Heroku is without a doubt one of the more expensive options out there. SSL being billed per month? Yikes. SSL really should be standard.
Simply not having to think about how to stage, locate and run an app saves a lot of visible and hidden engineering time.
Source: I work for a company which donates engineering time to what is, in some respects, a Heroku competitor (Cloud Foundry).
By default Heroku offers a wildcard SSL certificate which only covers
‘*.herokuapp.com’. This means that ‘Full SSL’ can be utilized as a default,
which does not require that the SAN contains your FQDN. To utilize
Full (Strict) you will need to add your own SSL certificate to your
Heroku app, which can be done by using their ‘SSL Endpoint’ add-on.
Looking at https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/ssl-endpoint using SSL as an addon for $20/M is expensive. With ELB I can pay namecheap for an SSL cert for like $10-$30 once and be done with it.
I think that starting startup can cut a lot of corners by using open source resources and cheap cloud servers like DO.
The SSL certificate expense is listed as $99/year from namecheap, ie. $8.25/month, so there seems no need to get a Symantec one.
However they/it/he are paying Heroku $20/month for handling the SSL traffic, not the certificate itself, which probably includes running a load balancing server in front of their apps that automate the SSL termination across nodes. Which seems like a fair cost to me.
I think the description of this cost is the error which causes the confusion.