I haven't. That looks super promising! I find AWS/Azure almost intentionally obtuse in their pricing and setup/configuration. This looks like they focus on the opposite!
In the context of AWS Free Tier, the non-obtuse option is you do the EC2 t3.micro with Linux on it, maybe also the RDS t3.micro, and you ignore all that make-things-harder-so-consultants-can-charge-more nonsense. Install your own nginx, install your own node or python or whatever, ignore all their obtuse crap.
That's also my understanding. Heroku, on the other hand, has no time-limit on their free tier, but it's always kinda broken (startup times). AWS's free tier is the real deal. That's a trade-off.
But that's orthogonal to the point I was making, and the comment I was replying to. If someone likes Heroku because of it's pricing clarity and its ease of setup... well, the pricing simplicity of an EC2 instance is just as good, and the ease of setup is even better.
More broadly, if you're evaluating them against each other....
Heroku isn't the easiest to set up, nor is it the simplest. It's not the easiest because you have to learn a bunch of Heroku-specific things, that you'll just have to reinvent/relearn/etc if you ever want to switch providers. To call it "vendor lock-in" might be a bit of a stretch, but it has aspects of that. With EC2, it's just server management, same as it ever was, same as it'd be on some other cloud.
(Note that many OTHER AWS services are far worse than Heroku in this respect. And/or better, depending on your goals.)
Heroku aims to be a sweet spot. A few hours (or days, maybe) invested in learning to use it properly, and you get a pretty reasonable bundle of tools and support and so on. But if you want to dive deep, Heroku's probably a waste of time. And and the other extreme, if you don't want to learn anything about an individual provider's proprietary crap, then Heroku also will not work out that well for you. Saying "this is our sweet spot" is a respectable position, even if you don't like the sweet spot.
(Personally, I'm still boycotting Heroku over their years of misrepresenting their "dynamic mesh routing", which was always fiction and which they lied about for years, and charged customers for something that they knew full well they weren't delivering. Don't get into bed with sociopaths, even if you like their sweet spot.)
> Heroku-specific things, that you'll just have to reinvent/relearn/etc if you ever want to switch providers. To call it "vendor lock-in" might be a bit of a stretch
It’s an understatement, not a stretch.
Heroku has always seemed really interesting/cool/clever to me. The tradeoff has never been worth the investment when I’ve considered using them, personally or professionally. Their operating model is far too different than every other cloud provider’s.
While I was doing the "free 30 days + 12 months of free stuff", a certain level of MSSQL was listed as free, but hidden under that is creating the storage for MSSQL which is a separate and additional cost that you cannot avoid. (At least, not that I could figure out.)
By the end of my 30 days, I found the bare minimum performing low volume .NET + SQL on Azure was going to be $30+/month even for just a prototype/development site, and I can pay less elsewhere for higher performance (though perhaps less control). And when I say "performing", I just mean the VM not being too slow to actually use as a UI, and throwing low memory errors constantly. The free tiers for Windows Server are, in my opinion, unusable at all.
I run a hobby .net core website on a $5 digital ocean instance and it runs fast as hell. You definitively don't need to spend $30. I'm using a PG database but it looks like maybe it would even be possible to run SQL server on a 2GB instance.
You do get some free storage with the free tier database, but it is only a paltry 32MB. Additional storage is only $0.221/GB/m though. The paid cheapest SQL database (B0) is only $5/m, which comes with 2GB of storage. In practise, this is absolutely fine for light usage.
By .NET + SQL, I assume you mean you were using an App Service? They come with a lot of convenience, but I definitely agree that they are too expensive, especially when considering the level of compute you get. I raised this with someone from Microsoft before, and they said they were confident the value offered was worth it.
There is a free tier for App Service though. It's a shared compute model - I tried it a while back, and the performance was totally fine for light usage.
I wouldn't try to run Windows Server on a B1S, as they only have 1GB of RAM :) You might just about get away with it for Server Nano, but I've never actually used it. Best stick with Linux or BSD for these tiny VMs.
Heroku is cool, too, though.