Link doesn't work for me. From another source I found:<p>Free – Experiment in your own dev or demo app with a web and a worker dyno for free. Sleeps after 1 hr of inactivity. Active up to 12 hours a day. No custom domains. 512 MB RAM.<p>Hobby – Run a small app 24×7 with the Heroku developer experience for $7/dyno/mo. Custom domains. Run a maximum of one dyno per Procfile entry. 512 MB RAM.<p>Standard 1X, 2X: Build production apps of any size or complexity. Run multiple dynos per Procfile entry to scale out. App metrics, faster builds and preboot. All Hobby features. 512MB or 1GB RAM. $25 or $50/dyno/mo.
<p>Performance – Isolated dynos for your large-scale, high-performance apps. All Standard features. Compose your app with performance and standard dynos. 6GB RAM. $500/dyno/mo.<p>H/T <a href="http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881" rel="nofollow">http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881</a>
I tried to post this yesterday[0] and fell off the new stories list, but such is HN.<p>Basically, they're nerfing their free tier by charging $7/month for a 24/7 running app. People wanting to run a free app may look at App Engine or AWS's one year free tier, or compare the price among other "cloud" and cloud-ish services.<p>[0] <a href="http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881" rel="nofollow">http://notes.ericjiang.com/posts/881</a>
If Heroku actually does make the free tier unusable (12 hours a day availability), and if custom domains aren't free anymore... then Heroku, time to part ways, and no more referrals to others.<p>This is the reason I chose Heroku as my platform in the first place over competitors, and if my experience is common, it worked out well for them because I have paid for premium tiers on certain apps along the way, and spoke glowingly of them to others.<p>I'm also still a little bitter that I incurred financial loss on one app because one of their quiet upgrades bonked Ruby 2.1.1 support, causing a big delay in a critical production push. (But I'm more annoyed that this will be about $100/month cost for me to keep my lighter traffic personal apps on Heroku).
Here's an analysis of how these rumored changes will affect apps of various sizes.<p><a href="http://www.octolabs.com/blogs/octoblog/2015/03/31/analysis-of-the-rumored-heroku-pricing-changes/" rel="nofollow">http://www.octolabs.com/blogs/octoblog/2015/03/31/analysis-o...</a><p>tl;dr : Current paying customers will see a discount of up to 30%. Current freeloaders will have to pay $84/year for functionality equivalent to what they get now.<p>Anyone who is technical enough to use Heroku effectively can charge AT LEAST $84/hour for their time, meaning that they'd need to move to a new solution in less than an hour to save money. All the hand wringing is very silly.
So, as a fellow hobbyist with 12 free dynos running on Heroku with custom domains, I clearly don't want to pay $84 a month for apps that aren't meant to generate revenue.<p>It is a sad day.<p>Where are you moving your side projects?<p>EDIT: I'm asking since I have no idea where I should go next. Heroku was a blessing.
I understand why they're doing this - companies have to make money - I get that.<p>I'm still annoyed with Heroku though. Cachet (<a href="https://cachethq.io" rel="nofollow">https://cachethq.io</a>) supports the "Deploy to Heroku" button. My experience is that their support is <i>terrible</i>. I've contacted them several times via; Twitter, email, GitHub and had no support from them in regards to this bloody button.<p>The reason I support Heroku in the first place is because of the free tier. It makes deploying your own instance of Cachet much easier. However, we've been having issues supporting it with Laravel 5's environment configuration anyway, so this is the last drop in the bucket before I pull <i>native</i> Heroku support.<p>Our demo (<a href="https://demo.cachethq.io" rel="nofollow">https://demo.cachethq.io</a>) and our own status page (<a href="https://status.cachethq.io" rel="nofollow">https://status.cachethq.io</a>) are both hosted on Heroku with the "Auto Deploy" function, but only because it's "easy" to do.
I totally support Heroku's right to charge whatever they want, of course. They're expensive, but they provide good value for the money.<p>Historically, I have a bunch of personal free-tier apps which sleep most of the time, and a couple which are up most of the time. My consulting clients, on the other hand, have paid Heroku thousands of dollars per month at various points. I also maintain a buildpack.<p>But at this point, it's time I get off my backside, set up a docker host on EC2, and containerize the stuff I care about. I can probably pack everything onto a pretty small instance, and I've been meaning to deploy some non-HTTP services. Besides, it's closer to what I'm using in production.<p>Thank you, Heroku, for some very enjoyable years, for top-notch paid service, and for the free hosting!
I think this is great! I was never very comfortable with the free tier where apps are swapped out (leading to a long loading request time) after an idle period.<p>A low cost $7/month plan for a dyno to always be running sounds good.
Digital Ocean has a dokku image. Within a few minutes you could be running several apps for $5/month.<p><a href="https://digitalocean.com" rel="nofollow">https://digitalocean.com</a><p><a href="https://github.com/progrium/dokku" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/progrium/dokku</a>
It seems they're still offering a free tier for an app that doesn't need to always be running. But if you need it running more than half the time, you need to pay at least $7/month. Will this affect current customers?<p>I understand there were probably too many apps running on free tiers, and probably some that abuses the TOS as well. But with AWS and others having cut prices so much, shouldn't Heroku also offer some kind of better discount?
I'm kinda surprised that we haven't seen a price decrease, since AWS keeps reducing prices. I can understand they wanting to decrease the 'freeloaders', but it seems shortsighted, those people are their future paying customers.
Their new pricing makes it more economical to just get a small droplet from digitalocean, i'm surprised they chose to be above that point.
If you have only small apps running for free on Heroku, for $5 you'll get them all hosted at DigitalOcean and Dokku easily as with Heroku: <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-the-digitalocean-dokku-application" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-...</a>
As a paying customer I am glad that Heroku is cutting down on the free usage. They are using AWS so free usage means actual expenses. Sure, it can be seen as a marketing expense but Heroku is well known now and don't really need it to gain awareness.
Does anyone know when this new pricing starts? I have a free app on here that is only heavily used during certain parts of the year and I am about to hit that busy time and hope that this new pricing won't take effect too soon.
This actually works out well for me since I don't host any "free" projects there, but I suspect DigitalOcean will be deploying a whole ton of VPSes in the next month with the Dokku image running ;-)
IBM is trying to build their hosting business. They offer a really generous free monthly tier on BlueMix. You can run a web app with a small data store for free.
I wonder if they will also change the pricing of the database tiers. Since paying 25$ for an 1x dyno and paying 50$ for a database just seems to be out of wack.