Remind HN: Heroku will delete all free dbs and shut down all free dynos Monday

A fun fact (and I&#x27;m not violating any NDA here) my client <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paireyewear.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paireyewear.com</a> is growing very fast and last year they raised $73 million from VC investors. They have their main store on Shopify, so they didn&#x27;t need too much on the backend: only their CRM for keeping customers happy and handling returns and damaged goods and refunds and special sales. Also, on the backend, they had all the integrations with the 3PL, that is, 3rd Party Logistics, which is to say, they worked with external warehouses, because they weren&#x27;t ready to have their own warehouses. They did have integrations with the warehouses so they could track inventory levels.<p>So the fun fact is this: they were running entirely on free Heroku dynos. This year they successfully transferred to AWS, but they got to a fairly big scale while running entirely on free Heroku dynos. I&#x27;m still kind of amazed by that.

Just moved off my 8 years old project google-webfonts-helper <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;majodev&#x2F;google-webfonts-helper" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;majodev&#x2F;google-webfonts-helper</a> from their free tier to my own private infra and replaced the current dyno with a 301 handler: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kenmickles&#x2F;heroku-redirect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kenmickles&#x2F;heroku-redirect</a><p>AFAIK sadly Heroku does not provide some other _free_ permanent redirect option for their *.herokuapp.com sub-domains without actually running a dyno there.

To be fair, I have had quite a few emails form Heroku telling me to move my stuff. Even after I thought it was already shut down, I keep getting emails. Everything I have on there is 5+ year old hobby things that I won&#x27;t bother hosting elsewhere, it&#x27;s nice to know they are paying more attention than I am to my projects&#x27; fates

Thanks for that reminder. I had to delete an app I had running since 2013. Up until the moment before I committed to deleting it, I felt no emotion at all. But right after I confirmed deletion, I felt like an animal I had on the farm died. I was sad. I had that thing chugging along with no real issues for almost 9 years. I used that platform to learn and try new things and then built an app to track my workout progress. It was a great way for me to learn Django without losing money and build some useful tools.

For alternatives we can recommend Hetzner US Cloud [1] which was the best US Cloud provider we&#x27;ve found that works out to be an order of magnitude less expensive than equivalent specs on Azure&#x2F;AWS and also includes 20TB free bandwidth that would cost a fortune in AWS&#x2F;Azure&#x27;s artificially inflated egress costs [2].<p>The UX behind managing instances is delightfully pleasant where new instances are available faster than any other cloud provider we&#x27;ve used, within seconds of creating an instance you can immediately login with your configured SSH keys. Another nice feature is being able to &quot;rescale&quot; your instance to higher specs after a restart [3], so you can confidentially start with a small instance that just meets your current workload knowing that you can easily scale up your instances as your workload increases.<p>AWS RDS was the only critical service keeping us on AWS, a service we no longer need in our new Apps which we&#x27;re building with SQLite thanks to the effortless replication in Litestream [4] that we&#x27;re using to replicate to Cloudflare R2 - another great value alternative S3 alternative with $0 egress fees [5] where you can get even greater value &amp; performance when hosting behind their free CDN.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hetzner.com&#x2F;cloud" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hetzner.com&#x2F;cloud</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;servicestack.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;finding-best-us-value-cloud-provider" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;servicestack.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;finding-best-us-value-cloud-pr...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bizanosa.com&#x2F;how-to-upgrade-resize-hetzner-cloud-server&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bizanosa.com&#x2F;how-to-upgrade-resize-hetzner-cloud-ser...</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.servicestack.net&#x2F;ormlite&#x2F;litestream" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.servicestack.net&#x2F;ormlite&#x2F;litestream</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloudflare.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;r2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cloudflare.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;r2&#x2F;</a>

Thanks for the reminder! Could&#x27;ve lost a bunch of photos :) Also, it&#x27;s interesting how little effort Heroku put into helping you upgrade. There&#x27;s no one-click options, and instead it&#x27;s a forest of choices and menus to jump through.<p>By the way, one hack to not upgrading your app? Move your DBs to a single shared instance on Amazon, and then point Heroku apps to that one instance. Meanwhile, in Heroku just remove the Postgres addon. As long as it doesn&#x27;t see a free instance, it doesn&#x27;t complain.

