While it doesn't seem certain any price change has happened. A drop in pricing has been way overdue, the cost of computing power and memory has been dropping but not Heroku pricing. I get that Heroku is meant to be a "premium" cloud product, but it often doesn't feel like one.
This also may not be much of a drop for people with minimal production requirements. Under the free hours system, 2x1X was $35 now it may be $50 unless the Hobby pricing is factored in for the first 1X and it's $25 + $7 = $32. For 2x2X the price drop will only be $6.50. Still it's good that the cost to scale has gone down.
The paid hobby tier is actually welcome change, the limitations of the free tier (often used for staging and demo environments) were (are?) annoying. The ability to run 1 dyno per Procfile entry (instead of per app) is a welcome change, as allows you to fully mimic production without dyno scaling more easily at a lower cost. People were likely using while allowing them to pay a reasonable price for these low-traffic systems.
I have been saying for a while 1X dyno is underpowered and unnecessarily memory limited considering it's price (particularly for Rails apps) even before 2X was announced. If I had my way the 1X would be dropped in favour of the 2X at the same price and the 1X only used for hobby and things like a worker role handling infrequent job queue processing. These price changes come pretty close to doing that, while adding a paid, but low-cost, hobby tier for applications with very limited needs.
GAE lost a lot of users in their price hike a few years back, so on the mid/higher end it makes sense. But, hiking on the low end may "save some headaches" but it puts off potentially moneyed ventures "with the bathwater" in a "no public restrooms" way. (Such "signs" are mostly pointless and just make the "shop" look discriminatory.)
This also may not be much of a drop for people with minimal production requirements. Under the free hours system, 2x1X was $35 now it may be $50 unless the Hobby pricing is factored in for the first 1X and it's $25 + $7 = $32. For 2x2X the price drop will only be $6.50. Still it's good that the cost to scale has gone down.
The paid hobby tier is actually welcome change, the limitations of the free tier (often used for staging and demo environments) were (are?) annoying. The ability to run 1 dyno per Procfile entry (instead of per app) is a welcome change, as allows you to fully mimic production without dyno scaling more easily at a lower cost. People were likely using while allowing them to pay a reasonable price for these low-traffic systems.
I have been saying for a while 1X dyno is underpowered and unnecessarily memory limited considering it's price (particularly for Rails apps) even before 2X was announced. If I had my way the 1X would be dropped in favour of the 2X at the same price and the 1X only used for hobby and things like a worker role handling infrequent job queue processing. These price changes come pretty close to doing that, while adding a paid, but low-cost, hobby tier for applications with very limited needs.
Let's hope this is actually serious.