Heroku's new pricing

Heroku is a hosting service that is built to scale as your web app grows. I have used them for hobby projects for a long time, but I have seldom paid any money to Heroku.

Their free tier was simply too good. You could basically deploy a Rails app and host it for free. Sure, you had to give them your credit card details, but as long as you ordered any paid add-ons or upgraded your plan it was free forever. Until now.

A week ago Heroku announced their new plans. They are essentially killing their free plan for serious hosting. I understand how they are thinking and I think it is a wise move.

The new ‘Free’ and ‘Hobby’ plans

The new free Heroku plan allows you to run a dyno (essentially a server) for free for 18 hours per day. That is usually enough to do development and demo something to your clients, but not enough to host something that is supposed to be online every day - like a blog.

The have a new plan called ‘Hobby’ that will cost you $7 per month and give 24/7 online time. The hobby plan on Heroku won’t have the limitations that the free plan has (like sleeping after 30 minutes of inactivity or scheduled downtime per day). The other plans got a bit cheaper too. Overall I think this is good news.

Since Heroku already have a big following they will pretty much cut costs and make people either move to their paid services or switch to another provider. This is smart. Business focused developers will still hang around. The freebie-hunters will move away.

There will be lots of developers who are annoyed by this decision, though.

Some quotes from developers on Twitter:

18 hours per day? Not too shabby!

Max uptime of 18 hours? That is really bad news.

Once they were friends of hobby-developers. Now they are a money-making scheme!

Wierd biz move! Their advantage was the simple but expensive upsell when scaling.

What do you think?