[jroes]

Heroku isn't just a transparent proxy to EC2. You are getting several other services that are not easy to put together on your own - routing infrastructure, simple git push deployment, world-class postgres tooling. To put this kind of stuff together on your own is costly, and you will likely make a lot of mistakes on the way (mistakes Heroku has already made and learned from).

Another thought: When you use Basecamp, are you calculating how much they are spending on hosting your data?

[orf]

This plan is $576 a month, the actual hardware you get for that is mediocre at best. A postgres instance and git push deploy isn't worth that much and isn't that hard to set up yourself.

sure, you could run into some issues while doing it yourself but that risk isn't worth nearly $600 p/m IMO

[jroes]

How many hours do you spend a month on devops tasks? And on top of that, how diligent are you with applying patches, testing backups, and all other sorts of drudgery necessary to keep a production site running smoothly? Take that number of hours, multiply it by your consulting rate, and there's a good chance Heroku may save you money.

For most production apps, you'd need at least a part time ops person to do things right. That's the kind of cost Heroku saves you.