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That's what they say. My money is on it encouraging people to leave more dynos running than necessary, thus yielding more income for Heroku.

That's true, but it also works in the other direction: you get slashdotted, which kills your 2 running dynos. If you're away from your computer, your traffic is long gone by the time you get back, and Heroku missed some revenue because you didn't scale up.

Anyway, Heroku's business model isn't about making money on their oblivious users, I would rather bet on their add-on store's which now has a very minimal marginal cost to expand.

Makes sense...

I don't think that's true. There a fork of delayed_job which does autoscaling of workers on Heroku and... it's written by a Heroku employee. It's regularly mentioned on the mailing list too.

https://github.com/pedro/delayed_job/tree/autoscaling

I talked with them too - and yes, they do not intend to release such thing, because "everyone's scaling needs are diffent".

I think needs aren't so diverse and there's quite a huge mass who has almost identical needs.