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Comment by davepeck | Hacker News Reader

I do, as do several startups I advise.

Despite interesting competition, my feeling is that the Heroku of 2024 remains... Heroku.

I feel this way even though -- depending on how you segment -- the list of "interesting" competitors is quite long at this point: Render, Railway, Northflank, Fly.io, Vercel, DO App Platform, etc.

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I revisit heroku alts every ~6months and I am shocked how not ergonomic they still are, I switched to DO VPS + Ansible Container & Github Actions for any project that doesn't need infinite scale after Salesforce paused heroku development but I'd go back to literally any heroku clone.

It's crazy how the ergonomic still just aren't there.

Yes, completely agree; I'm equally surprised by the poor DXes.

(And: bugs. I'm also surprised by the kinds of issues I run into on some of those sites in my list -- problems that, even if not show-stopping, feel like revealing indicators of quality.)

> Yes, completely agree; I'm equally surprised by the poor DXes.

Any specifics/examples? I find it hard to imagine those "big name" companies/platforms you just mentioned don't have entire teams dedicated to hyper-optimizing experience.

Having a dedicated team doesn't mean anything about the end result.

IME the Heroku of 2024 is Render.

Can you elaborate a bit more why render is good? we are on heroku and I have evaluated alternatives every 6 months since heroku/github outage 2 years ago [1]. But I don't see how render is better. 2 years ago render postgres did not have PITR. now they have build it, but Render's postgres offering is even more expensive than heroku, and queries run a bit slower on similar spec machines based on my test. I also don't like render charges per seat in addition to infra cost.

[1] https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2413

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