[condiment]

Jacked up prices isn't what is happening here. There is a psychological effect that Heroku and other cloud vendors are (wittingly or unwittingly) the beneficiary of. Customer expectations are anchored in the price they pay when they start using the service, and without deliberate effort, those expectations change in _linear_ fashion. Humans think in linear terms, while actual compute hardware improvements are exponential.

Heroku's pricing has _remained the same_ for at least seven years, while hardware has improved exponentially. So when you look at their pricing and see a scam, what you're actually doing is comparing a 2025 anchor to a mid-2010s price that exists to retain revenue. At the big cloud vendors, they differentiate customers by adding obstacles to unlocking new hardware performance in the form of reservations and updated SKUs. There's deliberate customer action that needs to take place. Heroku doesn't appear to have much competition, so they keep their prices locked and we get to read an article like this whenever a new engineer discovers just how capable modern hardware is.

[rtpg]

I mean Heroku is also offering all of the ancillary stuff around their product. It's not literally "just" hosting. It's pretty nice to not have to manage a kube cluster, to get stuff like ephemeral QA envs and the like, etc....

Heroku has obviously stagnated now but their stack is _very cool_ for if you have a fairly simple system but still want all the nice parts of a mode developed ops system. It almost lets you get away with not having an ops team for quite a while. I don't know any other provider that is low-effort "decent" ops (Fly seems to directionally want to be new Heroku but is still missing a _lot_ in my book, though it also has a lot)

[maccard]

I think it’s easy to forget how much you get with a modern setup like this, and how much work it is to maintain it. If you’re at a big corp, the team who maintains this stuff is larger than most mid corp’s engineering departments. For a solo person, it’s fine. But if you have 10-30 engineers, it’s a lot of work, and paying heroku $1000/mo is significantly cheaper than having even a junior engineer spend 40% of their time on keeping up.

[TheTaytay]

Well said. I’ve been expecting an obvious spiritual successor for a long time. They have a surprising number of features compared to most platforms. Their databases/redis and features like forking were quite good (as long as you were super big), logplex/log shipping, auto scale, add-on ecosystem, promotion pipelines, container support if needed (good build packs/git support if you don’t), good CLI or API, OS/patch management, hobby plans and enterprise plans, and more. And on top of all of that, the user/projects system is something mortals can wrap their heads around. They found the sweet spot between raw servers and the complexity quagmire of the mega-clouds a surprisingly long time ago.

There are some folks with good offerings (Fly, Railway, etc), but the feature set of Heroku is deeper, and more important for production apps, than most people realize. They aren’t a good place for hobbyists anymore though. I agree with that.

[cpursley]

Is it deeper than render.com? Can heroku run static sites or distributed Elixir/Erlang? Personally I’m on fly as the pricing is even better and I prefer the UX, but render is basically what heroku should be in 2025.

[91bananas]

Heroku made an application I worked on possible. I don't think we had the team to maintain the application stack without something like it. It enabled the company to exist long enough to get the magical stock exit. I'm forever grateful for it existing.

[sofixa]

> other cloud vendors

To be fair, AWS quite proudly talk about all the times they've lowered prices on existing services, or have introduced new generations that are cheaper (e.g. their Graviton EC2 instances).