It would be a poor business decision to exclude boot camp students from the upcoming student plan(s). That obviously doesn’t cover all types of learning/getting started though. I too mourn the loss of free, but also think it is the right decision for the times.
Why even bother with contacting an account executive? It's $7 per dyno per month for the cheapest hobby tier. That's peanuts compared to any fees for a paid bootcamp. Heck, with inflation, that barely buys a bag of peanuts.
Plus the students would have an incentive to learn about shutting down unused resources that would pay dividends if they ever deploy to AWS. It'd be like a home economic lesson for hosted services.
$7/mo and access to a payment method might be a stopper for someone in the third world. But it's a private company, not a charity. Somebody else can solve that problem for the truly deserving.
I think it's incredible they've provided free services for over a decade and would love to know what percent of their free compute resource have simply be hijacked by crypto miners, torrent downloaders, and VPNs. It's got to be enormous and the simple requirement of a payment card would add enough KYC to eliminate all of them.
If you are on an older ronin or fugu you can't. But you can from all other plans and newer ronin/fugu databases. The limitation on older ronin/fugu databases is related to: https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/37
I have an app that has a number of test users with a set of data for each of them that shows off the app. Since the users interact in specific ways, I need to have several users otherwise the testing isn't useful.
My dev machine has a much smaller set of data, but on Heroku, I run stage servers with reasonable amounts of real life data that I need for final testing
