Heroku Free Tier

» see heroku.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

heroku launched in october 2007 with a single idea: typing one command should be enough to put your code on the internet. james lindenbaum, adam wiggins, orion henry built it inside y combinator, and the cult of the twelve-factor app grew out of what they were doing. by 2010 it was the canonical ruby on rails host. salesforce bought it for $212 million the same year and let it run.

the free dyno was the thing that mattered for hobbyists. you got 550 hours per month of compute, scaling up to 1000 if you verified a card. an app idled to sleep after thirty minutes and woke on first request with a small cold-start delay. nobody loved the cold start, but nobody had to pay for the dyno either, and that was the whole pitch.

on august 25 2022 heroku posted a blog post titled "Heroku's Next Chapter" that announced the end of free product plans, citing fraud and abuse on free accounts. the sunset date was november 28 2022. free dynos were auto-converted to eco dynos and scaled to zero. heroku postgres free databases were deleted. you had two months to migrate or pay. the eco plan started at five dollars a month for 1000 shared dyno hours.

i was a computer engineer through this whole arc. heroku free was the place you pushed a weekend prototype to share with someone, and the place every tutorial on the internet pointed at when it said "now deploy this." after november 2022 the tutorials all changed. render, fly.io, railway, vercel, cloudflare workers, the same job got redistributed across six companies that each gave you a smaller free quota with a stricter rate limit.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

heroku was a paas before paas was a category name. the contract was simple: write a procfile, git push, get a url. heroku ran on aws under the hood but you never saw aws. that abstraction was the value, and for ten years it was the default answer when someone asked where to host a small thing.

the free tier was load-bearing for the brand. paying customers came from the funnel of hobbyists who shipped a side project, watched it work, hit the limits, upgraded. salesforce inherited that funnel and let it run on subsidy budget for twelve years before deciding it was too expensive.

~ the slide ~

by 2022 a free heroku dyno was being used to run open-proxy scripts, scraping bots, crypto miners, low-effort phishing flows that needed a clean domain. heroku's stated reason for the shutdown was that the security team spent extraordinary effort on this. the unstated reason was that aws was charging salesforce for every dyno-hour and the math stopped working.

the github community pages tell the rest of the story. on the morning of november 28 thousands of personal-portfolio sites, hobby slack bots, course-assignment apps, discord bots, link shorteners with two users, throwaway api proxies all returned application error. people who had not logged into heroku since 2017 found out their free postgres database had been deleted six months later when they tried to debug a broken portfolio link.

~ what got buried with it ~

heroku itself is still running. eco dynos, basic dynos, performance dynos, private spaces, the postgres tier. for a working business it is fine. what died was the assumption that a personal project could live somewhere indefinitely on someone else's credit card. that assumption was always a salesforce subsidy, and salesforce remembered.

the funny part is that fly.io and render took the entire indie-developer market without spending much on marketing. heroku had already done the marketing. all the new platforms had to do was offer the thing heroku had stopped offering, at a smaller scale, and wait for the redirected traffic.

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