Even if you are a paying customer, this change is likely to affect you. Heroku no longer offers free postgresql to go alongside your already enormously expensive dynos.
From a previous thread on this topic - posted by driverdan:
> 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.
Many of these projects have no revenue and only exist because a free plan existed. Paying is a non starter so asking where that next free alternative is is a logical intermediary step before shutting it down and moving on to something else.
Why is paying a non starter? There’s a lot of hobbies in the world that require money. I can’t just barge into a climbing gym and say “I’m sorry this hobby will give me no revenue so I refuse to pay”
No one barged into Heroku. The company offered a free service because they considered it a worthwhile marketing strategy. It has to be free because no one, including the authors, are interested in paying for the projects that are looking for another free option.
I created an Ember.js and Ruby on Rails clone of an old video game called Heroes of Might and Magic because it was fun to show my old buddies what I could do and play through some mock battles. I have no interest in paying for a server to host this so it’s just going to disappear from the internet. I have no interest in doing the work to port it over to even another free service. It never would have existed had Heroku not been an option when I had the idea. Obviously I could pay for it, it’s just not worth paying for. It’s similar to piracy, I consumed a lot of content back in the day simply because it was free. I never would have paid money for those music or to watch those movies.
It feels like a bait-and-switch and the "heroin dealer" model to give something away for free just long enough that people become reliant on it, and then suddenly make it be paid.
> It feels like a bait-and-switch and the "heroin dealer" model to give something away for free just long enough that people become reliant on it, and then suddenly make it be paid.
Heroku's free tier has been incapable of running a 24/7-accessible webserver for many years, nearly a decade[0].
At this point, if anyone is reliant on it, it's almost impressive that they've managed to get by for so long without either paying Heroku or bouncing off to another service.
[0] if you give them a verified credit card, you get a few additional free hours per month, just barely enough to run a single webserver full-time on one dyno. At best, the free tier offering is... incredibly limited.
If you verify with a credit card, a single dyno can run for as many hours as you like -- it can perpetually serve HTTP requests for years and years -- but it will be automatically turned off every few hours, with some latency on the first request to boot it back up.
I would say this kind of free tier is quite powerful. It even had free Redis and PostgreSQL. But it had some horrendous periods of downtime and bugs that affect the paying customers just as badly. So ironically the free Heroku experience in 2022 leads you to the conclusion that it's the worst service you could pay for, but the best service you could mooch off of (aside from fly.io and similar) -- which may be counterproductive for Heroku's marketing.
