Basically, they're nerfing their free tier by charging $7/month for a 24/7 running app. People wanting to run a free app may look at App Engine or AWS's one year free tier, or compare the price among other "cloud" and cloud-ish services.
This also may not be much of a drop for people with minimal production requirements. Under the free hours system, 2x1X was $35 now it may be $50 unless the Hobby pricing is factored in for the first 1X and it's $25 + $7 = $32. For 2x2X the price drop will only be $6.50. Still it's good that the cost to scale has gone down.
The paid hobby tier is actually welcome change, the limitations of the free tier (often used for staging and demo environments) were (are?) annoying. The ability to run 1 dyno per Procfile entry (instead of per app) is a welcome change, as allows you to fully mimic production without dyno scaling more easily at a lower cost. People were likely using while allowing them to pay a reasonable price for these low-traffic systems.
I have been saying for a while 1X dyno is underpowered and unnecessarily memory limited considering it's price (particularly for Rails apps) even before 2X was announced. If I had my way the 1X would be dropped in favour of the 2X at the same price and the 1X only used for hobby and things like a worker role handling infrequent job queue processing. These price changes come pretty close to doing that, while adding a paid, but low-cost, hobby tier for applications with very limited needs.
Let's hope this is actually serious.
Ah well, guess I'll need to properly support that hubot now.
I've had some processes die semi-regularly, though, because the OS does a scheduled maintenance task that maxes out the 512mb RAM.
Adding a swap file seems to have taken care of it, though. I wish they enabled them by default on their smallest droplets: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-...
I'll be interested to see what they do to my existing apps.
I'd be happy to put credit onto the account to use the smaller tier, or PayPal it or something, but I'm not paying for a big footprint that I'm not using.
But clearly, unlimited "limited" Free cloud hosting will be over in a few years.
hobbyist devs and students really need to prepare for this.