

Free (as in beer) Dynos - jvanbaarsen
https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2015/5/7/heroku-free-dynos

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task_queue
So they're getting rid of their free option for another free option that gives
you only 18hrs of non-sleep time a day.

How is this not a downgrade?

~~~
mapleoin
It _is_ a downgrade. The whole post sounded like a downgrade since they felt
the need to emphasize their commitment to experimentation.

I am one of the people affected by this since I was running a one-page website
dyno and had pingdom keeping it out of sleep mode. This is what they are
referring to as well in the last paragraph. I didn't know it was that many
people doing this, though the solution for me would be a simple one: just
allow me to serve static files.

~~~
csdrane
People wouldn't have been pinging their dynos to remain awake if it didn't
take so long for them to spin back up. Know of any alternative places for
projects that don't use a lot of resources?

~~~
ukbootstrapper
Redhat's OpenShift runs on the same AWS regions as Heroku and offer a free
tier.([https://www.openshift.com/products/pricing](https://www.openshift.com/products/pricing)).

IBM are also putting a lot of resources in to Bluemix which offers a 512MB
dyno equivalent in their free tier, it doesn't run on AWS though.
([https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/](https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/))

------
Shank
As one of a small niche group who hosts Hubot on Heroku, this is horrible
news. Chatroom bots are useless if they aren't in a room 24/7; that's the only
reason why we have a keepalive. It's not as if the chat bot is doing a lot of
computation, but this really does make it sound like I'll have to toss Heroku
despite the convenience factor with it.

~~~
briandear
Or pay $7 per month?

~~~
Shank
It's for an open source project, not an internal work instance or anything. As
a student at uni with no full time job, adding more monthly charges is hard to
deal with.

~~~
thinkbohemian
At Georgia Tech we got a very small server space which was used in a few CS
classes, it would have been large enough to run hubot. Your university might
have a similar setup.

~~~
derefr
Heroku was basically becoming the go-to place to run thousands of little
bots—and more importantly, to _advise_ people to run their little bots—without
thinking about marginal costs. It was becoming everyone's little pocket of
persistent personal cloud agents. The "launch on Heroku" button on Github
pages was a thing you could just press on a whim as a realistic solution to
your problem.

Now none of that's true.

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jk5_
The good news is, they decided to keep the custom domain on the free tier.
Last news we had, it was only available with the hobby.

Also, 18 hours daily sounds good compared to the initial 12 hours.

Not as disappointed as expected about these changes :)

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websitescenes
Heroku has great services/integrations and deployment is dead simple but when
you commit to them you introduce a level of uncertainty into your stack.
Services being deprecated, pricing changes and addons breaking are all very
real issues. I initially enjoyed the simplicity of the platform but find
myself feeling a little jerked around lately.

~~~
Artemis2
A pricing change was long overdue. AWS (which Heroku relies on to host
everything) has been getting a lot cheaper in the last few years, but Heroku
never changed its pricing and pocketed the difference.

~~~
danneu
Unfortunately it's strictly a price increase for everyone who bought a second
dyno to get out of the freeloader tier. $35/mo (one free + one standard dyno @
$35/ea) to $50/mo (two standard dynos @ $25/ea).

It's only a price decrease for people with 4+ dynos.

~~~
adamesque
Not really — if you were paying $35/month JUST to have always-on dynos, you
should be able to downgrade to the $7/month hobby tier.

If you really needed that 2nd dyno for performance reasons, then yeah, it's a
price hike.

~~~
rapcal
For production apps, 2 dynos is the least you need not only because of sleep,
but also because of redundancy. So there's no way of downgrading to the Hobby
tier for lots of us.

For 2 dynos the price increase is __44,9% __!

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fiatjaf
Stupid people who were abusing Heroku by pinging the apps caused this, now
they might as well suffer. All my hobby apps go to sleep regularly and it is
not bad.

I am grateful to Heroku for providing me all this free computing and I hope
they get rid of the freeloaders.

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mysterymachine
I'm pretty sure pinging services and such were out of their ToS anyway.
They're better facilitating non-sketchy free users by giving them the
Scheduler and a worker, and have given people who absolutely need 24/7 service
a great service for dirt cheap.

I bet most people who need the 24/7 service probably have the money to spare,
and I bet most people are overestimating the uptime they need anyway.

On the flip side, for a small flat fee, I can now have 10 processes running on
a 24/hr server, effortlessly. I'll pay the 7 bucks for an easy deploy. Most of
my projects are going to be hosted on Github Pages or Heroku's free tier
anyway.

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jackcarter
Seems like they're walking back from the previous announcement, which said
they'd give 12 hours of non-sleep time per day:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9295874](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9295874)

There's a huge difference between 24 hours/day and 18 hours/day, but I don't
think there's such a big difference going from 18->12, so I don't think many
people will care about this improvement.

