Heroku hasn't changed pricing since they launched, actually. The only historical price reference I quickly found was that the EC2 was $0.085/hr for (what is now called) an m1.small[1].
Heroku launched with $0.05/hr pricing.
Amazon's new m1.small pricing is $0.044/hr, nearly a 50% price drop over four years.
Heroku still is $0.05/hr, the same price as when it launched. Heroku runs on EC2.
Uh, did I miss something here? Sounds like Heroku was actually cheaper than the raw EC2 rate when it launched, and is now just over half a cent per hour more.
They might (a little) in that this 'friction' is exactly the sort of plain bottom-line info to get people to make the step to move off of heroku and on to raw EC2 (or other more infrastructure based setups).
They already charge an immense premium over your own fleet of micro to large instances, but by the time you rack up enough dynos for it to make sense to spend the necessary weeks migrating your infrastructure there's a good chance that replicating the environment with your own in house version (30+ instances?) is non trivial enough to be scary.
Once you're over a handful of dynos, the sunk costs and uncertainty will keep you there until it becomes totally ludicrous.
Heroku launched with $0.05/hr pricing.
Amazon's new m1.small pricing is $0.044/hr, nearly a 50% price drop over four years.
Heroku still is $0.05/hr, the same price as when it launched. Heroku runs on EC2.
[1] http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2010/09/15/how-run-drupal-...