Autoscaling Heroku workers is definitely a problem that people would like solved, but I see a few issues with trying to offer the solution as a SaaS. One, you're targeting developers. There are several github repos that do this kind of thing for free, and developers would know how to find and implement those. Two, those github repo's are going to do a better job of scaling because they can turn dynos/workers on and off instantly (e.g. as soon as a delayed job is done); much more cost effective than waiting up to 5 minutes to turn dynos/workers on/off. Three, you're targeting people that are trying to save money and _don't_ want to spend money.<p>As an aside, perhaps I (a cheap developer) am not in your target demographic, and you're really targeting folks with lots of Heroku apps and lots of money to spend. In which case you should be charging bundles more than $20/month.
I think this is a great idea however it would seem that this is more of a feature than a business. What happens when Heroku implements this feature themselves?<p>P.S. Love the website design, it really pops!
Seems like they did not scale heroscale.com itself. All I get is:<p><pre><code> App crashed
This application is temporarily offline.
If you're the administrator of this app,
please check your heroku logs for the backtrace.</code></pre>
David Dollar that works at Heroku already wrote a (free) gem that auto scales your heroku apps.<p><a href="https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-autoscale" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-autoscale</a>
This is a great idea. I looked at the auto scaling repositories on GitHub: 1) There wasn't a good solution for Rails 3 yet. 2) The GitHub repos were typically forks of existing repos (like for CollectiveIdea's Delayed Jobs) and therefore would not always be up to date. I wouldn't be too worried about Heroku implementing this (though I hope they do) because there isn't a direct incentive for them to save you money by auto scaling. I'm definitely going to try this out.
This looks pretty cool. As a startup, any savings is worth it. Problem is, my app is too matured to try a few things that aren't proven / stable yet. I will wait to see if Heroku official includes this as an add-on. If so, I'm totally down.<p>I could implement it myself, but if it's coming and implemented by a team who's dedicated a lot more time than I can, then it's worth it.