
Heroku Beta Pricing - jguimont
https://www.heroku.com/private/beta-pricing
======
topynate
Link doesn't work for me. From another source I found:

Free – Experiment in your own dev or demo app with a web and a worker dyno for
free. Sleeps after 1 hr of inactivity. Active up to 12 hours a day. No custom
domains. 512 MB RAM.

Hobby – Run a small app 24×7 with the Heroku developer experience for
$7/dyno/mo. Custom domains. Run a maximum of one dyno per Procfile entry. 512
MB RAM.

Standard 1X, 2X: Build production apps of any size or complexity. Run multiple
dynos per Procfile entry to scale out. App metrics, faster builds and preboot.
All Hobby features. 512MB or 1GB RAM. $25 or $50/dyno/mo. ​

Performance – Isolated dynos for your large-scale, high-performance apps. All
Standard features. Compose your app with performance and standard dynos. 6GB
RAM. $500/dyno/mo.

H/T
[http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881](http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881)

~~~
stolio
Did the free-tier just drop from 750 to ~350 dyno-hours/month? Does no custom
domains mean no DNS redirects?

[https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/billing](https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/billing)

 _edit: I read TFL, no more free tier with a cron job hitting it hourly to
keep it awake 24 /7\. Can't say I'm surprised._

~~~
erjiang
Under this tentative scheme, if you want to point example.com to
exampleapp.herokuapp.com then you'd need to be on the $7/month tier.

I don't know why you'd want to point your domain to an app that's only up half
the time anyways, so I don't think this is a big deal.

~~~
stolio
Good to know.

Domain redirects are useful for portfolio apps if you'd like to have some
coherency in your urls, and maybe you're not trying to showcase that your app
is on Heroku's free tier at that moment. That's legitimate, it's also a use
case where 12 hours/day is likely sufficient. However users breaking TOS and
keeping those apps awake 24/7 so recruiters don't have to wait ~30s for them
to load is probably a problem Heroku's trying to solve.

------
erjiang
I tried to post this yesterday[0] and fell off the new stories list, but such
is HN.

Basically, they're nerfing their free tier by charging $7/month for a 24/7
running app. People wanting to run a free app may look at App Engine or AWS's
one year free tier, or compare the price among other "cloud" and cloud-ish
services.

[0]
[http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881](http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881)

~~~
bovermyer
Well, that just nuked my blog, and also my company's hubot.

Ah well, guess I'll need to properly support that hubot now.

~~~
Igglyboo
I run my companies hubot on a $5 a month Digital Ocean instance. It's also far
easier than using Heroku because it's just a regular linux server and not a
managed/restricted instance.

~~~
torkalork
I also use the $5-tier Digital Ocean droplets to host some side projects.

I've had some processes die semi-regularly, though, because the OS does a
scheduled maintenance task that maxes out the 512mb RAM.

Adding a swap file seems to have taken care of it, though. I wish they enabled
them by default on their smallest droplets:
[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-
add-...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-swap-on-
ubuntu-14-04)

~~~
X-Istence
Or try running an alternate operating system that doesn't run a task semi-
regularly that uses up all of your RAM.

------
practicalpants
If Heroku actually does make the free tier unusable (12 hours a day
availability), and if custom domains aren't free anymore... then Heroku, time
to part ways, and no more referrals to others.

This is the reason I chose Heroku as my platform in the first place over
competitors, and if my experience is common, it worked out well for them
because I have paid for premium tiers on certain apps along the way, and spoke
glowingly of them to others.

I'm also still a little bitter that I incurred financial loss on one app
because one of their quiet upgrades bonked Ruby 2.1.1 support, causing a big
delay in a critical production push. (But I'm more annoyed that this will be
about $100/month cost for me to keep my lighter traffic personal apps on
Heroku).

~~~
imdsm
Most likely they will argue that you can use it 24 hours a day, just that they
will cut the 750 free hours in half.

Does that mean you'll pay $7 a month or $3.50 a month for a 24/7 dyno?

I agree with you though, they might think they're kicking out X freeloaders,
but how many of those freeloaders have production apps and how many of them
are in decision making positions?

If I have to leave, I'll move /everything/.

~~~
tortilla
I was a freeloader for 5 or 6 low traffic sites. But now I have a production-
grade app at over $700 a month.

~~~
glesica
Are you going to move your very significant app to another platform because of
this? Seems like an absurd thing to do to save yourself maybe a couple hundred
bucks a year...

~~~
tortilla
No, I'm very happy with Heroku. Just wanted to highlight my progression.
Freeloader to paying customer. I wouldn't be a paying Heroku customer without
a generous free tier to experiment with.

------
jagthedrummer
Here's an analysis of how these rumored changes will affect apps of various
sizes.

[http://www.octolabs.com/blogs/octoblog/2015/03/31/analysis-o...](http://www.octolabs.com/blogs/octoblog/2015/03/31/analysis-
of-the-rumored-heroku-pricing-changes/)

tl;dr : Current paying customers will see a discount of up to 30%. Current
freeloaders will have to pay $84/year for functionality equivalent to what
they get now.

Anyone who is technical enough to use Heroku effectively can charge AT LEAST
$84/hour for their time, meaning that they'd need to move to a new solution in
less than an hour to save money. All the hand wringing is very silly.

