku/roadmap/issues | adam_gyroscope wrote: | For folks looking for a free Postgres offering, check out bit.io | (I'm the founder/CEO) - we're super easy to use. And if you | migrate from heroku and mention HN we'll get you a $5 credit if | you go pro. | typest wrote: | Heroku's loss is Replit's gain. They're making everything so | easy, I expect them to basically be able to pick up this slack in | helping make deployments simple. | peterallport wrote: | Sad Day. Heroku has had security incidents, serious outages, and | contrary to rest of industry eliminated any free/growth tiers w/o | serious platform improvements. Was a long term paying customer. | Bye bye | | https://twitter.com/peteallport/status/1562874753429303298 | jonplackett wrote: | Getting rid of free tier is super short sighted. | | I always start a project on a free / hobby tier. I'll have a few | going and they'll be using basically zero resources because they | have no visitors except testers and alpha / beta users. | | When a project is ready - click - I switch to paid and start | paying. Probably also add the cloudfront add-on. Maybe a faster | database etc | | If I have to go build the beta version somewhere else (Vercel | most likely) I'm not going to switch back to Heroku to host the | paid version. I've been dealt liking Vercel lately so this is a | good excuse to move everting (free and paid) over there. | pythonaut_16 wrote: | Yep, this reads like they want Heroku to quietly die off but | don't want to make a hard deprecation announcement. | hugocbp wrote: | As many have already pointed out, I was one of those that started | my developer carrer by using Rails + Heroku from tutorials and | bootcamp. | | To this day, I still haven't found a solution that works as | easily as that Rails + Heroku duo did in that time. I still | remember when I got my first real paying customer and in about 4 | days had a "first version" of their webapp up and heard all the | praise they gave. | | And it was literally just a initial Rails app with login with | Devise, a couple of resources of CRUD and a domain linked to | Heroku. | | I still have some apps there from my portfolio in the free tier. | Probably time to move them somewhere else, but I, as many, was | very, very sad to hear that news. | | Heroku is past is heyday but I'll never forget my excitement when | I got my first real customer app deployed, with database and | everything, within hours, with no more than a few weeks of | starting to learn programming under my belt. | | It's not like they are shutting down right now, but it sure feels | like that. | | Thank you for the free tier for all these years, Heroku! | sergiotapia wrote: | Heroku was a cornerstone of my toolbox back in 2015 but these | days I wouldn't use them. They have been stained by Salesforce. | It's unfortunate. :( | peterallport wrote: | Sad day. Heroku has had security incidents, serious outages, and | contrary to rest of industry eliminated any free/growth tiers w/o | serious platform improvements. | | Was a long term paying customer. Bye bye | | https://twitter.com/peteallport/status/1562874753429303298 | A7med wrote: | The free plan probably brought 90% of their customers, watch them | bring it back after few months | glenngillen wrote: | I posted this previously, but it seems apt to repost given this | significant change: | | I've not found the time to write up the entirety of my experience | unfortunately, but I did move a bunch of stuff off Heroku over | the past couple of years and directly onto AWS. It was a very | piecemeal approach which had the double benefit of being low/no | impact to end users while also letting me do it at my leisure. My | general approach was: | | * Import my current Heroku config into Terraform resources so I | can co-ordinate changes across multiple platforms as a single | atomic change. | | * Embrace a strangler pattern | (https://www.redhat.com/architect/pros-and-cons-strangler- | arc...). I used Cloudfront, but you could put any CDN in front. | | * My databases + workers were a large part of my Heroku bill, and | I had a very spikey usage profile (potentially days with near | zero usage, with brief peaks), so I used it as an opportunity to | refactor towards a serverless infrastructure (https://glenngillen | .com/safely_migrating_from_heroku_aws_ser...). This was entirely | superfluous to the migration though. If I'd not taken that | approach the alternate would have been to provision and RDS | Postgres instance, add the required IAM profiles to my Heroku | app. Work out how/when to schedule a window to cutover to RDS | being the primary DB. Update the DATABASE_URL accordingly. Again, | doing all of this via Terraform to make it happen. But doing it | in small incremental steps where possible (i.e., adding the IAM | profiles to the app first). Once cut-over, take a final snapshot | of the Heroku Postgres database and then shut it down. | | * Updating the code on my workers to be idempotent. | | * Make sure config vars are imported to Terraform and are sync'd | to the various places they need to be (probably just the Heroku | app for now). | | * Have the workers run inside containers on AWS (doing them just | one worker at a time), exposing the required config vars for