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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Quite a few people used it as a Heroku add-on, where self-hosting isn't an option due to dyno restarts and lack of persistent storage. https://elements.heroku.com/addons/redistogo

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Ah, I understand that it had a free tier. Now I get it. You can’t beat free :P

No, the OP is correct. If you’re all in on Heroku then there is no “run redis yourself locally option”. It can’t run in a dyno, you couldn’t use it to reliably persist state across your dynos. It’s nothing to do with it having a free plan.

The “free” part answers the obvious follow up question of why the shutdown of this Redis SaaS provider is noteworthy. It’s highly used with Heroku because of the free tier.

Even the notice mentions this, emphasizing that the alternatives they recommend don’t have a free tier.

Heroku's own redis addon[1] has a comparable free tier and while I can't be certain, I'm pretty sure it's been beefed up recently, as I just had to migrate away from RedisToGo and I would have chosen Heroku's own addon over RedisToGo originally unless there was a compelling reason not to.

[1] https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-redis

Then maybe that’s why this service is shutting down? It was supposed to be a loss-leader, hooking people with a free tier. But now instead of getting more people to sign up and convert to paying customers, it’s just a drain?

This redis add-on was the original one, developed by Heroku and then spun out and handed over to a different team to operate. It’s been running successfully for something like 12 years. Has been acquired/changed owner 3 times. Has withstood the numerous challenges from competitors in what is arguably one of the most competitive parts of the add-on ecosystem.

It has been successful and had its time. To suggest this has anything to do with it having a free tier is to not understand the trajectory of the business at all.

I've been hit by this too. Can anyone advise how to migrate from Redis toGo to Heroku Redis? Perhaps its as simple as uninstalling redis-to-go and installing e.g. something like

heroku addons:destroy redistogo

heroku addons:create heroku-redis:hobby-dev -a your-app-name

See my SO question for this - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72695052/migrating-from-...

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