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Absolutely. We went from free tier to about 100/month in nearly no time with Heroku. It’s worth it though. Heroku takes care of all sorts of stuff, and that fee is still cheaper than hiring a sys admin for a small business.

That is quite literally the price you pay for convenience. In many cases, that's a very rational tradeoff - your time is better spent on developing and marketing your app than dealing with devops. If your Heroku bill is a relevant business problem, then you're probably grossly under-charging for your app.

I think the main competition for Heroku these days is AWS and GCP. The workflow for deploying directly to managed cloud services has improved drastically over the last few years, so you might not need the niceties that Heroku offer.

In my experience this is vastly overstated.

Also, just because you use Heroku for your app servers (dynos) doesn't mean you have to use it for everything.