them | to work. Let the Heroku + AWS workers both process the work for a | period of time, hence the need for being idempotent. Once I'm | confident the AWS ones work as intended, shut down the Heroku | workers. * Picking off individual paths/API endpoints to serve | from AWS. In my case I also migrated all of this to API gateway + | lambda. An ALB with EC2/ECS would have also been an alternative. | Add a new path based route to your CDN (e.g., /v2/the-existing- | path) and have it's origin point to your non-Heroku service. Test | it. Once it works, update the existing path that users are using | to now go to the new origin. It means if you discover some issue | you can quickly update the routing to have Heroku resume serving | that route. Once you're confident, rinse and repeat the next | path. Continue through until all traffic is ultimately served by | the new host. | | * If there's nothing left then scale down the remaining processes | on Heroku. | | I've gone an all-in AWS approach, but the same general principle | could apply to whatever platform you want to run on. I think the | biggest thing people I've spoken to in the past about this | overlook is that you don't have to make some big wholesale | switch. There's ways to derisk it and take an incremental | approach to migrating. Which also drastically reduces the cost of | making the wrong decision. If you can run just one route through | AWS/Fly/DigitialOcean/whatever then you can get a sense for | whether it will _actually_ work for your needs, and quickly roll | back if you change your mind. | m3nu wrote: | For hosting simple open source apps there is also | https://www.pikapods.com. Not free forever, but fairly cheap at | around $1.5/month for the typical app. | | I'm a founder and we specifically don't focus on running custom | apps, but a moderated selection that also gets updates and | optimizations. Like an app store for open source web apps. | TillE wrote: | I want to run a very low-traffic Discord bot, and I was about to | use Heroku's free plan for that. But at a minimum for $7/month | for just the dyno, I'm far better off renting a full VPS instead. | | It's frustrating that I haven't found many good options for | hosting a program that's constantly running but using few | resources. I suppose it's not very profitable to do that kind of | thing for around $5/month. | joshstrange wrote: | So their next chapter is obscurity followed by shutting down? | | It was clear even before their horribly bungled GitHub security | incident that Heroku was on life support at best and it's been a | long time since "Heroku" was the answer to "What PaaS should I | use?". | | The beancounters took control a while back and are sucking all | they can out of it before they discard it's empty shell. | | Having Heroku as your PaaS provider seems like a bad business | decision at this point. You are just begging to have the rug | pulled out from under you. | countspongebob wrote: | 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. | golemiprague wrote: | [deleted] | joshstrange wrote: | Ok, let's see how well this comment ages. I predict in 5-10 | years max we will get an "Our incredibly journey" post or a | "Heroku is now Salesforce Cloud" (if that name isn't already | taken, I have no clue, "Safeforce" is an immediate "avoid! | red flag!" for me, I don't follow that company). Heroku was | amazing when it first came out but it squandered the lead it | had and hasn't done anything interesting for a long time. | | As with all "let's squeeze all we can out of this" you will | continue to make money for a number of years no doubt but | you've just destroyed a major onboarding ramp (free tier), | your security appears to be a joke from the outside looking | in, and your product has been effectively on life support for | many years now. A public roadmap is too little, too late. | You've lost the trust of developers and it's only going to be | downhill from here. | | > This does have tradeoffs, but getting the rug pulled out is | not one of them - the opposite. | | I'm sure the developers with apps on the free tier don't | agree and I'd bet good money they will never touch Heroku | again if they have their way. I know I won't. | intelVISA wrote: | Alarmingly prescient prediction, Heroku had a good run | though. | ubertaco wrote: | "Heroku is now Salesforce Cloud" is an easy-bet prediction, | just like "ExactTarget is now Marketing Cloud", or "Pardot | is now Marketing Cloud Account Engagement". | | When something gets the "Cloud" rename, you can bet it's on | the way downhill. | upset_customer wrote: | 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 the company, to the point that fighting abuse | and spam is not possible, nor is active feature development. | | I've submitted a support ticket several times and get a | canned response from some poor sod in India who has no idea | what is going on. Heroku's Support used to be the model of | "how it's done." Now it's a joke. | | And security is a joke, as demonstrated by the April | "incident" that lasted two months. Reading between the lines, | it seems that nobody knows what exactly happened, and the | team is probably still waiting for more fallout. | | I don't envy your position Bob, you've