Last time a post about Heroku was posted, I talked about my great experience using Coolify:<p>I am using Coolify (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coolify.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coolify.io</a>), an open source self-hosted PaaS which is a relatively newer kid on the block compared to Dokku and CapRover. I tried both of these and I just didn&#x27;t like how they were, always had some problem or another.<p>In contrast, Coolify has a great GUI that abstracts away the most common things about PaaS hosting, like connecting to GitHub automatically for git push deploys, SSL certificates, reverse proxying and custom domain support, and best of all, having support for Heroku style buildpacks as well as Dockerfiles. I&#x27;ve been quite happy with it, the creator has a Discord and responds to issues very quickly.<p>With regards to non-self-hosted options, I did try out Render, Fly.io and Railway but I found that their free servers were too anemic. I was compiling a Rust backend and it simply could not compile on their free servers. On Hetzner, for 5 bucks I could get a 2 AMD vCPU and 2 GB RAM machine that was sufficient to compile my Rust apps in a way that the non-self-hosted ones were not. I have a JS frontend app that works fine though but I wanted to keep everything under the same VPS, plus I can run other types of self-hosted services on it too, like Plausible analytics and a Ghost blog. I&#x27;m not sure if those are allowed on non-self-hosted options.<p>All in all, it costs me 5 bucks a month, and I never have to worry about sudden upcharges for traffic à la AWS as in the very worst, my VPS goes down for a while. I&#x27;m now running about 20 different services on this 5 dollar box including databases and applications as well as other services, works just fine.

Now that Heroku free tier is not available, here are a few alternatives<p>Serverless and edge functions: Deno, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare.<p>Databases: Planetscale, Supabase, Cockroach, Fauna, Upstash.<p>Services: Fly, Railway, Render.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;Ak_Mittal&#x2F;status&#x2F;1567175784229650432" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;Ak_Mittal&#x2F;status&#x2F;1567175784229650...</a>

Does anyone have a link to a good analysis about the &quot;death&quot; of Heroku? Say, a good Ben Thompson style piece explaining how it all was subsumed into Salesforce and failed as a standalone service.

I’ve migrated an old PHP7 app from Heroku to GCP the last couple of weeks. I rewrote the CRUD in Go. The rest of the components were an SQLite database and an old (2013) SPA that holds up surprisingly good even today.<p>Heroku account: deleted.<p>For small scale projects Heroku seemed thousands of times easier to work with than GCP. I sometimes get lost in all the GCP menus and settings. It’s a lot.

I understand this is news for a few months now but still, such a hostile way to just unplug projects and to an extent, the history of the web.<p>I doubt Salesforce is struggling with cash not to let these projects stay online on a “read only” mode.

So basically anyone with a bunch of free dynos (who doesn&#x27;t use heroku DBs) can just switch to the $7&#x2F;month eco subscription and keep their dynos running?

Does anyone have a quick and dirty script to download the Git repo and data for all your Heroku apps?

Gave up on PAAS and decided to switch to a VPS. I enjoy the comfort of a persistent storage.

Hey everyone! A couple of pretty decent Heroku alternatives have already been mentioned, but in case anyone is looking for another platform that offers super easy backend service deployment and scaling, Fl0 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fl0.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fl0.com&#x2F;</a>) is going to release to the public in a couple of months.<p>You can sign up to be on the waitlist for access here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fl0.com&#x2F;contact?utm_campaign=hn" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fl0.com&#x2F;contact?utm_campaign=hn</a><p>(Disclaimer: I work at Fl0.)

