[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.