Heroku Class Action

My startup is heavily invested in and tied to Heroku. We don't have the resources right now to get off of the platform quickly, but plan to as soon as possible.<p>Like Rapleaf, we have spent an enormous amount of effort optimizing and searching for the causes of latency, and overpay for dynos to reduce but not eliminate the chance of latency issues. Heroku has always told us it's our fault.<p>While I have no interest in recovering money through a class action lawsuit - which is just grossly unproductive - my confidence in heroku has been shattered and I am embarrassed to have chosen and advocated for them for so long. I look forward to getting off their platform for good, and there is no way I could recommend it to others for similar applications.<p>Heroku's most recent statement does nothing to resolve the issue for most of their customers, and does not reduce what is clearly a gross overpricing and misrepresentation of what they provide.<p>It's quite clear that Heroku is not just a bad, but a horrible choice for rails applications that are not carefully designed for concurrency and don't go against Heroku recommendations and use a concurrent application server.

Ok this is going too far. Did Heroku make a mistake? Yes. Did they mislead and lie to their customers? Yes. But is it worth pursuing a class action lawsuit that could ultimately ruin them - if not financially, but force their mgmt team to focus on this damn suit rather than fixing the damn problems? Hells no.<p>I hope RapGenius is not the lead plaintiff in this, otherwise I will be very disappointed.<p>I applaud them for raising this issue, and doing all the research they did. We are all much better off for it.<p>I applaud them for sticking to their guns to make sure Heroku fixes the issue.<p>But if they join this class action suit, in my humble opinion, it is one step too far. What is the max they can realistically expect to get back from Heroku? $250K? $500K? Surely not the entire $20K/mo, so I doubt it will be that much.<p>Given all the money they have raised so far, if I were one of their investors I would start to ask questions about if they are wasting their time frivolously beating a dead horse.<p>This is getting into 'bad karma' territory. I am sure someone, at some point, will want to sue RapGenius....they may remember how they behave now.<p>So yes, keep up the pressure, and keep forcing Heroku to fix their faulty systems.<p>But a class action suit dawg? I think not.

Polemic though this site may be, my understanding of the situation leads me to believe that it makes no false claims.<p>If this is so, Heroku has a problem on its hands: its behaviour is such that it has alienated current customers and, more importantly, dissuaded potential future customers from employing the platform.<p>Heroku's challenges seem threefold:<p>One, they need to get their infrastructure in line with their branding, or vice versa.<p>Two, they need to assuage the doubts of current customers and offer them convincing reasons to stay.<p>Three, their image and reputation have taken a nosedive. I can't see well-informed potential customers considering Heroku without taking this saga into consideration. This would appear to be the most difficult, and the most important, challenge to solve. Heroku needs image rehabilitation in a big way. The only way I can see them achieving that goal is through increased honesty and engagement with their potential customer base. Unfortunately, I haven't seen anything from them that suggests they're adopting that strategy.

Wow, seriously? This is way over the top and unnecessarily snide ("Heroku...supposedly assists web application developers"). Stop Heroku? Pretty sure nobody's gonna get on board with that.<p>What is it even trying to accomplish? As far as I can tell it's essentially an ad for that law firm.

Dear Heroku, slice off a piece of your offering that shows some love to the Ruby community again. Lets call it the Maple stack. Have this stack use the old routing infrastructure.<p>Edit: To be clear, I do not support this legal action. I do want Heroku to hear the community, but I don't want it to go this far.

oh look, a parasitic lawyer-company trying to suck some money out of a technology company. it must be a day that ends in -y.

This isn't some grassroots action lead by startup CTOs across the valley. This is just a lawyer searching for a lead plantiff. I find the site rather misleading, and ultimately trashy. (Disclaimer: I am personally opposed to class action lawsuits.)

Interestingly, someone tried to spam a bunch of comment threads with this a few days ago: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=herokulawsuit" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=herokulawsuit</a>

Is this in any way affiliated with Rap Genius? In either case, you should make it abundantly clear where you stand, as they're very publicly involved with this spat.

General question: do class action lawsuits need to be sponsored/initiated by an actual plaintiff, or can lawyers just start a bunch of class actions hoping one will eventually stick and they'll get some fees out of them?<p>Edit: s/defendant/plaintiff/

Can we please get this site hosted on Heroku for the irony?

Attorney 'Values' page includes stock photo of corporate jet. Aaaaand we're done here, folks. <a href="http://kristensenlaw.com/values.php" rel="nofollow">http://kristensenlaw.com/values.php</a>

wtf is this? No one will get money from this. Last time I checked I got a .06 payout from some company that supposedly defrauded me of over $60. Quite a payout. Lawyers took 30% right off the top. Hmm.. maybe someone will make money.

Anyone else spot the "I see what you did there?" with the Notes screen shot?<p><a href="http://herokuclassaction.com/how-to-make-heroku-comply-with-its-promises.php" rel="nofollow">http://herokuclassaction.com/how-to-make-heroku-comply-with-...</a><p>That dig makes it personal.

This is why you don't fuck around with PR issues. They can easily turn into lawsuits.

It's to technical... I don't see a reason why you'd win.<p>Lies happen all the time, i saw someone here mention that Heroku didn't knew it was such a big deal.<p>They are expanding a lot, the issue (intelligent routing) has been raised and will be solved. They know what they've done wrong now... They didn't see it as a big issue before.<p>It's up to Heroku to resolve the problem, because at the end of the day it's an issue to be fixed.<p>And don't we see issues all the time in software development.<p>As long as the company itselves communicate about the problem and is honest about it when the problem comes up.<p>That's the only thing i would really care.<p>PS. I'm not associated (employed or client) by Heroku.

Sorry in advance for being a little off topic here: which VPS hosting companies have the best reputation for automatically restarting your failed VPS (for any reason) from the most recent backup? Many years ago, I was on vacation without an Internet access and my host provider restarted my instance and since I set up my services to start on boot up, all was good.<p>I would guess that I am a typical customer who does not really need fast scalability. I host several web apps with a modest number of users and what I care most about is reliability and then cost.

Ahh.. the smell of blood in the water!

Do class action lawsuits actually have any effect on business practices? Just seems like an extortion that is somehow legal. No one benefits but the lawyers. Recently I've been included in a bunch unbeknownst to me that require me to submit written notes within a week of notice to NOT be included. Why can't we just eliminate the middleman in these cases to cause real change?

This must be the Kim Kardashian of law firms.

It is going to be interesting when this gets to discovery, and we find out what Heroku were saying internally this entire time about the issue. There are bound to be internal emails that discuss this issue and what to do (or not to do) about it. For this reason I can see this being settled. Perhaps refunds and an apology.

This is interesting, because I don't remember any similar class action lawsuits/attempts like this in the tech/SAAS sector, though I've often heard of threats. Have there been any similar attempts?

Is there a similar service that is better than Heroku that anyone would recommend switching to?