[ljm]

Heroku's pricing is also justified IMO, since if you're using Heroku you're most likely saving money on hiring an on-call infrastructure or ops team, and saving money on having your engineers switch focus from feature development to maintaining the system, or doing dev-ops work.

You're paying Heroku to do the operational stuff for you so you can spend more time building your product. That's a price well worth paying to a point, and even then I don't think the default next step is going full-blown cloud and K8S. Although that seems to be the way these days.

I mean, if you've got a year's worth of runway to launch your product, then you don't really want the engineer you're paying 90k+ a year for to get bogged down in debugging a custom CI/CD pipeline.

[jrochkind1]

> even then I don't think the default next step is going full-blown cloud and K8S

What would you suggest as a 'next step' after heroku?

[ljm]

Switching to a VPS or two is an option. You get more control over the machines you're running.