[HN Gopher] Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
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Life after Heroku: What's a dev to do?
Author : h3mb3
Score : 81 points
Date : 2022-10-29 17:46 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| bdcravens wrote:
| Anyone know any developers willing to work for free? I have a
| business idea, and it'll probably make me decent money, but I'd
| rather not have to pay for the resources needed to fulfill my
| vision.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Time to remind folk that if you don't need containers (well, it
| works with containers too, but it's not the point), you can set
| up https://github.com/piku on a VPS as well.
| larrymyers wrote:
| The article calls out having to learn how to create a Docker
| image for Fly.io as though it's a bad thing. I consider it a huge
| bonus if you like taking advantage of free tiers for services.
|
| The whole point is that if you're going to take advantage of a
| free tier you should do so in a way that switching is trivial.
| Docker goes a long way to achieving that.
|
| I personally just pay $10/month to Linode and self host these
| days using Nomad. Less restrictions and more freedom for the cost
| of a coffee and a bagel.
|
| https://www.larrymyers.com/posts/nomad-and-traefik/
| poopypoopington wrote:
| the real story here is that a coffee and a bagel costs $10 \s
| nurettin wrote:
| Your post made me realize that I pay more to digitalocean for a
| 2gb ram instance. I guess roles got reversed.
| KronisLV wrote:
| I use Time4VPS (which is linked on my blog) or Hetzner for
| VPSes and Docker Swarm for orchestration (at least for personal
| stuff, though Nomad or something like K3s can be great too), in
| combination with a more boring web server like Apache or Nginx
| for ingress (but Caddy and Traefik are viable as well).
|
| Overall, I'm inclined to agree! You can pick a stack that's as
| boring or interesting as you want and have your container
| images work in almost any environment where OCI is supported,
| with minimal tweaking.
|
| You can use either base images that someone else has made
| (Bitnami images in particular are rather nice), or build your
| own, about which I wrote in more detail:
| https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-fo...
|
| Currently each of my individual nodes cost around 5-10 euros a
| month, or I can even use my homelab servers for whatever I
| want, since they can either be in the same cluster or a
| separate cluster. Essentially you just adjust some deployment
| constraints and feed some YAML/HCL into whatever container
| orchestrator you have. Provided that your registry access is
| configured correctly, you'll have your software up and running
| in minutes.
| x86hacker1010 wrote:
| Can you speak to Nomad vs K8s for side projects?
|
| I've deployed K8s in the past but was curious if Nomad is
| lighter/easier
| torvald wrote:
| I can share some articles later, but Nomad is a ten-fold
| easier.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| Digital Ocean's App Platform seems similar.
|
| GCP offers Cloud Run which would probably free for most to run
| containers.
| rhodysurf wrote:
| Cloud run is really great and cheaaaapppp
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Pay?
| paxys wrote:
| It's bizarre that people's form of protest against Heroku is to
| threaten to move to a competitor that has even worse pricing
| tiers. You've had a free ride for a decade, being asked to
| cough up $7/mo now isn't the end of the world.
| ralston3 wrote:
| Agreed. I don't understand all of the "Can't believe I have
| to pay (X < $10) for $service".
| stepbeek wrote:
| There are plenty of reasons to dunk on Heroku from the last
| year. I'm not sure why asking customers to pay for hosting us
| one of them.
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| Many of these projects have no revenue and only exist because
| a free plan existed. Paying is a non starter so asking where
| that next free alternative is is a logical intermediary step
| before shutting it down and moving on to something else.
| krashidov wrote:
| Why is paying a non starter? There's a lot of hobbies in
| the world that require money. I can't just barge into a
| climbing gym and say "I'm sorry this hobby will give me no
| revenue so I refuse to pay"
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| No one barged into Heroku. The company offered a free
| service because they considered it a worthwhile marketing
| strategy. It has to be free because no one, including the
| authors, are interested in paying for the projects that
| are looking for another free option.
|
| I created an Ember.js and Ruby on Rails clone of an old
| video game called Heroes of Might and Magic because it
| was fun to show my old buddies what I could do and play
| through some mock battles. I have no interest in paying
| for a server to host this so it's just going to disappear
| from the internet. I have no interest in doing the work
| to port it over to even another free service. It never
| would have existed had Heroku not been an option when I
| had the idea. Obviously I could pay for it, it's just not
| worth paying for. It's similar to piracy, I consumed a
| lot of content back in the day simply because it was
| free. I never would have paid money for those music or to
| watch those movies.
| josephcsible wrote:
| It feels like a bait-and-switch and the "heroin dealer" model
| to give something away for free just long enough that people
| become reliant on it, and then suddenly make it be paid.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| I think not even drug dealers give away their stuff for
| free, but if you know one that does do let me know!
| atdrummond wrote:
| It is mainly a thing in open air markets like Kensington
| in Philly or SF's Tenderloin.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > It feels like a bait-and-switch and the "heroin dealer"
| model to give something away for free just long enough that
| people become reliant on it, and then suddenly make it be
| paid.
