

The Heroku Pricing Gap + Add-on Fever - andrew_k
http://blog.bryanlanders.com/post/26155936402/heroku-pricing-gap-addon-fever

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benjaminwootton
Remember Heroku have to support millions of users on the free tier on a
permanent basis, all of which costs very real cash money compared to your
average freemium web business.

AWS only have a temporary free usage tier so collect money right up front even
on the smallest projects.

For that reason, these relatively large step functions in pricing at the low
end are reasonable from where I'm sitting.

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xiaoma
It sounds like you're agreeing with the OP.

Heroku is a great deal for people just starting out, somewhat at the expense
of those who have already grown larger. His strategy seems sound-- use Heroku
at the beginning, then if and when it gets unjustifiably expensive, switch to
AWS.

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carsongross
The OP undervalues that bit in the TLDR: "stress-free deployment". For us,
hiring or contracting a DevOps guy with 1/10th the chops of the heroku crew
would cost 10x what we are paying them, and I don't think we'd have a better
quality of life.

Heroku is only expensive if your time has no value.

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bryanlanders
Yes, maintenance (upgrades, security patches, scaling up instances...) if
you're going DIY on AWS is also significant. The time needed for setup +
maintenance varies greatly depending on the developer(s) as well as the exact
project needs, but at a minimum, Heroku needs to be at least as expensive as
AWS minimum costs + bare minimum setup costs before switching to AWS could be
considered cost-effective.

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geon
What kind of traffic could you handle on a 100% free account? Would it be
feasible for a low-traffic website, say a few k requests per month?

If I want to upload files, is it necessary to have an Amazon account? As I
understand it, you can't use Heroku for dynamic file storage.

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bryanlanders
No idea. Someone who has experienced that on Heroku should weigh in...

We're hosting static media on S3, but this project has no UGC and very limited
amount of media assets, so you'd have to consider the AWS costs depending on
your own needs.

When I first deployed to Heroku, I was serving media right from the web dyno,
and it was working, but since the app is serving up the files (not Nginx
serving them directly instead, or similar), I'd imagine that's not a great
solution in terms of scalability.

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bryanlanders
@glenngillen (a Heroku dev) mentioned that it's the add-on providers who set
the pricing for add-ons.

<https://twitter.com/glenngillen/status/218830351307522048>

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sasoon
90$ for 1GB memcached? I am paying 65$ for the whole server (i7 quad, 32GB
ram, 3TB disk, 10TB bandwidth) and can setup 30GB memcached if needed.

