Now I want more competitors for platforms like Heroku just so that they can put their prices down. Heroku is great, but it is crazy expensive. Furthermore, I don't see any signs of Heroku lowering their price at all.
$ 36/month in 12 month is $432/month
That is indeed a cheap service. However, relatively expensive for people not making a profit for their projects.
It would be nice if Heroku lowered their prices occasionally as well.
And yeah, when you charge $20 for SSL, you're expensive.
A private VPS with enough resources for 4 of those same apps would be 2-4X cheaper.
If your time is so valuable that you can waste money like that, congratulations, but many of us find halving a price and learning marketable skills in the process to be valuable.
If your app is so important that SSL is necessary, that's worth $500/year. Or your app isn't that important and the point is moot.
Do you know what Heroku offers over a VPS? They're not the same thing.
For the money, Heroku offers far far less than VPS+Dokku
Security, true isolation, the ability to easily scale horizontally and vertically, integrations into many services are all things Heroku offers that you need to work hard for in Dokku. Disregarding the fact that you need to maintain your own server(s) with Dokku, Heroku is tthe clear winner here.
The only thing Dokku offers people is the ability to save some money at the cost of their own time. Sure, I can manage just fine as I was maintaining my own servers anyhow - and know how - but honestly I already have a dayjob, why would I want to make my programming hobby more work?
I have probably spent a thousand (paid) hours doing devops for customers. For my own projects I don't want to spend the time.