One way Heroku could have countered the “Unfair markup prices” effect would be to make it possible to bypass their modules. When I was in Heroku:
- Impossible to add HTTPS (with your own domain) unless you pay for the LetsEncrypt plugin,
- Impossible to add monitoring unless you paid the monitoring plugin,
- etc. for all the load balancer, the DB…
It means, as a guy founding a startup (now with 1m$ ARR), the initial dyno was $35-70/month, but I was afraid the upselling for all the 12 factors would represent 10x, 50x the pricing of the basic dyno. And that price expectation was unaffordable.
Think about this alternative:
- Sure you can use your own domain if you program the LetsEncrypt thingy in your dyno… OR use your $5 addon.
- Sure you can build monitoring in your dyno… OR use our $10 New Relic addon.
You may think I’m stupid, because in the end I’ll always use the paid solution, but at least I can run with extremely low expenditure at the beginning.
Launching a startup is extremely hard. You need to squeeze prices and make do with barebone services. I used DigitalOcean precisely for this reason, with Ansible deployment. I spent $5 a month for 2 years. I tried Heroku several times but it had limits everywhere (specifically background processes, while DO doesn’t have this limitation). Then money came and I went to AWS because it was cheaper and less limited than Heroku. Now the money is flooding.
- Impossible to add HTTPS (with your own domain) unless you pay for the LetsEncrypt plugin,
- Impossible to add monitoring unless you paid the monitoring plugin,
- etc. for all the load balancer, the DB…
It means, as a guy founding a startup (now with 1m$ ARR), the initial dyno was $35-70/month, but I was afraid the upselling for all the 12 factors would represent 10x, 50x the pricing of the basic dyno. And that price expectation was unaffordable.
Think about this alternative:
- Sure you can use your own domain if you program the LetsEncrypt thingy in your dyno… OR use your $5 addon.
- Sure you can build monitoring in your dyno… OR use our $10 New Relic addon.
You may think I’m stupid, because in the end I’ll always use the paid solution, but at least I can run with extremely low expenditure at the beginning.
Launching a startup is extremely hard. You need to squeeze prices and make do with barebone services. I used DigitalOcean precisely for this reason, with Ansible deployment. I spent $5 a month for 2 years. I tried Heroku several times but it had limits everywhere (specifically background processes, while DO doesn’t have this limitation). Then money came and I went to AWS because it was cheaper and less limited than Heroku. Now the money is flooding.