SWOT Analysis of Heroku

Interesting article.

Having been a Heroku user who then switched to my own Dokku-VPS, I have a few thoughts:

- Back then you HAD to use postgres. Didn't bother me, but might bother others. - Things get expensive quick. I recently beefed up my VPS which is now as expensive as Heroku's cheapest paid tier, but what I get for it is miles beyond Heroku.

Of course I now have to deal with upgrading and looking after my VPS, without any kind of support. Though, whether I end up learning how to use Dokku or Heroku made no difference to me, really. Some people will say that even that amount of management is unacceptably involved, which, for a SaaS that's got really good growth right off the bat, is probably true? You'd want to really maximise productivity and not worry about infra.

Last point: the article mentions that Heroku is well placed to compete with Netlify, Vercel and the like. Why would they though? I feel their offering is way beyond static pages? And considering how cheap the competition is, you'd then need to create a new / separate pricing tier that operates according to completely different rules from the others. I am not sure that would work.

I feel Vercel and Netlify are in more trouble thanks to Cloudflare Pages and Workers Sites. They offer next to no advantages and are really ridiculously expensive in comparison.

The article also refers to something as the Jamstack-lie. Is that just because 'serverless' is a ridiculous misnomer or the fact that Netlify are marketing the term Jamstack so hard, even though everyone could just say 'static pages'? Or does the article's author think we are going back to databases for all our sites à la WordPress?