$5-10 a month is pocket change in some contexts, but for a hobby or a one-off project, it's a huge chunk of change.
I really wish they offered a lower-cost tier.
Sure there are others out there that provide the same easy of use, I am just too lazy to switch ;)
OTOH I've never had them wipe a database on me, so I guess that would be the motivation to move on.
Give it time, apparently ;)
If you're like me and are really into ease of use, I really endorse Digital Ocean. People don't seem to use it in Big Important Companies, but I never had a problem with anything I hosted there when I was my last, medium-sized company, and everything was so easy to manage in the GUI without having to learn proprietary APIs and whole stacks of infrastructure-as-code stuff like in AWS land.
I haven't looked recently but does DO have the heroku click to add resources and git push to deploy offerings?
About a year ago they shut down my personal blog based on a vague "violation of our terms." There was no violation, either. (I suspect they had to shut down phishing and other abusive sites, and cast a little too wide of a net.)
When they claimed they turned it back on, I had to keep pestering them because they goofed something or other. Eventually I couldn't push updates via Github. (I wrote the blog engine as an exercise to learn NodeJS.)
Again, if I could have bought an ultra-cheap tier, I would have been happy to pay.
(Context: I maintain an app for an event that runs about one week a year. The ability to use free dynos the other 51 weeks means we retain the ability to do one-off analytics queries, minor development work, etc. during the off-season, without having to delete and recreate the app or something every year. Eco isn't quite as good as free, but it means we can still have separate staging and production instances during the off-season, without paying extra for staging to be idle, and without having to destroy and recreate staging every year.)
You can also go to any competitors, which have their smallest tier around the same price. Linode has a $5/m tier.
You could also buy a Raspberry Pi for $50 and run it in your closet.
I don't want to pay $5 / month indefinitely to host a weekend project.
I don't want to deal with the complexities of hosting a weekend project myself. I've done plenty of that.
I just don't want to end up spending $100-200 / month to host a lifetime of weekend projects and experiments.
That involves port forwarding, figuring out something like dyndns, and whatever I need to share domains on a single IP.