It is great to see the 'why not just host it yourself comment?'. Cliche as it is on HackerNews it always reminds me of the infamous Dropbox comment.

I personally think render has a great future, 99% of dev ops is the golden architecture involving a load balancer behind multiple app instances with a db and cache.

I don't want to care about creating automated backups. I don't want to care about managing VPS. I don't want to care about security updates (though unattended upgrades does make it easy nowadays). Let me git push with a dev environment and link available and start shipping features to customers. That is the value of Render/Heroku.