TBH I'm surprised that it took this long to move to this!
Back when Heroku first arrived, PaaS was a new idea. It was available ~2009, well before services like AWS Lambda existed.
This was such a paradigm shift that no one knew what to think of it. It takes time to build trust around such a big shift. The best way to do this is to offer to try it for free. Hence, the Free Tier.
People tried it, and were blown away by how easy it was to build services. It was so much easier than managing hosts directly. Fast forward to today. Engineers are generally comfortable with higher-level services. They know what to expect.
So the free tier is used as as part of the funnel to onboard new customers. Back in 2010, that funnel had a /lot/ of customers going in! Here in 2022, that funnel may be basically zero. On top of that, the free tier costs heroku to run.
Cutting off the free tier is in Heroku's best interest. It saves them money and allows them to focus on their current customers. But it does mean that there's no growth in the product any more, unless they offer something new.
> Back in 2010, that funnel had a /lot/ of customers going in! Here in 2022, that funnel may be basically zero.
That's not because 12 years passed, it's because Heroku didn't innovate or even keep abreast of the competition in that timeframe.
> Cutting off the free tier is in Heroku's best interest. It saves them money and allows them to focus on their current customers.
It cuts off the only onramp they had for entry developers or developers who can't afford to pay their ridiculous prices (I mean come on, $25/mo for 512MB of ram? Is this a joke? It was expensive but understandable when they launched and has only gotten worse while the product has not improved which competitors have blazed past them).
> But it does mean that there's no growth in the product any more, unless they offer something new.
I won't hold my breath, it seems clear they are life support at this point.
100% agreed with this. Having fewer customers using the free tier in 2022 would make it cheaper to run.
It's the stagnation and the realization that they can't compete that's pushing them to sell based on their brand instead of their merit. "Life support" is one way of phrasing that. The other might be "bleeding the tech dry".
> It's the stagnation and the realization that they can't compete that's pushing them to sell based on their brand instead of their merit.
What a beautifully succinct way of putting it, and I couldn't agree more. They aren't competitive on tech, they aren't competitive on price, and this is has already pissed off a number of customers who have been with them from the beginning (starting on the free tier, growing to 10's of thousands of dollars a month) and who are now looking elsewhere. All they have is their Heroku/Salesforce name, neither of which are compelling IMHO.
Back when Heroku first arrived, PaaS was a new idea. It was available ~2009, well before services like AWS Lambda existed.
This was such a paradigm shift that no one knew what to think of it. It takes time to build trust around such a big shift. The best way to do this is to offer to try it for free. Hence, the Free Tier.
People tried it, and were blown away by how easy it was to build services. It was so much easier than managing hosts directly. Fast forward to today. Engineers are generally comfortable with higher-level services. They know what to expect.
So the free tier is used as as part of the funnel to onboard new customers. Back in 2010, that funnel had a /lot/ of customers going in! Here in 2022, that funnel may be basically zero. On top of that, the free tier costs heroku to run.
Cutting off the free tier is in Heroku's best interest. It saves them money and allows them to focus on their current customers. But it does mean that there's no growth in the product any more, unless they offer something new.