The Heroku Pricing Gap + Add-on Fever

Remember Heroku have to support millions of users on the free tier on a permanent basis, all of which costs very real cash money compared to your average freemium web business.<p>AWS only have a temporary free usage tier so collect money right up front even on the smallest projects.<p>For that reason, these relatively large step functions in pricing at the low end are reasonable from where I'm sitting.

The OP undervalues that bit in the TLDR: "stress-free deployment". For us, hiring or contracting a DevOps guy with 1/10th the chops of the heroku crew would cost 10x what we are paying them, and I don't think we'd have a better quality of life.<p>Heroku is only expensive if your time has no value.

What kind of traffic could you handle on a 100% free account? Would it be feasible for a low-traffic website, say a few k requests per month?<p>If I want to upload files, is it necessary to have an Amazon account? As I understand it, you can't use Heroku for dynamic file storage.

@glenngillen (a Heroku dev) mentioned that it's the add-on providers who set the pricing for add-ons.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/glenngillen/status/218830351307522048" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/glenngillen/status/218830351307522048</a>

90$ for 1GB memcached? I am paying 65$ for the whole server (i7 quad, 32GB ram, 3TB disk, 10TB bandwidth) and can setup 30GB memcached if needed.