You could call it a side-grade. We're also allowing users to add a worker dyno and use up to 18hrs/day of `heroku run` and scheduler one-off dynos as well. All told you can get quite a few more compute-hours for free applications now than before.
And all that for only $7/month. Seems reasonable, for an essential service.
18+18 > 24
I understand that your (and my) particular use case are affected negatively by this, but if it wasn't totally clear what he means by sidegrade, that's about the size it. More compute hours for your $0, but less availability.
i have a bunch of open source, public service sorts of things and I don't know what I'm going to do with them now :(
Seriously though, they're saying that most deployments use less than 18 hours per day, and if they just let them stay up 24/7 regardless of that, they're basically leaving money on the table. Heroku pays Amazon for all of what we're getting for free. Their free tier is a loss-leader.
If they don't spin down your app when it's idle, it absolutely costs them more than if they do. Regardless of how much (or even whether) they bill you for it.