[jrochkind1]

I am not very familiar with any of these, but here is the short list of things I've compiled from past HN threads, that might be alternatives to heroku that provide similar affordances to heroku.

Most of them I have done no more than look at the website and determine that, yeah, it was similar to heroku for my personal criteria of what makes something similar to heroku. (Some things suggested in past threads did not meet them and I didn't keep on my list).

render.com

fly.io

platform.sh

railway.app

[sergiotapia]

Some hands on experience with all of these, September 2022:

Render.com - we use this for production at Grilla. Great experience, great platform. I wish I could pay them money to have my builds go faster but everything I want out of the box in places where you would think to look for them first. Fantastic dev ux. Never said, fuck I wish I had this and couldn't find it.

Fly.io - still extremely rough around the edges and militant about things that most companies don't really care about. For example, you create your database, and you see the credentials once and only once. You didn't save them? Tough luck, delete your database and create a new one. Just a lot of sharp corners. Same with ENV vars, you can only set them not see them. Which is ridiculous. Hey my payment processor isn't working, the webhooks aren't coming in, let's debug check the webhook env var, what you can't see it? Ugh.... They are most likely working very hard on the fundamentals of the hosting platform, but they need a lot of work on the dev ux.

Railway.app - Sexy as fuck, will potentially tear me away from Render on my next endeavor. These guys are taking everything that's shitty about hosting apps and making it simple. One thing I did miss was being able to ssh into a running container to run an elixir console into the running process. But for everything else, they are right on the money and gaining quick.

[jrochkind1]

If you felt like saying more about what you liked about railway.app, it's advantages in comparison to heroku and render specifically, I would find it interesting!

[iratewizard]

I can only speak about render.com which I've seen recommended several times. I was thoroughly unimpressed. Heroku is my go to when I want to spend no more than 5 minutes getting a microservice deployed. Otherwise I would use DO. Render seemed to be the longer and clunkier experience of DO without the benefits of DO.

[anurag]

(Render founder) Any chance we could connect about the issues you saw with Render? Email in profile. Lots of former Heroku customers spending thousands of dollars every month have successfully made the switch to Render and are quite happy (as you can see elsewhere on HN). I'd appreciate a chance to address your pain points with us.

[iratewizard]

Probably not, but generation focus is pretty good at connecting companies with specific subsets of users. I know they already maintain a list of current heroku devs.