>We are always going to offer free accounts pretty equivalent to what we offer now, with enough resources to do something interesting. We will always offer that, but we will, at some point soon, be opening up a full on-demand pricing model.
For Python, Google App Engine is really the first thing that comes to mind. I would be surprised if any business was going to try to take on Google in that arena with that language. Google did say in the Web 2.0 conf that they would be looking at other languages besides Python, but since they are heavily invested in it already I wouldn't expect anything soon from them
On the Java front, I really haven't heard of a company doing this. Java programming seems to fall either in the 'Do it all internal' camp or 'Let another company do it all for you'. That may change with the more modern approaches like Groovy and Scala taking some center stage time.
There are other companies that are offering Platform as a Service, though not really in Heroku's layer. Off the top of my head I know of Goodbarry and NetSuite (others, Im sure) are providing component platforms to developers to build applications off of. They typically tend to operate at the same abstraction level that Microsoft did with VB, as in 'We'll build the blocks an you plug them together'.
>We are always going to offer free accounts pretty equivalent to what we offer now, with enough resources to do something interesting. We will always offer that, but we will, at some point soon, be opening up a full on-demand pricing model.