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Comment by teiferer | Hacker News Reader

It's insane how much my local shop charges for an oil change, I can do it much cheaper myself!

It's insane how much a restaurant charges for a decent steak, I can do it much cheaper myself!

...!

I know you mean this sarcastically but I actually 100% agree with this particular on the steak point. Especially with beef prices at all time record highs and restaurant inflation being out of control post pandemic. It takes so much of the enjoyment out of things for me if I feel i'm being ripped off left and right.

Where’s the beef inflation? Local butcher has prime rib fillet $30 AUD/KG cut to your liking.

My understanding is that here in Oz we get access to cheaper beef than the rest of the world...

One also doesn't get shamed by the steak snobs if you have different steak preferences.

Or having to cut the steak with a serrated "steak" knife that tears the meat.

What you're missing here is that companies happily pay the premium to Heroku because it lets them focus on building the product and generating business rather than wasting precious engineering time managing infra.

By the time the product is a success and reaches a scale where it becomes cost prohibitive, they have enough resources to expand or migrate away anyway.

I suppose for solo devs it might be cheaper to setup a box for fun, but even then, I would argue that not everyone enjoys doing devops and prefers spending their time elsewhere.

Maybe what bothers people so much is more of the fact that when Heroku first came out, it was much harder to do what that platform does. In the past 20 years or so, there has been a ton of improvement in the tools available. What could’ve taken you three full-time employees can probably be done with 20% of someone’s time after the initial set up which also isn’t that hard. So, it seems like instead of charging like 50X the cost of the servers themselves, maybe Heroku could be charging 10X. But it seems like salesforce probably just bought Heroku as a cash-generating machine. They probably figure they have a lot more to lose in cutting the bills of their old customers who don’t want to migrate anything, then they could gain from attracting new customers who aren’t already locked in.

Honestly, reading these threads it sounds to me like a lot of people are still launching new projects on Heroku. I wouldn’t have guessed that was true before reading this.

This argument doesn't work with such commoditized software. It's more like comparing an oil change for $100 plus an hour of research and a short drive against a convenient oil change right next door for $2,500.

Nobody is forced to go to the expensive one. If they are still in business then enough people apparently consider it a reasonable deal. You might not, but others do. Whether I'm being downvoted or not.

> If they are still in business then enough people apparently consider it a reasonable deal.

Or they didn't check. A business still existing is pretty weak evidence that the pricing is reasonable.

Not the best comment but I agree with the sentiment. I fear far too often, people complain about price when there are competitors/other cheaper options that could be used with a little more effort. If people cared so much then they should just use the alternative.

No one gets hurt if someone else chooses to waste their money on Heroku so why are people complaining? Of course it applies in cases where there aren't a lot of competitors but there are literally hundreds of different of different options for deploying applications and at least a dozen of them are just as reliable and cheaper than Heroku.

The problem with Heroku's pricing is that it's set high enough that I no longer use it and neither does anyone else I know. I suspect they either pivoted to a different target market than me, which would be inconvenient but I'd be okay with it, or killed off their own growth potential by trying to extract revenue, which I would find sad.

I’m pretty sure their target market is people who have already built something kind of complex on there and don’t have the time/money budget to do a big migration. In that way, they know their customers are stuck but can afford the current prices, so keeping pricing static or gradually increasing makes sense.

I'm hurt because a service I'm using is based on Heroku. I'm on the "unlimited" plan but they have backtracked on that and now say I'm too big for them...

The price value proposition here seems similar to that of a stadium hot dog.

It's just trendy to bash cloud and praise on-premises in 2025. In a few years that will turn around. Then in another few years it will turn around again.

Indeed, there are levels to the asymmetry though. Oil change might be ~5x cheaper vs the 20-50x claimed for Heroku...

> for an oil change, I can do it much cheaper myself

Really? I mean oil changes are pretty cheap. You can get an oil change at walmart for like 40 bucks.

And you get the stripped out bolt hole for free too.

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