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Comment by novakinblood | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for that reminder. I had to delete an app I had running since 2013. Up until the moment before I committed to deleting it, I felt no emotion at all. But right after I confirmed deletion, I felt like an animal I had on the farm died. I was sad. I had that thing chugging along with no real issues for almost 9 years. I used that platform to learn and try new things and then built an app to track my workout progress. It was a great way for me to learn Django without losing money and build some useful tools.

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Thanks for posting this. I currently pay a fair amount per month to keep a thing I used to work on alive. I did the migration - only took a minute - but I thought long and hard about just killing it. In the end I couldn’t do it. Too much of my life went into that project.

There's Glitch if you want a new playground: https://glitch.com/

do they only offer JavaScript backend? I am looking for other language support

I see some evidence you can potentially run any language by using your own HTTPD, but I can't speak for the viability. Search for your language with the box and you might find some examples to get you started.

Have they committed to anything different than what Heroku had committed to?

We're Charlie Brown running towards the football repeatedly. We need to learn a lesson here. "We're the good platform devs" branding doesn't mean a company will do the kind thing by their true believer users (post-acquisition, post-cash-flow-belt-tightening, post-IPO, etc)

There ought to be a platform on which new coders can build a free simple web app in a playground, and know it will be accessible in 20 years. If a company wants to use "free easy backends" as bait for capturing growing companies' future costs, devs should hold them to long-term persistence and at least an off-platform future migration path. See also Parse, Geocities, etc

Use some % of the money and put it in to an OSS migration path or a fund to pay their own future AWS bills, c'mon.

People need to realize that free plans are a loss leader/sales feature, not a guarantee. The longer you're able to use their free plan, the more obvious it is that you aren't going to convert to a paid user. The better the free plan, the less likely it is to make sense to run long term.

The only free tier product I use is Cloudflare's, and if it goes away someday, I'll pay for it.

Glitch's free plan is pretty much useless for everyone except the intended audience: new programmers looking to get help from the community (there's a button) and experienced programmers looking to provide that help. It has tiny resource limits. $8/month lifts some of the limits for all your projects and gives you five "boosted" projects with more memory and storage.

People who've been around a bit will recognize its previous name: Fog Creek Software.

Many are new students who don't think about the business landscape of the service they choose to build something on.

Students who are learning to build things on these platforms shouldn't lose their early work.

Sure, but move it elsewhere later. And who doesn't keep a copy of the code they deploy?

> Students who are learning to build things on these platforms

... and have not yet learned about version control or backups the hard way.

It’s a good thing those students have access to thousands of dollars of free credit for AWS/Digital Ocean/Azure, etc.

Not to mention if whatever they are working does take off, those companies would throw extra credits to these students.

I think they’ll be fine.

Well, then it's excellent they are learning this now and not later. The best time to learn about making backups is when you start programming, the second best time is today.

Then they need to learn!

Why are you expecting 20 years of free service?

Even if it's a penny a day, that's 60$ over 20 years supporting a user with no intention of spending any money.

If you still have the code, you can always deploy it again.

> We need to learn a lesson here

Something comes to mind about a free lunch?

The idea that there ”ought” to be a free service that guarantees you 20 years of service is laughable.

If you’re paying nothing, guess what you can demand?

Apparently a lot from the HN entitled crowd.

There's plenty of platforms where devs can do that. The idea that there should be One Monolithic Platform that lasts for 20 years is silly. Why only one? We have tons of options from modern hosts who have some kind of free plan available.

There's very little incentive for hosting companies to offer grandiose 20 year perfect free backend plans because hosting has been extremely commoditized and anyone hosting on top of AWS is just being squeezed aggressively. While you waste 25% of your resources fighting bad actors, spammers, CSAM, and everything else that comes with being The Place for Free Backends, your competitors are staying lighting focused on the features that your paying customers are leaving you for, spending only the minimum necessary on free options.

Frankly, if a dev can't find one of the ~dozen free top tier amazing backends available to newbie devs (many of which available through entirely web based IDEs that can launch any framework you want in moments), maybe they're not ready for this field, because a lot of it is in fact their ability to search and learn.

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