All the free alternatives will eventually get rid of their free tier too - could be 1 year, could be 10 years. As the author stated, they had 25 free instances running. They converted over to paid, so maybe they became a profitable client. However, all the users who have 25+ instances and never pay over the course of 10 year isn't sustainable for a business.
We just shut down our last Heroku dyno. Kudos to all the people who worked there, there were a lot of talented ones but lately the service has been a joke.
As a Heroku user, you pay a premium for AWS instances, essentially, with the premise being that things "just work" and that you get simple deploys.
Well, if by "just", you mean "barely" - sure! We had several hours of outages where Heroku's status page was still green. We even gave them metrics to show that the issue was with their routing layer, and they just told us that it was our apps fault and that perhaps we should get New Relic to see why it's so slow... After several months of prodding they acknowledged that it was their fault. Or, well, they blamed another customer for excessive use of resources or something like that.
As for simpler deploys. We had multiple incidents where our deploys got into some hybrid preboot state. (If you're not familiar with Heroku's terminology, a bit simplified: Preboot enabled = start the new instances, wait three minutes and then reroute traffic. Preboot disabled = stop the old instances, then start the new ones.) In our case, deploying with preboot enabled, Heroku stopped our old instances and then waited three minutes to start new ones... Again, this wasn't acknowledged by support until after several weeks, even those we provided logs showing exactly what happened with our instances. Now they have admitted that it's a bug, but our issue is still open.
Oh, and the Github integration was of course removed when they were hacked, so the DX argument isn't very strong either.
Heroku still has a free tier which is comparable to Render, Fly.io and all the other alternatives people keep bringing up. The mythical "an unlimited number of sites & DBs hosted for free forever" option everyone is looking for simply doesn't exist.
> new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year
I don't see how that's comparable. it's one instance of a micro server(and a few other things) for one year for a new AWS user and then it's over. heroku was an unlimited number of apps free tier forever with a limit on cpu/database usage for each app.
The terms are actually quite reasonable. You can't even pay for your resources without changing your account type (anything you buy with your free credit gets wiped out after the trial month, only the "always free" stuff remains...) so I'm reasonably certain you can use their service quite comfortably.
The 50mbps uplink isn't spectacular and certainly not enough to run a business on, but for anything the other free tiers are intended for (experimentation and hobby use) it's sufficient.
Juet remember to never give them your credit card number and provide as little personal information as legally allowed. You don't want the lawnmower to come in your direction, the lawnmower doesn't care.
maybe heroku and fly and others could start shelling books and shoes to help out...
it's been 12 years, but they had a decade of other business units helping to fund their service, and can afford loss leaders like few other businesses.
