[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
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