|
| Heroku's free tier has been incapable of running a
| 24/7-accessible webserver for many years, nearly a
| decade[0].
|
| At this point, if anyone is reliant on it, it's almost
| impressive that they've managed to get by for so long
| without either paying Heroku or bouncing off to another
| service.
|
| [0] if you give them a verified credit card, you get a few
| additional free hours per month, just barely enough to run
| a single webserver full-time on one dyno. At best, the free
| tier offering is... incredibly limited.
| creatonez wrote:
| If you verify with a credit card, a single dyno can run
| for as many hours as you like -- it can perpetually serve
| HTTP requests for years and years -- but it will be
| automatically turned off every few hours, with some
| latency on the first request to boot it back up.
|
| I would say this kind of free tier is quite powerful. It
| even had free Redis and PostgreSQL. But it had some
| horrendous periods of downtime and bugs that affect the
| paying customers just as badly. So ironically the free
| Heroku experience in 2022 leads you to the conclusion
| that it's the worst service you could pay for, but the
| best service you could mooch off of (aside from fly.io
| and similar) -- which may be counterproductive for
| Heroku's marketing.
| metadat wrote:
| It was given away for free for 10+ years.
|
| What does Heroku / Salesforce owe us?
| bnt wrote:
| Apparently Heroku is a welfare state program and everyone
| is entitled to free shit.
| creatonez wrote:
| Even if you are a paying customer, this change is likely to
| affect you. Heroku no longer offers free postgresql to go
| alongside your already enormously expensive dynos.
|
| From a previous thread on this topic - posted by driverdan:
|
| > 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.
| ysavir wrote:
| My biggest take away from trying to find a Heroku alternative is
| that Heroku is late to the game of charging for a basic app.
| Other service might be free, but seem to have some sort of catch
| --only static, or requires a certain infrastructure, or whatever
| else--and only Heroku had the unopinionated free tier. And while
| I haven't used their competitors, I'm skeptical they can match
| Heroku's interface, CLI, add-on ecosystem, documentation, and all
| the various tutorial and stack overflow questions about their
| platform.
|
| So, I'm sticking with Heroku. Sure, it'll cost some (and
| supposedly they're bringing in cheaper tiers than current, too),
| but it's not a big difference from their competitors, is
| reasonably priced (from a competitive perspective), and allows me
| to continue using a tool I know inside along with all the
| accompanying ecosystem.
|
| I guess after ten years I'll actually have to pay Heroku
| something for their service. That seems... fine to me.
| Complaining about that seems petty.
| charrondev wrote:
| I've found Vercel to work well for my personal projects. It's
| supports dynamic applications and static ones, custom domains,
| CI for deployment and has a useable CLI all available on its
| free tier.
| js4ever wrote:
| It's not comparable, you have to rewrite your backend to make
| it work with vercel
| nathants wrote:
| you don't want a free tier. what you want is reasonable usage
| based pricing and scale to zero.
|
| all the actual tiny projects on free tiers have actual costs
| approaching zero. everything else shouldn't be on a free tier.
|
| if it's not possible to monitor usage (not billing) and
| automatically unplug dns if usage spikes above some threshold,
| it's probably not a good provider. having confidence that some
| project will never cost above x/month is a reasonable ask, and
| not challenging.
|
| hint: use aws. like python and linux, it's not very good, but
| everything else is worse.
| paxys wrote:
| Every conversation on this topic can be summed up as: "Heroku
| charging $7/mo for hosting is evil. Switch to <competing service
| that costs $10-$20/mo> instead."
| tyingq wrote:
| You can get pretty far for free on Cloudflare, and the next
| tier up is $5/mo. Though it does mean either JS or WASM, which
| doesn't work for everyone.
| [deleted]
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Stay on Heroku? Still works.
| greatgib wrote:
| For less than heroku monthly price, you can have your own server
| in a cloud provider and spawn as much simple apps as you want!
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| I have zero sympathy for these guys, nor for anyone else running
| their business on free tier infrastructure. This is the kind of
| customer nobody needs.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| They weren't asking for it.
| [deleted]
| danjac wrote:
| Hetzner (or Digital Ocean) + Dokku is cheap & easy to run for
| small side projects.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Linode + dokku + the letsencrypt plug-in is my goto
| dasil003 wrote:
| This looks like a serious agency, so I'm stuck on the question of
| why the free tier is so important to them versus simply paying
| for Heroku. Surely doing a mass migration to a new PaaS just to
| claim a small per-project savings is a dubious proposition given
| the inevitably of a future rug-pull from wherever you migrate.
|
| On the other hand, if you're an individual with a bunch of small
| projects and you want to host them economically, then standard
| VPS hosting is going to give you a lot more bang for your buck.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I can say that back in the glory days of Nokia Mobiles they
| certainly got lots of money, you can find this out easily by
| checking the company history.
|
| They can certainly play for Heroku.
| erokar wrote:
| They mention their personal projects in the article.
| mscarborough wrote:
| Interested to hear what the paying business customers who
| migrated away from Heroku think about their new home and the
| process to move to Fly/Render/Digital Ocean/whatever?
