We're a large Heroku user currently spending $10-20k/month. This change may lead us to switching to another platform.
We host a lot of individual apps, many that only need free tier DBs and Redis. This change will roughly double the cost of a basic app on pro dynos + DB + redis, from $25/m to $49/m, with no additional benefit.
Heroku is already very expensive. $25/m for 512MB RAM is laughable. At $49/m we could get a decent bare metal server for each of our apps.
If this change included a reduction in pricing to better match alternatives it would be fine. If they only eliminated the free tier for dynos but kept free tiers of add-ons that would be fine. But as is this change will significantly increase the cost for anyone using some free resources.
(Disclaimer: I was at Heroku from Jan 2019 - July 2022, supporting Heroku Data products for most of that time. I have no special insight into this latest news beyond what's being reported publicly.)
> We host a lot of individual apps, many that only need free tier DBs and Redis.
I saw a lot of this, and while it's certainly not abuse it was - to my mind - a failure to turn Heroku's multi-tenant DB services into a real product.
Obviously it's not free to provide free services, but because they are "free" they don't get the same treatment and respect. Over time, these free or "hobby" services end up underpinning real production workloads such as SaaS providers using them for low-usage tenants of their own services, or for critical infrastructure stuff like review apps.
Tons of work goes into making those hobby redis and postgres plans work smoothly, abstracting away the complexity involved. If only someone were to put a customer-facing UI and API in front of that, and charge for it - so that you could pay one fixed price for a service that let you host as many DB tenants as you can fit on it, isolated from any other customers? It wouldn't be free, but it would be a killer feature.
It's a pity I don't see anything like that on the roadmap! Oh well, maybe someone else will do it first.
I agree. I support paying for everything because everything has a cost. But I also think the amount I pay should reflect the cost it takes to run the service and the value I get out of it. We do not get $15/m in value out of the $15/m tier of redis for most of our apps. A multi-tenant solution that costs us something like $1/m per app would be much more reasonable.
Wow, I didn't think about paying customers who supplement their pricey apps with free ones for lower-volume or less-critical functions. This change makes Heroku objectively worse even for shops that are already paying top dollar.
+1, same for us. We spent tens of thousands of dollars a month on Heroku, and still get nickel and dimed for free repos.
Including my own personal side projects. I like being in one ecosystem, and rather than just move free repos somewhere else, we're going to just move everything.
Since they specifically called out abuse of free services, I wonder if they would be open to continuing free dynos for paying customers. It'd be worth reaching out at least.
We pay for all of our dynos so that doesn't concern me. I'm much more concerned with Redis going from $0 to $15 since 95% of our apps don't need the paid tier of redis.
If you'd like something that gives you way more control and flexibility, yet is similarly easy to use, try https://stacktape.com
Also, the Stacktape pricing works way better for companies spending $10-20k/month on infrastructure. With Stacktape, you pay a single monthly fee for the "deployment simplicity" (+AWS fees, which are in general way below PaaS providers). You're not paying the "deployment simplicity fee" for every running instance.
If you're looking for a platform where you can run small experiments on free tier backends, we'd love to have you on our platform. We're looking to provide Serverless backends including SQLite-based storage for free: https://wundergraph.com/cloud-early-access
I expect the parent doesn't mean one bare metal server per dyno, but one bare metal server per application (which currently runs across multiple dynos).
We host a lot of individual apps, many that only need free tier DBs and Redis. This change will roughly double the cost of a basic app on pro dynos + DB + redis, from $25/m to $49/m, with no additional benefit.
Heroku is already very expensive. $25/m for 512MB RAM is laughable. At $49/m we could get a decent bare metal server for each of our apps.
If this change included a reduction in pricing to better match alternatives it would be fine. If they only eliminated the free tier for dynos but kept free tiers of add-ons that would be fine. But as is this change will significantly increase the cost for anyone using some free resources.