1. It took about 1 week due to lack of render documentation for Docker and buildpacks. I posted on the render help forum and contacted their support which did respond but were not the most helpful. I ended up finding a single example buildpack file in a render blog post which shed light on how to structure their build system. If I had not found it I dont think I would have been able to get it to work.
2. I don’t have experience with 3rd party deployment frameworks.
3. Learned how to use Docker in order to utilize Renders blueprint feature which would automatically link a redis instance to my hosted app.
4. $0 to $0
Render has a similar interface to Heroku but some missing features and bugs a few of which I’ve found are: No newline/special character support in environment variables. Applications cannot get the public hostname from calling the standard call in the programming language’s library like hostname(). Unlike Heroku where a publicaly reachable host is return, render returns an internal hostname is returned instead.