Heroku to discontinue free product plans and delete inactive accounts

[SquareWheel]

This was discussed largely in this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594533

[mkl]

Confusingly, "largely" means "mostly". You probably want something like "extensively".

[tmpz22]

I learned web development through "Ruby on Rails Tutorial" by Michael Hartl. The book is a project-based tutorial where you create a Twitter clone complete with a basic authentication system.

The book had you host your app on the free version of Heroku. I imagine this book has taught a lot of people, and influenced a lot of people to use Heroku.

Not anymore I guess.

[walterbell]

That tutorial belongs in the Tech and Zero-DRM Publishing Halls of Fame for

  - free to read digital content
  - paid paper books
  - paid video upsell
  - multiple six figures of revenue
  - frequent updates 

Shockingly, few have tried to repeat this feat, despite Hartl providing a low-fee SaaS for this purpose.

[JohnBooty]

I should note that this book is still excellent.

We've been using it to teach new Rails developers at our workplace, where we have a "hire the best engineer available" policy even if they have no Rails experience. You can just skip the Heroku bits.

Of course, knowing Hartl, he'll also soon update the book accordingly.

And, it's a shame that Heroku is no longer an option for brand new developers who won't know that painless deploy-to-web. I know there are alternatives but I'm not familiar with them.

[bluedino]

It's how learned Rails.

Interviewed, was given a take home project to complete, and went straight to borders and bought the book. Went through the book in a couple days then completed the project and ended up getting the job.

[eschulz]

I also went through that book many years ago. It was great to start with no experience and make an app that could be working online at no cost!

[BalinKing]

Possibly related, I don’t think the book itself is free anymore (at least, if I’m reading railstutorial.com correctly).

[BSOhealth]

I essentially earned a college degree’s worth of languages/frameworks (Ruby, Node ecosystems) on free Heroku instances, and I owe my career to it. Other comments speak to this point as well. There’s probably a generation of us who completed some blog/O’Reilly “curriculum” involving Heroku > Digital Ocean > AWS > etc.

I never paid Heroku a dime and, after everything has shaken out, I don’t know why I would start now.

[charles_kaw]

> I never paid Heroku a dime and, after everything has shaken out, I don’t know why I would start now.

Well, that's the problem, isn't it?

They provided a valuable service to lots of people on their own dime, and saw no reward for it. Now they've been bought by a large player who, presumably, wants their infra and expertise.

[tehwebguy]

There are plenty of cool alternatives but one I’ve used and don’t see mentioned here is Dokku, which was trivial for me to set up on, in my case, a cheap droplet on DigitalOcean.

https://dokku.com/

[RileyJames]

Same, been running 4 rails apps on a $40 per month droplet.

Works really well for small projects. One of which has gained traction and I’m about to migrate off. Not that I have any issues that I need to migrate away for, but it seems sensible to have it on its own infra / isolated environment if we’re going to be working on it more seriously.

[xena]

This made me have feelings, I wrote them up on my blog: https://xeiaso.net/blog/rip-heroku

I wish that things were better such that we could have nice things.

[woojoo666]

A bit unrelated but I love the use of stable diffusion here, and thanks for providing the prompts as well for reference!

[yumswiss]

Will there be a new pricing tier or lowest being $7?

[japhyr]

I haven't seen anything to indicate there will be anything cheaper than $7. But if you need a data store, and who doesn't with a service that uses Heroku, I think you'll have to pay for that as well. For example, the cheapest Postgres instance is $9/month.

[toyg]

They are switching to an enterprise-oriented model, which means they'll nickel-and-dime you for everything. If you can't afford a few hundreds on basic infra, you really should look elsewhere.