~~~
practicalpants
> Anyone who is technical enough to use Heroku effectively can charge AT LEAST
> $84/hour for their time

This is very off base in my experience. I know countless beginner devs who
swear by Heroku, because it's designed to be that simple.

You're not a 'freeloader' if you have lots of apps on the free tier but
production grade ones where you pay premium. You're a paying customer in that
case, and that's probably a common pattern with these 'freeloaders' \- lots of
free apps, but key paying ones.

All in all, I'm not going to pay $84/year for each of my 12-14 personal apps
that have light traffic (couple hits per hour maybe). I'm going to pick a new
platform and make it part of my workflow, and for the sake of simplicity, I
will be moving all of my apps to it, paid ones included.

~~~
jagthedrummer
I'd be interested to hear what you move to, what the set up looks like there,
and what you pay for it.

------
jk5_
So, as a fellow hobbyist with 12 free dynos running on Heroku with custom
domains, I clearly don't want to pay $84 a month for apps that aren't meant to
generate revenue.

It is a sad day.

Where are you moving your side projects?

EDIT: I'm asking since I have no idea where I should go next. Heroku was a
blessing.

~~~
baudtack
I'm not sure what you're doing exactly but I'm a member of hcoop and highly
recommend joining. It kind of depends on what your use case is though. I'm not
vary familiar with heroku so not sure what a dyno is.

[http://hcoop.net/](http://hcoop.net/)

~~~
mod
Ex-hcooper here! My late friend "Nion" introduced me.

I had a good experience there, but it's a lot different from Heroku. There's
no paid support or anything.

------
jbrooksuk
I understand why they're doing this - companies have to make money - I get
that.

I'm still annoyed with Heroku though. Cachet
([https://cachethq.io](https://cachethq.io)) supports the "Deploy to Heroku"
button. My experience is that their support is _terrible_. I've contacted them
several times via; Twitter, email, GitHub and had no support from them in
regards to this bloody button.

The reason I support Heroku in the first place is because of the free tier. It
makes deploying your own instance of Cachet much easier. However, we've been
having issues supporting it with Laravel 5's environment configuration anyway,
so this is the last drop in the bucket before I pull _native_ Heroku support.

Our demo ([https://demo.cachethq.io](https://demo.cachethq.io)) and our own
status page ([https://status.cachethq.io](https://status.cachethq.io)) are
both hosted on Heroku with the "Auto Deploy" function, but only because it's
"easy" to do.

------
ekidd
I totally support Heroku's right to charge whatever they want, of course.
They're expensive, but they provide good value for the money.

Historically, I have a bunch of personal free-tier apps which sleep most of
the time, and a couple which are up most of the time. My consulting clients,
on the other hand, have paid Heroku thousands of dollars per month at various
points. I also maintain a buildpack.

But at this point, it's time I get off my backside, set up a docker host on
EC2, and containerize the stuff I care about. I can probably pack everything
onto a pretty small instance, and I've been meaning to deploy some non-HTTP
services. Besides, it's closer to what I'm using in production.

Thank you, Heroku, for some very enjoyable years, for top-notch paid service,
and for the free hosting!

------
colinbartlett
[https://gist.github.com/cbartlett/b5e932217d494bc6601c](https://gist.github.com/cbartlett/b5e932217d494bc6601c)

[http://i.imgur.com/PdZT3JQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/PdZT3JQ.png)

------
mark_l_watson
I think this is great! I was never very comfortable with the free tier where
apps are swapped out (leading to a long loading request time) after an idle
period.

A low cost $7/month plan for a dyno to always be running sounds good.

~~~
hanley
You can get around that by using a service like Uptime Robot to ping your site
every hour and keep the dyno running. That way you have a free 24/7 app that
doesn't go idle. I think Heroku is trying to get rid of that with these
changes.

------
rascul
Digital Ocean has a dokku image. Within a few minutes you could be running
several apps for $5/month.

[https://digitalocean.com](https://digitalocean.com)

[https://github.com/progrium/dokku](https://github.com/progrium/dokku)

------
ben_pr
Can't see it unless I login. Anyone care to post some details here?

~~~
cubehouse
You can't see it when you login either, think this is for select beta testers.

------
jwilsco
Why are people still surprised when free things become more restrictive. If
you like a service, pay for it.

------
arikrak
It seems they're still offering a free tier for an app that doesn't need to
always be running. But if you need it running more than half the time, you
need to pay at least $7/month. Will this affect current customers?

I understand there were probably too many apps running on free tiers, and
probably some that abuses the TOS as well. But with AWS and others having cut
prices so much, shouldn't Heroku also offer some kind of better discount?

------
ezegolub
I'm kinda surprised that we haven't seen a price decrease, since AWS keeps
reducing prices. I can understand they wanting to decrease the 'freeloaders',
but it seems shortsighted, those people are their future paying customers.
Their new pricing makes it more economical to just get a small droplet from
digitalocean, i'm surprised they chose to be above that point.

~~~
nlh
I wouldn't be so quick to assume they're being shortsighted. I have no idea
what the details are, but I've got to assume they have very explicit data
about who and how many people convert from free to paid tiers and that they're
taking this data into account.

Again, assumptions here, but maybe they found that only a very small % of
users start with a completely free 24/7 app and move to paid? Maybe the folks
who convert start with a low-utilization (<= 12 hrs/day), hence the limit.

I dunno. I'm just guessing that there's some logic behind the decisions.

------
ddorian43
I don't see a change? Can you post the change ?

------
thesimon
Can someone make a screenshot or give a description? Link redirects to main
site

------
fiatjaf
If you have only small apps running for free on Heroku, for $5 you'll get them
all hosted at DigitalOcean and Dokku easily as with Heroku:
[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-
use-...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-the-
digitalocean-dokku-application)

------
sleepyhead
As a paying customer I am glad that Heroku is cutting down on the free usage.
They are using AWS so free usage means actual expenses. Sure, it can be seen
as a marketing expense but Heroku is well known now and don't really need it
to gain awareness.

~~~
imdsm
I am happy to pay for my production, but I feel as though part of the benefit
is that I get a cost-free development playground. If they take away that, I'd
rather put the money into something else where I get even more control.

I guess they want to go leaner, which is fair enough, but they will lose
paying customers as well.

~~~
jhkjkhljh
For a cost-free development playground, they have the hobby tier. You can run
your dev apps for 350 hours per month - that's a lot of dev testing time.

------
chipgap98
Does anyone know when this new pricing starts? I have a free app on here that
is only heavily used during certain parts of the year and I am about to hit
that busy time and hope that this new pricing won't take effect too soon.

------
petercooper
This actually works out well for me since I don't host any "free" projects
there, but I suspect DigitalOcean will be deploying a whole ton of VPSes in
the next month with the Dokku image running ;-)

------
mark_l_watson
IBM is trying to build their hosting business. They offer a really generous
free monthly tier on BlueMix. You can run a web app with a small data store
for free.

~~~
aikah
no, it's 375hours/month just like the new free heroku plan.

~~~
mark_l_watson
Actually, BlueMix gives you 375 hours of 1 gigabyte units. If your web app is
configured to use 0.5 gigs of RAM, then you get 2 * 375 hours free per month.
I was running a node web app with a data store using a combined 0.25 gig
units, so running that 24/7 would only use up half of the free monthly tier.

IBM is trying to buy there way into the market.

------
jvanbaarsen
I wonder if they will also change the pricing of the database tiers. Since
paying 25$ for an 1x dyno and paying 50$ for a database just seems to be out
of wack.

~~~
sleepyhead
The database pricing looks pretty much like before. What is problematic about
paying $50 for a database that you don't have to manage, has continous
backups, dataclips, and ability to easily scale and set up replication for?

How much would a db admin charge you per hour to do the same?

~~~
moe
_How much would a db admin charge you per hour to do the same?_

I think that's the wrong question.

A better question would be why you don't just rent a $50 dedicated server and
run everything, including the database, on that.

If you think you need a "db admin" to do that then you should really re-
evaluate your team.

~~~
nasmorn
Finding someone who can setup Postgres wal archiving and replication in only 6
hours per year is surely costing you 600$ in additional salary per year. I
don't think your argument holds any merit at the level of hosting costs we
talk about. Also as someone who does host stuff on a dedicated machine too,
have you looked at what is involved in upgrading to say Postgres 9.3 from 9.1.
If you have single server you will just not do it unless you are also big into
Russian roulette.

~~~
moe
_Finding someone who can setup Postgres wal archiving and replication_

Your $50 database doesn't need that. A simple backup works fine for a great
many people.

 _I don 't think your argument holds any merit at the level of hosting costs
we talk about._

In order to match the performance of a measly $50/mo dedicated server you'll
pay in the ballpark of $1300/mo to Heroku (16GB DB + 16 "dynos"). In between
these two figures there's a lot of merit to be had.

 _have you looked at what is involved in upgrading to say Postgres 9.3 from
9.1_

Yes, you stop the db, run pg_upgrade, and start the db.

But as you correctly state, most people in this bracket have no reason to
upgrade their database software ever.

------
enginous
I'm also interested in what has changed. The dyno-hour prices of $0.05, $0.10,
$0.80 for 1X, 2X and PX, respectively, seem the same as before.

------
JorgeGT
Goodbye then, and thanks for all the fish! =)

------
tmwh91
Guess i'll be moving my stuff off heroku then (no free custom domains!)