probably been told to | kill Heroku by your leaders, all of whom have never used | Heroku nor can explain what a dyno is. | | A sad day in the developer world indeed. | karmelapple wrote: | Nice to hear from you! We spend multiple tens of thousands of | dollars every year and are on Heroku Enterprise, and have | been on the platform for 10 years. | | We could cut our price by about 50% moving to a competitor. | We suspect AWS RDS will work very similarly to Heroku | Postgres, and I have been unable to get much clarity from the | teams at Heroku on precisely what Heroku Postgres is doing | for me that AWS RDS would not do. Is it possible to find out | precisely what Heroku Postgres is getting me that AWS RDS | will not? | | There's always a cost with transitioning, so if there would | be some kind of price reduction possible for Heroku, that | would eliminate me looking at competitors. I suspect this is | out of the question, and you wouldn't want to comment | publicly, but I sure would like a reply somehow indicating | there may be some plans for this. | | Some of the reasons I'm concerned: * the GitHub security | issue that lingered for over a month * the DNS issue that hit | the other day that resulted in our apps being only spottily | available for multiple hours | | Missing features, such as: * the lack of wildcard in Heroku | Automated Certificate Management * having to share a load | balancer with free dynos that might be doing suspicious | things and therefore getting our apps blocked at certain | customers, even when we're using Heroku Enterprise (this is | one reason why I'm okay with free dynos going away, since | we've been bit multiple times by this issue over the last | decade) | | Looking forward to a response - thanks! | coffee_beqn wrote: | What is the PaaS people use today? Just big cloud is too | powerful or are there still niche companies that make life easy | for startups like Heroku used to? | appliku wrote: | If you are doing Django or Python https://appliku.com | | Free tier for deployments + AWS Free tier = year or free and | convenient hosting | mapcat wrote: | Railway is super easy to get started. Render and Fly are good | options too | akprasad wrote: | I've been experimenting with Render (render.com) and like it | so far. | malyk wrote: | porter is another | rychco wrote: | render.com & fly.io are two choices that may fit your | description. I've deployed a small project to render.com and | it's been enjoyable. | joshstrange wrote: | Fly.io is one I've looked at a few times but hasn't been | exactly what I wanted to normally I just use AWS, Firebase, | or a DO droplet. Supabase is something I've been interested | in as well but I haven't played with it yet either. | dwheeler wrote: | A pricing increase for at least some paying customers, really. I | use Heroku (and pay for it), but I use free tiers for testing | pre-production, and that's an extra fee even for someone | _willing_ to pay. | willio58 wrote: | Really sad end for Heroku. They never could find a balance | between the free tiers they offered and their overly-expensive | paid tiers. Now they're entering purgatory before they are | ultimately shut down for good. | | They had the markings of a long-lasting company in this space but | corporate mismanagement has led to this drawn out death for the | company. Salesforce buying the company made a few rich, but it | really did turn out to be the nail in the coffin everyone said it | would be. :( | clairity wrote: | heroku was great but their free pricing was almost too good. | and once you were out of the free range, their pricing jumped | too steeply. they should have had a much more gradual ramp-up | as your app got bigger and needed more resources, more of a | geometrically rising pricing curve rather than a discontinuous | one (but not like the overly complicated aws pricing, by the | nanosecond on 15 different dimensions). | no_wizard wrote: | Counter point seems to be Slack, which has become better (in my | opinion) after the Salesforce Acquisition. | | I think the struggle is that Salesforce has never historically | offered a _platform as a service_ business that is agnostic to | its end goal. I imagine the idea of acquiring Heroku was to | make it easy to spin up new Salesforce apps, but I don 't know | that ever materialized in the way they were hoping. | ubertaco wrote: | > Counter point seems to be Slack, which has become better | (in my opinion) after the Salesforce Acquisition. | | ...which was only finalized about a year ago, and "phase one" | of Salesforce's several-steps-plan that culminates in | screwing up an acquisition is usually needlessly tinkering | with pricing and packaging, which just happened recently [0]. | | The next step, if past patterns are predictors, will be an | attempt to bundle Slack into their existing SKUs, then work | on integrating Slack with their nightmare CRM codebase/dev- | env, and then from there it's all downhill as velocity | abruptly halts, the ratio of time spent doing meaningful work | vs. time spent doing compliance busy-work stalls out | completely, and the brain-drain begins. | | [0] https://slack.com/blog/news/pricing-and-plan-updates ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-25 23:00 UTC)