| lis wrote:
| I've migrated one larger project with several containers /
| databases to AWS Fargate / RDS and a smaller one to Scalingo
| [0]. In both cases, I'm happy with how it turned out and the
| migration went fine.
|
| One of the main drivers behind the decision was that Heroku
| required us to move to the Enterprise tier to run private
| databases.
|
| If the architecture of your application is not too complex, I
| would suggest trying Scalingo (or Fly.io, Render, etc.) first.
| It took me around a day to get the application running on
| Scalingo, Fly.io and Render. This allowed us to be able to
| compare them a bit. In the end, we went with Scalingo, since
| the Review Apps feature to automatically launch environments
| from pull request worked well for our workflow.
|
| You can see the configuration for Scalingo for a smaller elixir
| app on Github [1].
|
| [0] https://www.mindwendel.com
|
| [1] https://github.com/mindwendel/mindwendel
| theonething wrote:
| > Review Apps feature to automatically launch environments
| from pull request worked well for our workflow.
|
| Render has this exact feature. They call it Pull Request
| Reviews. Was it not around when you were evaluating?
| metadat wrote:
| More thorough resource from last week:
|
| _Heroku Free Alternatives_
|
| https://github.com/Engagespot/heroku-free-alternatives
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33300053
|
| (271 points, 134 comments)
| gbourne wrote:
| All the free alternatives will eventually get rid of their free
| tier too - could be 1 year, could be 10 years. As the author
| stated, they had 25 free instances running. They converted over
| to paid, so maybe they became a profitable client. However, all
| the users who have 25+ instances and never pay over the course of
| 10 year isn't sustainable for a business.
| fragmede wrote:
| It's been 12 years since Amazon announced their free tier, and
| it's still going strong.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/10/21/announ...
| mgkimsal wrote:
| maybe heroku and fly and others could start shelling books
| and shoes to help out...
|
| it's been 12 years, but they had a decade of other business
| units helping to fund their service, and can afford loss
| leaders like few other businesses.
| weaksauce wrote:
| > new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2
| Micro Instance for a year
|
| I don't see how that's comparable. it's one instance of a
| micro server(and a few other things) for one year for a new
| AWS user and then it's over. heroku was an unlimited number
| of apps free tier forever with a limit on cpu/database usage
| for each app.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| If you don't need a lot of bandwidth:
| https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
|
| Four CPUs, 300GiB of storage and 24GiB of RAM should last
| for quite some time.
|
| If you do need the compute and bandwidth: pay someone. Pay
| Heroku or set up a Dokku (or similar) system on your own
| server.
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| We just shut down our last Heroku dyno. Kudos to all the people
| who worked there, there were a lot of talented ones but lately
| the service has been a joke.
|
| As a Heroku user, you pay a premium for AWS instances,
| essentially, with the premise being that things "just work" and
| that you get simple deploys.
|
| Well, if by "just", you mean "barely" - sure! We had several
| hours of outages where Heroku's status page was still green. We
| even gave them metrics to show that the issue was with their
| routing layer, and they just told us that it was our apps fault
| and that perhaps we should get New Relic to see why it's so
| slow... After several months of prodding they acknowledged that
| it was their fault. Or, well, they blamed another customer for
| excessive use of resources or something like that.
|
| As for simpler deploys. We had multiple incidents where our
| deploys got into some hybrid preboot state. (If you're not
| familiar with Heroku's terminology, a bit simplified: Preboot
| enabled = start the new instances, wait three minutes and then
| reroute traffic. Preboot disabled = stop the old instances,
| then start the new ones.) In our case, deploying with preboot
| enabled, Heroku stopped our old instances and then waited three
| minutes to start new ones... Again, this wasn't acknowledged by
| support until after several weeks, even those we provided logs
| showing exactly what happened with our instances. Now they have
| admitted that it's a bug, but our issue is still open.
|
| Oh, and the Github integration was of course removed when they
| were hacked, so the DX argument isn't very strong either.
|
| Maybe we were just unlucky, but good riddance...
| paxys wrote:
| Heroku still has a free tier which is comparable to Render,
| Fly.io and all the other alternatives people keep bringing up.
| The mythical "an unlimited number of sites & DBs hosted for
| free forever" option everyone is looking for simply doesn't
| exist.
| nosecreek wrote:
| Just double checked and I'm pretty sure this not true? Or at
| least it won't be as of November 28. Unless I'm reading
| something wrong?
| aantix wrote:
| Use Hatchbox. With Linode. I love it.
|
| https://hatchbox.io/
| paxys wrote:
| If your problem with Heroku is the price why would you use
| something that is even more expensive?
| devin wrote:
| https://neon.tech/ wasn't mentioned in the article, but I'm
| looking forward to trying it out. At the moment it's unclear if
| they'll have something suitable for hobbyists.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| No discussion of Heroku and the free tier should happen without
| the context of the massive cryptomining scheme that was directly
| targeting their free tier:
|
| https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-crypt...
|
| Note, oddly the article doesn't state Heroku by name, but the
| network diagrams all do.
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