The Heroku Pricing Gap + Add-on Fever

The Heroku Pricing Gap + Add-on Fever(blog.bryanlanders.com)

29 points by andrew_k 13 years ago | 8 comments

Remember Heroku have to support millions of users on the free tier on a permanent basis, all of which costs very real cash money compared to your average freemium web business.

AWS only have a temporary free usage tier so collect money right up front even on the smallest projects.

For that reason, these relatively large step functions in pricing at the low end are reasonable from where I'm sitting.

xiaoma 13 years ago | |

It sounds like you're agreeing with the OP.

Heroku is a great deal for people just starting out, somewhat at the expense of those who have already grown larger. His strategy seems sound-- use Heroku at the beginning, then if and when it gets unjustifiably expensive, switch to AWS.

carsongross 13 years ago |

The OP undervalues that bit in the TLDR: "stress-free deployment". For us, hiring or contracting a DevOps guy with 1/10th the chops of the heroku crew would cost 10x what we are paying them, and I don't think we'd have a better quality of life.

Heroku is only expensive if your time has no value.

bryanlanders 13 years ago | |

Yes, maintenance (upgrades, security patches, scaling up instances...) if you're going DIY on AWS is also significant. The time needed for setup + maintenance varies greatly depending on the developer(s) as well as the exact project needs, but at a minimum, Heroku needs to be at least as expensive as AWS minimum costs + bare minimum setup costs before switching to AWS could be considered cost-effective.

geon 13 years ago |

What kind of traffic could you handle on a 100% free account? Would it be feasible for a low-traffic website, say a few k requests per month?

If I want to upload files, is it necessary to have an Amazon account? As I understand it, you can't use Heroku for dynamic file storage.

bryanlanders 13 years ago | |

No idea. Someone who has experienced that on Heroku should weigh in...

We're hosting static media on S3, but this project has no UGC and very limited amount of media assets, so you'd have to consider the AWS costs depending on your own needs.

When I first deployed to Heroku, I was serving media right from the web dyno, and it was working, but since the app is serving up the files (not Nginx serving them directly instead, or similar), I'd imagine that's not a great solution in terms of scalability.

bryanlanders 13 years ago |

@glenngillen (a Heroku dev) mentioned that it's the add-on providers who set the pricing for add-ons.

https://twitter.com/glenngillen/status/218830351307522048

sasoon 13 years ago |

90$ for 1GB memcached? I am paying 65$ for the whole server (i7 quad, 32GB ram, 3TB disk, 10TB bandwidth) and can setup 30GB memcached if needed.