Feel free to ping me: jay@tasker.sh, happy to personally help onboard and toss in some credits if you’d be willing to chat with us about what you’re building!
It's really easy to spin up a web
app in production.
...
However, it is incredibly difficult
to run anything longer than a web request.
We find that as the workloads grow, it becomes a bit more burdensome to maintain. Did my job run correctly? Where are my logs? Do I need to make my box bigger? Do I need to pay for a VM when my workload only runs once a day? How do I get my code from GitHub onto the box? etc.
All of these are solvable, certainly. Just as Heroku removed the need to set these things up, so too does tasker but purpose built for batch processing.
"Did my job run correctly?" can mean so many things. I have to define what that means for my specific use case anyhow. What does Tasker offer here?
If you are going to say “just use a vm” for every PaaS offering get ready for me to ask “why a vm?”
You could do everything you do on a vm with a bare metal server as well and it’s pretty easy and you maintain more control. Of course you probably have good reasons, perhaps lend others the same benefit of doubt?
First, you're coming at this from the wrong perspective. The OP is about alternatives to Heroku - the starting position is "I don't want to use servers". There are a number of rational reasons for this, including OS maintainence and the mental overhead of setting up continuous deployment from your repo (ansible to configure cron? a self-hosted PaaS?). "Don't worry about servers" doesn't just make sense in principle, it's also quite popular in practice - just consider the uptake of things like serverless.
So, starting from "no servers", how do you run something on a regular basis? Let's say "send me a message on telegram daily with some info". Serverless and similar offerings are useless for this, they're a different model (request/response). I did research on "hosted cron" at the time and the options were pretty terrible - there's definitely space here for tasker.
FWIW, this is coming from someone with a default position of "self-hosted only". For my own use, I tried out cron and airflow - they're both annoying and I settled on bgproc [0] as least-worst on my already-existing personal server. I really wanted to move to something hosted by the time I was done (tasker didn't exist).
You got your point across in your various comments.