[habosa]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like they have no free tier. This is a big mistake, and it's one reason they probably can't catch Heroku.

I generally start out my Rails apps on Heroku free, because why not? It's dead simple to deploy and it lets me test how my app will perform in the "real world". Until I get any real traffic, I just point my domain at herokuapp.com and let them deal with the bill. Heroku knows this, and encourages it.

Here's how they get you though: what do you do when HN picks up your side project? All of a sudden your request load goes up by 10x, 100x, or even 1000x. Do you take the time to move it to AWS to save the money, or do you just say "oh fuck need moar server!" and turn up the Heroku web servers dial to 5. Suddenly you're a Heroku customer, all because they had the easiest place to host your MVP.