Heroku 22 Stack

It would be great if you could let everyone know (here, or as a later Tell HN) which alternatives you're considering. People have chimed in with suggestions before (Fly, Render, etc.) but it always helps to have additional thoughts on this, especially from someone running a high traffic'ed site. Thanks!

We are in pre-planning for our exit as well. We will be on AWS EKS(perhaps with lambda/ECS mix) by the time our contract is up next March.

Too many issues both discussed here and undiscussed. Also, their upsell approach is stale:

* Public runtime has a 20 min cooldown after 3 app crashes

* Hobby pro dynos don't report container mem limits due to ancient cgroup setups(gotta upgrade to performance M)

* No Dyno sizes between 2.GB and 14GB ?!

Bunch of BS trying to push you towards Enterprise accounts, more expensive dynos, and private spaces(which cost more Dyno units).

We tried[0] to find Heroku alternative a couple of weeks ago. In short Render.com feels solid and Railway.app very promising, hope they will do more progress soon.

[0] https://nixsanctuary.com/best-paas-backend-hosting-heroku-vs...

We are looking at a number of alternatives as well. A number of the common ones mentioned don't have feature parity with Heroku for larger apps (log drains to external logging services, CLIs, etc). Aptible looked pretty mature (they are trying to be Heroku, but for apps that need more security/compliance), and Platform.sh is intriguing as well.

It's also the lack of communication and dealing with support is not great.

Funnily enough, it's down right now :(

I've been using it in prod for almost 10 years now, almost without issues. Personally I'm still a very happy customer. FWIW, it's a low-traffic app, so cost isn't an issue. I'm happy to pay Heroku a bit more for the developer ergonomics over running my own server – it has saved me a ton of time.

Luckily I was not affected by the recent "issues", since I'm not using the Github integration.

We do - the monthly bill was about 30k when I joined and I was able to drop it down to 15k in a month by refactoring the majority of the infra (mainly backend workers). DB is the biggest limiting factor - pricing is absolute rubbish. You can't have backups after your data size goes above 20gb. Replicas have to be on the same tier, as otherwise lag occurs daily. Connection limits are awful, but luckily you can setup a pooler in front of the DB. Also, we had workers being stuck in a limbo state, where they aren't crashed, but they aren't working either - but this mainly happens with Celery workers, to be fair. Some add-ons are also cheaper directly on their respective website, rather than through heroku.

If someone was to use heroku I'd advise to at minimum:

- move the DB elsewhere.

- not setup external services through heroku auth (sentry, logtail, newrelic etc)

With all of that said - I do have my startup and some pet projects there as it does in fact abstract the devops aspect away.

I've had to recently approve a surprisingly large bill for Heroku.

For small teams/products/services it totally makes sense. After a certain point, especially in a large organization that understands the value in infrastructure/operations investment, most applications/services can be streamlined and deployed. At that point, no, it is much much cheaper to go elsewhere.

The fact that minor change like this made it to front page mean it's still used, there no better altrenative. From a happy ~7 years customer

Was on it until late last year, switched off recently. The cost for the performance and reliability of their Redis and Postgres instances was pretty bad, and it didn't seem like the dynos were well co-located with the db. A few of the issues we had:

  1. Redis was wildly unreliable, would go down for 2-5 minutes every few days with no explanation from support
  2. We had to pay for a much beefier instance of Redis just to increase our connection count. We weren't using more than 2-3% of the available memory, we just needed the connections, but you can't pick and choose.
  3. Their limits on websocket connections were also a killer, I think each dyno could have a max of like 1,000 sockets so we had to add more dynos just for more sockets.
  4. Switching over to AWS reduced the RTT (just networking, not actual query runnig time) on Postgres queries from ~8ms to ~1ms. Seems like the dynos and db weren't closely co-located.

However, the amount of time spent and code we have to maintain our infrastructure is waaay more than it used to be on Heroku. No free lunch for sure.

We're happily using Heroku in prod.

One nice thing for us is that we also use Heroku CI so our tests run on the same infrastructure as prod, and the pricing for Heroku CI is just based on usage with no concurrency limits so everyone can have their CI runs across all their branches happening at the same time. We tried Github Actions when Heroku CI was ahem "down" and it was slower & more expensive + the concurrency limits meant we had to wait in line to get a CI run though. Nobody else seems to use or even talk about it though, so either we have a crazy CI setup or Heroku just never marketed it.

We occasionally do the math to see if Heroku is still a good deal and the answer is always that the amount of time we estimate we're saving on devops more than pays for itself in extra time spent on app development. There's a break-even where that will no longer be the case, but as engineering & devops get more and more expensive Heroku seems like a better and better deal.

The scariest part isn't really the product itself but all the recent talk about how it's a ghost town and nobody works there anymore. It's a great product but I do hope they start innovating again.

Yep! Using it to run a scheduling webapp for a number of fighter squadrons.

We had ~10 apps on heroku until last month. We have been migrating to Cloud Run and Cloudflare Pages recently and love it.

For sure. As the only developer in the team, it saves me a bunch of devops time that I can instead dedicate on the business, while we're trying to get product-market fit.

I'm sure that there are limitations for larger teams or if you have specific requirements. But I think it's a great choice if you're a small team and/or your application is more or less run-of-the-mill from a technical point of view.

Switched to GCP Cloud Run.. but do miss the Heroku CLI sometimes

Yep, still running my saas product on it, have been for over 5 years. Never had any issues really, and we deploy through a CI/CD so we don’t have GitHub connected.

Still more expensive than I’d like, and the lack of an AU option sucks, but it’s been great so far, I choose it because I didn’t want to worry about devops, and that’s pretty much been the experience.

I have had a look at render, but didn’t find it as easy as Heroku, It’s probably due to me being more familiar with Heroku.

We have a couple production websites on Heroku. One is a decade-old Rails app and the other is a Rails backend for a ~3-year-old site whose frontend is hosted on Vercel.

The decade-old app is still running great. We make extensive use of the Heroku CLI and some of the addons for databases and logging. The newer one isn't so heavily integrated into Heroku's features aside from the database. It was set up by a senior dev who's given largely free rein over his projects, but otherwise the company switched to DigitalOcean for new projects several years ago.

So my job is ~75% working with DO droplets and ~25% Heroku dynos. I didn't care either way, really, because at the end of the day my priority is the actual program. But the recent blowup with Heroku's GitHub integration was really painful, especially for our old app whose deployment process was deeply integrated with our GitHub repo. Once the outage had dragged out for a couple weeks, I started advocating to my lead for a move to DigitalOcean. The only reason we haven't done it yet is that we're a consultancy so we'd need to sell our very non-technical customer on a migration.

My points are 1) I think a lot of Heroku's business in 2022 comes from large, old projects that, for various reasons, are complicated to move elsewhere, and 2) Heroku is pretty much fine for those projects, aside from the recent issues that were thankfully resolved.

I used to use it for side projects (not sure if you would count that as "production") but now go with Dokku on top of Hetzner or Digital Ocean. It's similar in experience to Heroku (at least the CLI) but much cheaper, and as it's my own VM if I hit a limitation in Dokku I can access the VM itself or just throw away Dokku entirely and use something else instead. The major limitation is that it doesn't really do multi-server setups well, but for the wheelhouse of low-traffic simple applications it's great.