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Comment by holografix | Hacker News Reader

Controversial opinion: given the vast majority of answers here: cheapskates looking for free tiers wherever they can find them.

Heroku should’ve closed that free tier years ago! Now they added some very very cheap plans as well which is fantastic for them = gets rid of some of the horrendous cost from platform abuse they dealt with every quarter.

Good for you Heroku, you were always under appreciated by the enterprise, with their clingy sysadmins and ops people fighting you like a plague and at the same time you were taken advantage of by an army of penny pinchers!

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Companies count on the "cheapskates" and the free plans to work as a "gateway drug" to corporate plans.

I sometimes feel this services "need" an affordable paid plan, so I don't "freeload" on their free plans, and I don't need the expensive big plan.

I.e.:

I monitor a bunch of my hobby sites with StatusCake. They're great and I use the free plan but I'd like to pay a little for very simple monitoring. But the first paid plan is around $200 a year. But I don't need the premium plan, I just need the free plan, but paying, so I feel like I'm contributing to the business.

AWS and the others... you've got a free plan, but once you begin to deploy... ;)

DnsMadeEasy. They don't have a free plan, but I'm using their "Small business 10 domain plan". That was $30 a year for years. Past year was $40. Then they got acquired by DigiCert and since last month they've posted their new prices: ~$200 a year for a 5 domain plan.

It happens in a lot of providers, so I guess is a regular VC tactic to acquire volume, clients, publicity or whatever.

> I monitor a bunch of my hobby sites with StatusCake. They're great and I use the free plan but I'd like to pay a little for very simple monitoring. But the first paid plan is around $200 a year. But I don't need the premium plan, I just need the free plan, but paying, so I feel like I'm contributing to the business.

Odd mentality. You don't want to feel like a freeloader, but don't want to pay the asking price.

Hence why they said they want to "pay a little." If this is a common objection to the price of a good in a market, and if someone else comes by offering a simpler product at, for example, half the price, they could take the market. This is an example of a low-cost pricing strategy: https://stratechery.com/concept/strategy/low-cost-strategy/

I know the ending to this story! The "someone else" comes along, gets a lot of buzz, attracts users, gets funded, then the investors say "you should be focusing on the enterprise market and increasing prices!" Then they become like the company they were trying to undercut and sell for $100m to RandomCorp.

> Now they added some very very cheap plans as well which is fantastic for them

Can you share a link to their new plans? The pricing listed on their old page (https://www.heroku.com/pricing) still showing $7/mo as their cheapest option and it's already an overkill for my applications. In comparison, the cheapest option on fly.io is $1.94/mo (https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/).

Note: I know $7 is the maximum cost, but by default their hobby tier app will not sleep, so I guess it still costs $7/mo to run in the end?

Thanks!

I think they aren't in effect yet, but were announced in this blog post from last week: https://blog.heroku.com/new-low-cost-plans

I am not sure if it will meet your expectations though, it doesn't really provide something much cheaper than 7/month or for an always-on production service. As I see it, the "eco" dyno is mainly a way to more easily save money with transient dynos (used for things other than production services) -- it does meet your concern about hobby dynos not sleeping though!

There's also a new cheaper very limited postgres corresponding to the previous free postgres.

The new "cheap" plan is only two dollars less so I don't think it is an alternative for many. I will most likely move infrequently used apps to another platform.

The new “eco” dynos work the same way as free do today — they draw down a shared pool of hours across multiple apps. So you could run tens (or hundreds) of infrequently used apps for a total of $5/month. That’s in contrast to the originally-announced plan, which had Hobby as the lowest cost option which costs $7 per dyno per month, which can get expensive with lots of rarely-used apps.

Ah I missed the "shared across all of your eco dynos" part. Thanks for the info. That helps. I also like the new small Redis plan.

If you're running a project with a database, you need to take into account the cost of a Hobby dyno and a database add-on. I believe the cheapest Heroku Postgres plan is $9/mo.

So, if you had a light-traffic, or demo, or staging project that was using the free dyno & postgres offering, you went from $0/mo to $16/mo. That's a big jump, depending on your use case.

I'm all for well-restricted free offerings that let you try a platform; Heroku absolutely needed to change its plan. But if the cheapest web app with a db plan is $16/mo, people are going to look for something closer to $5/mo for their low-load deployments.

If I'm wrong about any of this, I'd love to know.

I'm gonna play the devils advocate here

$5-$10 / month is peanuts for most western people. In other places of the world, that could be equivalent to a solid 10%-20% of their monthly paycheck (if the hosting services do not offer prices based on location).

Interesting claim/model. Can someone cite some real data or at least give an anecdote about this?

Are there IT workers who earn ~100 USD a month? (Okay, thinking about it there must be. Freelancers who are not really experienced, or working in very local very low productivity companies.)

Aren't there already small hosting providers regionally who price accordingly? (We tried to run one here in Hungary around 2009-2010, but there was no point. Free stuff provided by giant companies is a much better value, so the local market is composed of otherwise non-typical clients who actually want local hosting with something extra, all in all not a great business. Prices are very low, competition is fierce, etc.)

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