~~~
pvh
We looked at the numbers and it's actually a very, very small percentage of
applications that run between 18 and 24 hrs per day.

Eighteen hours a day is enough to keep your app running from 9AM to 3AM every
day, and unless your application has a global reach, it should naturally
equilibrate into a comfortable place.

We are asking that if you want 24x7 wake-time that you pay for a hobby dyno,
but if you can let your application sleep when you do, you won't see any
difference at all.

------
frewsxcv
Relevant links:

[https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2015/5/7/new-dyno-types-
pub...](https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2015/5/7/new-dyno-types-public-beta)

[https://www.heroku.com/beta-pricing](https://www.heroku.com/beta-pricing)

~~~
gt565k
Hmm looks like the 1st and 2nd tier dynos are actually cheaper now at $25 and
$50. Before they were $34.99 and something else.

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zebracanevra
Previously, worker dynos never slept. On the new free dynos, you now get a
free worker dyno, but the tradeoff is that the app must sleep for 6 hours/day.

Does that sleeping time include the worker dynos? If it does, when do they
sleep? Workers can't "timeout" like web dynos can.

~~~
petitmiam
The updated help pages only mention the scenario of a worker dyno running
along a web dyno.

[https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-types#dyno-
sleepi...](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-types#dyno-sleeping)

It's unclear what happens to apps which just have a single worker dyno. Are we
meant to use the scheduler to kill workers for 6 hours a day?

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stfnkolb
I understand the thoughts about changing the current pricing. However, it
would be really good if Heroku would support the community with a 24/7 dyno
for open source projects. It hurts if you need to put in additional monetary
effort into projects you provide for free.

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peregrine
So ahh when are they going to lower prices on the "professional" dyno pricing?
AWS has only gotten cheaper and heroku has only gotten more expensive.

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matt2000
I've probably posted a similar comment a few times before, but why don't the
dynos ever improve? I have no problems with the pricing, but dyno performance
and memory has been the same for, what, 5 years? Longer? The whole time I'm
getting emails from AWS telling me about cheaper, better instances. Doesn't
make sense.

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egomaksab
You can move your apps to Openshift
[https://www.openshift.com](https://www.openshift.com) .

They provide 3x512MB gears for free and you can use your custom domain.

------
dang
Also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9506244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9506244).

If the other URL is better, we can change this one.

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hayksaakian
So what's the down side they failed to mention?

Whats the difference between a hobby (7$) dyno than a real dyno?

~~~
pvh
Hobby dynos are real dynos. :) Professional dynos, like the new `standard-1x`
will have scale-out, Heroku Metrics, preboot, and mix with other dyno types:
all features we have found are most useful for apps at scale.

We hope that between the new `free` and `hobby` dynos you should have good
choices that support almost any personal or small scale professional app you
might want to build.

~~~
freditup
So hobby dynos should be able to run the same type of application as a 1x
dyno, just with fewer other features more or less?

I have a small scale web application (around 5K pageviews per day) that runs
very well on the one free web dyno currently offered. (We do have costs for
the DB and SSL). I assume in the next few months I'll have to move it to
either a hobby or 1x dyno. Obviously I'd rather move it to the hobby one
because I don't need an additional $220 or so cost per year. It would be great
to have a few more details on the site about the specs behind the free and
hobby dynos!

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CoachRufus87
What exactly is a Process Type?

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JoshGlazebrook
In your Procfile you can have any type of process you want. The "web" process
type is just special because it expects you to open an listening tcp socket on
the port it provides in their environmental variable to your app. Aside from
that you could say have a worker process, emailer process, etc and scale them
independently.

