With Heroku free tier is coming to an end and people are looking for Heroku alternatives, it may be naive to look for another free service- news flash: Nothing is really free!
Even though it was limited it still gave a lot of grad students the opportunity to take their first steps and host their projects. While it is disappointing to see Heroku end its free tier, it's good to look at alternatives because the container hosting services / app hosting has changed a lot since Heroku came on the scene.
The much loved service started to come into question after it was sold to Salesforce, it's very exciting to see the recent announcement from Salesforce which was not just about Salesforce ending the Heroku free tier:
I don't think we can see the return of Heroku's free tire any time soon, but the future of Heroku doesn't look as bleak as it seems, in fact the future couldn't be any brighter, with heroku using all their resources, they can now take the time to work with their customers and partners with their new business model.
Simplicity. I have a git repo, and if I `git push` my repo, then my web application will be live. This is a fast feedback loop. We
have lost this fast feedback loop with the rise of DevOps. As Infoworld pointed out Devs don't want to do ops, they simply want to
make their web app live and let someone else deal with it. Container hosting service is exactly that- you get a hosted place for your
app, a database and an SSL certificate. Simple, we don't need to mess around with Kubernetes or Docker or anything like that - we just need to get the app online.
Cloud is in a complexity crisis and container hosting services like Fly, Render, Heroku etc are a return to productivity. I don't want to spend a week working out the correct IAM policy in
AWS, I'll probably get it wrong anyway. Yes we want security, but complexity is not going to help with being more secure. Do you know what does? Simplicity.
It's not clear they did. Perhaps the product simply ran its course? Perhaps this new announcement is exactly what Heroku needs and (clearly) is getting- some fresh public attention.
Who knows what exciting new things Heroku will offer. Community trust is important and this is not unique to Heroku- Lastpass had the same challenge when they changed their pricing model
and upset a lot of users. The truth is you're never going to make people who previously had something for free, and then expect them to pay happy- and that's OK. The challenge is how to communicate that.
Heroku should have conveyed their change in a more phased-out manner, it's good for a business to change and adapt but not at the cost of their customers and community.
That being said, we have new exciting things on the horizon for Heroku thanks to their new business model, even though it might not be for everyone, you can't always satisfy all your users.
Even though Heroku pioneered and led the way in hosting services/app hosting, it has come a long way from where it was at the start. At one point, Heroku was the go to answer for anyone who wanted to learn, with its simple yet fast hosting, it was a no-brainier and fostered a community of like minded new users who had a thirst and curiosity to learn that could not be satiated, but all good things never last... a lot of people who want to learn for the first time are going to find it hard to find a new alternative to host, so we would like to point you in the right direction and show you some of the alternatives that you should consider.
On the whole, it seems like Heroku is doing a very good attempt at that- investing in education and a non-profit. Haters gonna hate, but it would be hard pressed to say Heroku is throwing their user base under a bus- a lot of free tier users are using Heroku because they are learning and perhaps don't have an income stream strong enough to pay for it. In that light, an education focused non-profit angle makes a lot of sense.
It's an opportunistic post to draw attention to: