Heroku to discontinue free product plans and delete inactive accounts

128 points by stunt 2 years ago | 28 comments
  • SquareWheel 2 years ago
    This was discussed largely in this thread.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594533

    • mkl 2 years ago
      Confusingly, "largely" means "mostly". You probably want something like "extensively".
      • iLoveOncall 2 years ago
        Or he wanted "largely", because all there was to be said about the topic has already been said in that other thread.
        • mkl 2 years ago
          Yes, could be. In that case "largely discussed in this thread" would have that meaning more than "discussed largely in this thread". To me those parse like "(largely discussed) (in this thread)" and "discussed (largely in this thread)".
          • user5678 2 years ago
          • IAmGraydon 2 years ago
            I understood exactly what he was saying.
            • mr90210 2 years ago
              • dmerks 2 years ago
                Thanks
            • tmpz22 2 years ago
              I learned web development through "Ruby on Rails Tutorial" by Michael Hartl. The book is a project-based tutorial where you create a Twitter clone complete with a basic authentication system.

              The book had you host your app on the free version of Heroku. I imagine this book has taught a lot of people, and influenced a lot of people to use Heroku.

              Not anymore I guess.

              • walterbell 2 years ago
                That tutorial belongs in the Tech and Zero-DRM Publishing Halls of Fame for

                  - free to read digital content
  - paid paper books
  - paid video upsell
  - multiple six figures of revenue
  - frequent updates
                Shockingly, few have tried to repeat this feat, despite Hartl providing a low-fee SaaS for this purpose.
                • JohnBooty 2 years ago
                  I should note that this book is still excellent.

                  We've been using it to teach new Rails developers at our workplace, where we have a "hire the best engineer available" policy even if they have no Rails experience. You can just skip the Heroku bits.

                  Of course, knowing Hartl, he'll also soon update the book accordingly.

                  And, it's a shame that Heroku is no longer an option for brand new developers who won't know that painless deploy-to-web. I know there are alternatives but I'm not familiar with them.

                  • dicriseg 2 years ago
                    Render seems to be carrying the torch at this point. I haven’t used much of it, but it seems like a very capable replacement.
                    • iancarroll 2 years ago
                      That seems like all it is, though? I have moved some stuff off of Heroku to Fly, and the new features/capabilities you get are pretty cool. It's hard to be excited about moving anything to Render, which is just the same thing as Heroku.
                      • ilrwbwrkhv 2 years ago
                        Render was quite expensive when I used it though.
                    • bluedino 2 years ago
                      It's how learned Rails.

                      Interviewed, was given a take home project to complete, and went straight to borders and bought the book. Went through the book in a couple days then completed the project and ended up getting the job.

                      • eschulz 2 years ago
                        I also went through that book many years ago. It was great to start with no experience and make an app that could be working online at no cost!
                        • BalinKing 2 years ago
                          Possibly related, I don’t think the book itself is free anymore (at least, if I’m reading railstutorial.com correctly).
                        • BSOhealth 2 years ago
                          I essentially earned a college degree’s worth of languages/frameworks (Ruby, Node ecosystems) on free Heroku instances, and I owe my career to it. Other comments speak to this point as well. There’s probably a generation of us who completed some blog/O’Reilly “curriculum” involving Heroku > Digital Ocean > AWS > etc.

                          I never paid Heroku a dime and, after everything has shaken out, I don’t know why I would start now.

                          • charles_kaw 2 years ago
                            > I never paid Heroku a dime and, after everything has shaken out, I don’t know why I would start now.

                            Well, that's the problem, isn't it?

                            They provided a valuable service to lots of people on their own dime, and saw no reward for it. Now they've been bought by a large player who, presumably, wants their infra and expertise.

                            • daenz 2 years ago
                              >and saw no reward for it

                              That doesn't necessarily follow. Good will towards developers goes a long way. It helps build reputations and encourages referrals.

                        • tehwebguy 2 years ago
                          There are plenty of cool alternatives but one I’ve used and don’t see mentioned here is Dokku, which was trivial for me to set up on, in my case, a cheap droplet on DigitalOcean.

                          https://dokku.com/

                          • RileyJames 2 years ago
                            Same, been running 4 rails apps on a $40 per month droplet.

                            Works really well for small projects. One of which has gained traction and I’m about to migrate off. Not that I have any issues that I need to migrate away for, but it seems sensible to have it on its own infra / isolated environment if we’re going to be working on it more seriously.

                          • xena 2 years ago
                            This made me have feelings, I wrote them up on my blog: https://xeiaso.net/blog/rip-heroku

                            I wish that things were better such that we could have nice things.

                            • woojoo666 2 years ago
                              A bit unrelated but I love the use of stable diffusion here, and thanks for providing the prompts as well for reference!
                            • yumswiss 2 years ago
                              Will there be a new pricing tier or lowest being $7?
                              • japhyr 2 years ago
                                I haven't seen anything to indicate there will be anything cheaper than $7. But if you need a data store, and who doesn't with a service that uses Heroku, I think you'll have to pay for that as well. For example, the cheapest Postgres instance is $9/month.
                                • toyg 2 years ago
                                  They are switching to an enterprise-oriented model, which means they'll nickel-and-dime you for everything. If you can't afford a few hundreds on basic infra, you really should look elsewhere.