Help Heroku's free tier is ending | Hacker News Reader

Help Heroku's free tier is ending

reaktor.com

16 pointstodsacerdoti17 comments

I'm actually quite amassed that some developers are completely oblivious to the underpinnings of how their software works. Some of them really do feel source code runs on water vapour!

If you are genuinely having a break down because Heroku will stop being free and you haven't figured out that there are absolutely hundreds of other ways to achieve the "serverless feel"--which is basically near free as well, then there is no more hope left for humanity!

You're "amassed"? I don't think the thing you're worried about is that great a threat to humanity.

I'm not sure who you are referring to with your condescending commentary. Easy-to-deploy high-level-of-abstraction application hosting services offering a free tier (like Heroku for the last 10 years) is a great thing to have IMO.

The fact that you know how software and operating systems work under the hood doesn't mean you'd necessarily want to build everything from scratch and setup Linux servers for all of your hobby projects.

There are some exciting ways to continue using the heroku build packs and Google cloudbuild to host on gcp. You can maintain git push deploys costs can be pretty inexpensive. The primary cost is around managed postgres.

https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator#id=46eb44ca-9ac...

It isn't the same as a free plan but can provide a very similar ease of use. My profile has contact info if you want more detail.

First, it's still one more month. Then there are much more free tier options than the ones listed. E.g; AWS, fly.io, koyeb.com, railway.app and tons more. There are also free domains (e.g. for .tk) at freenom.com

Also Adaptable.io and Render.

Blog post author here. You're right that there's a lot of alternatives and that's great! In the post we listed a few options that we have personally tried and can recommend. I'm also considering setting up some Github page for listing more of "deploy for free" services and keep that up to date. Would that be useful?

Definitely useful.

I got burned by Railway free tier because it's only 500 hours / month... so it would only work for 20 days per month

You can buy cheap VPS (I use netcup) and run Dokku in it.

But that can be quite a hassle, atleast in my case. I'm trying to run it behind reverse proxy and in subdomain with other services running in same Docker environment. These two things has made it so time consuming that these kind of free services are more suitable for small hobby projects.

Fly.io would be great, but they don't have an UI, only CLI and their CLI doesn't work on Windows although they say it does

Could just run their CLI through a Docker container

Not sure what sort of UI are you looking for, but I'm quite happy with their dashboard UI including monitoring, logs, metrics, status etc.

You use the CLI for deploying your apps but that is hardly a downside in my books, as this is a tool for people who write Dockerfiles and are, in my experience, usually familiar with the command-line.

It’s not clear what the gain is here. Is this the beginning of the end? A bad purchase for Salesforce?

To me the free tier has seemed like a gateway drug; you try Heroku (or Fly.io etc) for your hobby projects first and after you've gained some confidence you will apply the same in more serious projects. From now on the hobby projects will be deployed elsewhere.

Need to find a good reason to try fly.io. Seems like they’re doing some cool cool stuff.

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