Well darn. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;heroku-sucks.herokuapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;heroku-sucks.herokuapp.com&#x2F;</a> had a good run, I guess.

This thread was fine with me until I considered Vercel might do the same thing in five years with their free tier.

Depending on how your software is architected, there are other free clouds available: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paul.totterman.name&#x2F;posts&#x2F;free-clouds&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paul.totterman.name&#x2F;posts&#x2F;free-clouds&#x2F;</a>

They can delete my dynos but they can&#x27;t delete all the emails over months and months telling me they are going to delete my dynos. I&#x27;ll never get that time back.<p>I kid.<p>Thanks for everything, Heroku.

I’ve been using render.com. Pretty good alternative.

Rip Heroku

I didn’t receive any emails from Heroku about this, thank you so much for this reminder. Saved us a lot of headaches.

Thank you very much. I forgot about this.

I hope no one is rushing over the 4.5-day US holiday weekend to do a last-minute migration or backup.

It’s curios like this action push user to go way instead just paying 7$&#x2F;month.

Hi. Please take my oppinion with a grain of salt, as I might be biased since I&#x27;m a founder at a competing service.<p>In recent years, there was a significant amount of startups&#x2F;bootstraped companies that tried to make application deployment easier, similar to Heroku. A lot of them were trying to get as much users as possible using a very generous offering. A lot of the times, this use-growth was fueled by a VC money, and the only metric that mattered was user&#x2F;customer growth.<p>But then came the &quot;cooling&quot; at the private markets. VCs are looking not only at the user-growth, but also at the cash flow. A lot of the very generous offerings that were possible only thanks to the VC funding will eventually disappear.<p>I believe that what&#x27;s currently happening with Heroku will happen to a lot of other Paas&#x2F;BaaS startups. They will need to transform to a cash-flow positive business. Similarly to what Heroku is transforming to (a &quot;cash cow&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cash_cow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cash_cow</a>).<p>A lot of other PaaS providers will need to increase their prices to stay cash-flow positive. A portion of them will need to cancel or reduce the generousity of their free offereings.<p>The margin of these companies is usually possible thanks to 2 things: - the infrastructure resources they provide is slightly (10-100%) more expensive than the underlying infrastructure they run you workloads on - they use more cost efficient hardware (e.g. databases running on 3rd gen SSD disks) to run your workloads.<p>Since these companies are renting raw hardware, on which they run your workloads (and are not using cloud-provider-native services, such as RDS), they need to hire experienced operators able to run and manage those workloads in production. This (for obvious reasons) is not exactly easy, and requires a lot of experienced talent with operational experience.<p>Hiring those people is very hard, as these experts are not usually available on the market.<p>This leaves us with with the obvious problem:<p>Are the operators of the given PaaS provider really able to run your production workloads? Are they able to to withstand all the issues that may arise?<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong. There definitely are companies (the most succesful) able to hire very capable talent (such as <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;supabase.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;supabase.io</a>), but this definitely isn&#x27;t the case for all of those PaaS providers.<p>And I believe that these companies will need to increase their prices (and be less lucrative for their customers) or changes their business model.<p>This is something that we at stacktape.com built our business case on. We took a different path. We just wanted to make the existing (AWS) offerings 2 orders of magnitue easier to use, so that any developer (withou Cloud or DevOps experience) can use them productively.<p>We&#x27;re not running your workloads for you. We are just making AWS services (run by experienced operators) significantly easier to consume (97% less difficult, so that any developer can do the job). For that, we&#x27;re charging 30%-&gt;20% of the AWS infrastructure costs managed by us premium. This also means that you are not restricted to our platform, but can easily extend your infrastructure by any AWS service (using AWS CloufFormation or AWS CDK).<p>AWS offers areasonably generous free tier, and Stacktape won&#x27;t charge you for any resources withing the free tier.<p>We&#x27;re launching our v2 soon (~1-2 weeks), and if the offering we have sounds interesting, we&#x27;ll be very happy to hear your thoughts.