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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

A fun fact (and I'm not violating any NDA here) my client https://paireyewear.com is growing very fast and last year they raised $73 million from VC investors. They have their main store on Shopify, so they didn't need too much on the backend: only their CRM for keeping customers happy and handling returns and damaged goods and refunds and special sales. Also, on the backend, they had all the integrations with the 3PL, that is, 3rd Party Logistics, which is to say, they worked with external warehouses, because they weren't ready to have their own warehouses. They did have integrations with the warehouses so they could track inventory levels.

So the fun fact is this: they were running entirely on free Heroku dynos. This year they successfully transferred to AWS, but they got to a fairly big scale while running entirely on free Heroku dynos. I'm still kind of amazed by that.

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> they were running entirely on free Heroku dynos. This year they successfully transferred to AWS, but they got to a fairly big scale while running entirely on free Heroku dynos.

I’ve read so many of these stories now that I understand why Heroku is phasing out the free tier.

It’s kind of fascinating to see how some engineers see free tier limits as an optimization target. I wonder how many engineering hours across the industry went into arbitrarily keeping services small enough to fit in the free tier.

> I’ve read so many of these stories now that I understand why Heroku is phasing out the free tier.

To me, those stories seem like good arguments for reducing the usage limits of the free tier, but not getting rid of it entirely.

You don't need to profit off every single customer. Many business models make 90%+ of their revenue from 'whales' and crumbs from the rest. Optimising for consistent margin from every single customer could be a waste of time; a distraction, and could even hurt a business.

Why do all the big clouds have generous free tiers with reasonable limits then?

> I wonder how many engineering hours across the industry went into arbitrarily keeping services small enough to fit in the free tier.

Why is that wrong? If everyone optimized their services and applications like it used to be in the past, will substantially bring down compute and memory requirements and reduce overall bloat.

It’s not, strictly? It’s just more of a tragedy of the commons.

Heroku is not "the commons", they're a company and people are playing within the rules that they set out.

This has to be the analog of "the first amendment only protects you from government restrictions on speech" in this conversation.

Heroku can protect itself from abuse of its free tier by changing the rules - which they eventually did.

I'm sure that the only reason why they kept the free tier as long as they did was because it brought in enough users (who were eventually converted into paying customers) to be worth the cost.

I think it's more of sadness that abuse took it away. It would be nice if hobbyists only used the free tiers and not successful businesses.

This is definitely the "software engineer" way of conceptualizing and solving the problem. You have discrete limitations, you optimize around them.

This is clearly not "working at intended" though and I'd like to believe everyone knows that, including the people building this system.

Of course it’s well within Heroku’s domain to structure their services however they choose. The tragedy is that if everyone uses the platform’s free tier to maximum utility in a self beneficial way, it exhausts the resources available and the common utility ceases to exist. So it’s not ethically wrong as was my response to the GGP. But it’s functionally “wrong” because it exhausts the common resource.

If a service is broken down into n microservices such that each of them fits into the free tier, these n microservices are likely to consume more resources in total.

One day, compute requirements will be part of a companies eco-statement.

Eg. Amazon will be forced to say 'For every item purchased from Amazon, 370 grams of CO2 are emitted by our servers and other business operations :-P'

I like free shit that doesn’t suck.

How could they stay on free dynos? You can't be running on a free dyno 24/7. It's like 16/7 or something.

If I'm not mistaken, if you gave Heroku a valid credit card, it would add a few hundred extra hours for your dynos.

that's correct, you could be have it on 247 with trick!

I have several legacy free tier dynos that don't have the restriction. They run 24/7, at least for another day or so.

That was at one point true, but hasn't been true for at least a few years.

Heroku could have gone back to that i suppose, instead of getting rid of free dynos entirely, but they didn't.

Still... I think you could basically only run one free dyno per account 24/7. I am curious if they somehow fit their entire production in one free dyno, or were somehow splitting things between multiple accounts, or what.

Why did they not just start paying for Heroku?

They’re part of the reason it’s not free any more.

Well, Salesforce could have made the free dynos non-commercial only

That's even worse, so when your hobbyist project accidentally makes 40$ Salesforce can send it's legal team after you?

I would prevent any hobbyist project of mine from making $40 for tax reasons alone, where the difference the to tax authorities between $0 and $40 is basically the same as the difference to a Saleforce non-commercial clause. At $0 I don’t have to do anything about taxes. At $40 it’s immediately in the red due to whatever time I have to spend sorting out taxes for $40 in revenue.

I'm not an accountant, but for the US in 2021, that was Form 1040, Schedule 1: Additional Income and Adjustments to Income, Part 1: Additional Income, line 8: Other income, sub-line i: Activity not engaged in for profit income. You would just put $40 on that sub-line and add it to your adjusted gross income. If you made only $40 on it, I don't it can reasonably be called self-employment income, per Publication 535.

[0] https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i1040gi#en_US_2021_publink1...

[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p535.pdf

Right, and I'm not in the US, but my point is that even if it is that simple, figuring that out for my country and filling out the form is going to take more than $40 worth of my time, and introduces downside risk that I've gotten it wrong somehow.

Shopify does logistics now too, you could use that and get rid of the whole backend altogether. Disclosure, I work there.

Perhaps conways law is now more about cloud pricing tiers tham teams!

Cool story (really), but what were they hosting on Heroku then?

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