The article calls out having to learn how to create a Docker image for Fly.io as though it's a bad thing. I consider it a huge bonus if you like taking advantage of free tiers for services.<p>The whole point is that if you're going to take advantage of a free tier you should do so in a way that switching is trivial. Docker goes a long way to achieving that.<p>I personally just pay $10/month to Linode and self host these days using Nomad. Less restrictions and more freedom for the cost of a coffee and a bagel.<p><a href="https://www.larrymyers.com/posts/nomad-and-traefik/" rel="nofollow">https://www.larrymyers.com/posts/nomad-and-traefik/</a>
My biggest take away from trying to find a Heroku alternative is that Heroku is late to the game of charging for a basic app. Other service might be free, but seem to have some sort of catch--only static, or requires a certain infrastructure, or whatever else--and only Heroku had the unopinionated free tier. And while I haven't used their competitors, I'm skeptical they can match Heroku's interface, CLI, add-on ecosystem, documentation, and all the various tutorial and stack overflow questions about their platform.<p>So, I'm sticking with Heroku. Sure, it'll cost some (and supposedly they're bringing in cheaper tiers than current, too), but it's not a big difference from their competitors, is reasonably priced (from a competitive perspective), and allows me to continue using a tool I know inside along with all the accompanying ecosystem.<p>I guess after ten years I'll actually have to pay Heroku something for their service. That seems... fine to me. Complaining about that seems petty.
This looks like a serious agency, so I'm stuck on the question of why the free tier is so important to them versus simply paying for Heroku. Surely doing a mass migration to a new PaaS just to claim a small per-project savings is a dubious proposition given the inevitably of a future rug-pull from wherever you migrate.<p>On the other hand, if you're an individual with a bunch of small projects and you want to host them economically, then standard VPS hosting is going to give you a lot more bang for your buck.
All the free alternatives will eventually get rid of their free tier too - could be 1 year, could be 10 years. As the author stated, they had 25 free instances running. They converted over to paid, so maybe they became a profitable client. However, all the users who have 25+ instances and never pay over the course of 10 year isn't sustainable for a business.
No discussion of Heroku and the free tier should happen without the context of the massive cryptomining scheme that was directly targeting their free tier:<p><a href="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-cryptomining-campaign-abuses-free-tier-cloud-dev-resources/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-crypt...</a><p>Note, oddly the article doesn't state Heroku by name, but the network diagrams all do.
I’m personally very happy with switching to a Hetzner dedicated server, I’m saving a ton of money, and the server can handle my busiest months of load with plenty of room to spare.<p>I use docker containers for a rails app and send backups of my db to S3 with restic. Docker compose files and DR scripts are in my repo. If Hetzner goes down I’ll run them on a VPS from any of the million providers.<p>Deploys push a docker container to dockerhub, then ssh into Hetzner and pulls them.<p>If you want the ease of git push deploys similar to Heroku then use Dokku.<p>Everyone should remember how long it took Heroku to tell you your environment variables were stolen in a breach and how they were not transparent at all through the whole process.
Every conversation on this topic can be summed up as: "Heroku charging $7/mo for hosting is evil. Switch to <competing service that costs $10-$20/mo> instead."
$7 is less than a single beer in the pub. If you can afford to devote thousands of hours to learn programming and then hundreds to thousands of hours to build an app then you can afford the hosting cost...
you don’t want a free tier. what you want is reasonable usage based pricing and scale to zero.<p>all the actual tiny projects on free tiers have actual costs approaching zero. everything else shouldn’t be on a free tier.<p>if it’s not possible to monitor usage (not billing) and automatically unplug dns if usage spikes above some threshold, it’s probably not a good provider. having confidence that some project will never cost above x/month is a reasonable ask, and not challenging.<p>hint: use aws. like python and linux, it's not very good, but everything else is worse.
Interested to hear what the paying business customers who migrated away from Heroku think about their new home and the process to move to Fly/Render/Digital Ocean/whatever?
GCP Cloud Run and Cloud Native Buildpacks will get you back the Heroku workflow and includes a bunch of other advantages on top of it. It also includes a free tier as well.
More thorough resource from last week:<p><i>Heroku Free Alternatives</i><p><a href="https://github.com/Engagespot/heroku-free-alternatives" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Engagespot/heroku-free-alternatives</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33300053" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33300053</a><p>(271 points, 134 comments)
<a href="https://neon.tech/" rel="nofollow">https://neon.tech/</a> wasn't mentioned in the article, but I'm looking forward to trying it out. At the moment it's unclear if they'll have something suitable for hobbyists.
I've been using Google Cloud Run for one of my hobby projects and it worked like a charm. You can have a Google Cloud Build job that takes your GitHub repo from which it builds a Docker image. You make sure that the CMD in the container starts your server. When a request comes in the container is started within ms. You only pay for the storage for the image & the cost from actually executing the container. If you get no requests, it's practically free which is important for my side projects, since there is hardly any traffic.<p>I tried to get a similar solution with AWS Lambda and API Gateway and it was a huge PITA in comparison.
Anyone know any developers willing to work for free? I have a business idea, and it'll probably make me decent money, but I'd rather not have to pay for the resources needed to fulfill my vision.
There are cheap virtual machines that are good enough for most.<p>In my book Deployment from Scratch I make a case that just a little bit of Bash gets you pretty far.<p>There is also nothing wrong with Dokku (we used it at one startup) or Capistrano (I didn't really use it but I think it's fine!) and other simple tools for simple deployments.
Time to remind folk that if you don't need containers (well, it works with containers too, but it's not the point), you can set up <a href="https://github.com/piku" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/piku</a> on a VPS as well.
I appreciate the great article. Heroku has been my go-to platform for personal projects. I'll research these Heroku alternatives. You've given me a terrific place to start and saved me countless hours. Best wishes for your relocation!
Disclosure: former heroku employee.<p>I believe there is a new tier coming that that is a small price for dyno hours spread across all your apps. So if your apps sleep it could still be cheap.<p>Personally I just doubled down on heroku!<p>I cleaned up a lot of free apps. ‘git pull’ to grab the source is just as magical as git push.<p>I scaled the important ones up.<p>I simply don’t have time to learn another platform and its trade offs, or to repackage my apps. I definitely don’t have time for anything other than Postgres which isn’t standard or cheap on other platforms either.<p>Nothing else is free anyway and who knows how long other platforms will be around. The whole Docker fad has practically come and gone meanwhile build packs keep doing their thing.<p>In doing so I hit a problem redeploying and the docs and support response are as good as ever.<p>Thanks for everything up till now Heroku, I’m still a customer for life!
I have zero sympathy for these guys, nor for anyone else running their business on free tier infrastructure. This is the kind of customer nobody needs.