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Comment by markonen | Hacker News Reader

Was very excited about this during the private beta, when the only pricing indication was about the dyno usage (billed by the second). Now, the GA pricing of $10/mo/pipeline doesn't seem like much, but with our small startup already at 32 pipelines, it ends up blowing past what we're currently paying for CircleCI.

I guess that's actually a more general criticism of Heroku in the microservices context; high availability (at least 2 dynos per service) and predictable performance (non-shared dynos, Performance-M at minimum) combine to make the cost of a "production" setup start at $500/mo/service. Non-issue for a monolith, quite tough for small microservices.

(To be fair, we compromise on both of those requirements and use both single-dyno apps and shared dynos, and so Heroku is very affordable for us. But the downside of those choices ends up biting us often enough that I, in turn, end up lamenting about it on HN.)

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Heroku's strategy is about locking you in through services. It's the same playbook being followed by AWS, Azure and GCP. The concept of spinning up and scheduling containers is now well below the value line -- there are many competing platforms in this space. Raw compute is nearly a fungible, undifferentiated product at this point.

Insofar as you can decouple yourself from Heroku service offerings, you are able to decouple from Heroku.

Whether that's a full-service standalone platform like Cloud Foundry (partly inspired by, and partly sharing code with, Heroku), an IaaS-smoothing platform like Convox (founded by Heroku alumni), integrating some intermediate platforms like Deis or rolling your own with Kubernetes or Marathon.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, which sells a commercial distribution of Cloud Foundry. And I work in the Cloud R&D section on opensource bits of it. So I have a horse in this race.

If you were Heroku, how would you plug the hole of people running some parts of their deployments in AWS us-east-1 to save on their Heroku bill?

Maybe I just have the wrong idea, but I'm pretty sure the whole USP of Heroku is easy deployments without having to worry about Dev Ops and infrastructure. If you want to use AWS directly, that's great... but that's not the customer they're targeting.

I wouldn't, because that's mostly going to happen on larger accounts. I'd expect Salesforce to try and rope in those ones.

I'm surprised people don't go all AWS with elastic beanstalk and cut out the expensive middleman.

Heroku seems like more of a value-add than Beanstalk, in my untutored opinion.

Again, disclosure, I work for a competitor.

Maybe you meant $10/mo/team[1]? There is no monthly charge for pipelines and you can have as many pipelines as you want within a team. 1 pipeline or 5 pipelines, you just pay for dyno time of the apps in your pipelines -- pro rated to the second.

Pricing is similar for Heroku CI -- you pay for dyno time to run your tests.

Note: I work for Heroku and feedback welcome at heroku-ci-feedback@heroku.com (about features or docs).

[1]: https://www.heroku.com/pricing

Here's a quote from the Dashboard:

> During the beta period [team name] will only be billed for dyno usage when tests run. After the beta period ends, each pipeline with Heroku CI enabled will be billed at $10/month plus dyno usage.

Apologies, you are correct.

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