Heroku has stated that it will discontinue all of its free services after providing them for more than ten years, forcing users to subscribe to premium plans instead. The free product plans and free data services on the Salesforce-owned cloud platform as a service will end on November 28. Additionally, starting on October 26, inactive accounts and the related storage for accounts that have been idle for more than a year will start to be deleted.
The end of the free services, which included the free plans for Heroku Dynos and Heroku Postgres as well as the free plan for Heroku Data for Redis, was attributed to “abuse” by Bob Wise, general manager of Heroku and Salesforce EVP. The management of fraud and misuse of the Heroku free product plans requires a tremendous amount of work, according to Wise, who also heads the product, engineering, and security teams. “We will keep offering affordable options for computing and data resources.”
The details of Heroku’s student program will be revealed during Salesforce’s next Dreamforce conference in September, according to Wise, but for now, nothing is known about it.
For those who are unfamiliar, Heroku enables developers to create, execute, and grow apps in a variety of programming languages, such as Java, PHP, Scala, and Go. In 2010, Salesforce paid $212 million to acquire the business. Since then, it has supported Node.js, Clojure, and Heroku for Facebook, a package that makes it easier to deploy Facebook apps on Heroku infrastructure.
According to Heroku’s website, 13 million apps have been developed using its platform to date.
The elimination of Heroku’s free tiers will have an impact on a wide range of users, not only amateurs. Some users mention Heroku’s free plans as an efficient testing area for apps before deployment in a discussion thread on Y Combinator’s Hacker News forum. According to a user using by the handle “driverdan,” many of his company’s apps only require free-tier databases and “dynos” (Heroku’s term for Linux containers), and switching to one of the expensive plans will result in huge cost increases with, in his opinion, little benefits.
According to driverdan, “This move will nearly quadruple the cost of a basic app on pro dynos + DB + redis, from $25/m to $49/m [sic].” For comparison, the monthly starting prices for Heroku Dynos are $7, Heroku Data for Redis is $15, and Heroku Postgres is $9. “It would be acceptable if this change included a price drop to better match alternatives. However, as it stands, this modification will drastically raise the cost for anyone utilizing those sites that are free.
After all, Salesforce is a business. Only a few months after a hacker gained access to Heroku’s GitHub account and was able to collect client passwords, the pivot isn’t exactly the best look. Additionally, it comes as platform as a service competitors like Porter, Railway, Render, Fly.io, and Clever Cloud compete for a share of Heroku’s market with enticing pricing and features.
Whatever the case, Heroku’s future prospects got a little bit murkier today.
Important Information About Heroku Free Products
Dear Customer,
Thank you for being a Heroku user. Starting November 28, 2022, free Heroku Dynos, free Heroku Postgres, and free Heroku Data for Redis® will no longer be available. You can learn more about these and other important changes from our GM, Bob Wise, on the Heroku blog.
Existing free dynos and Heroku data add-ons will be impacted, so action by you is required. To prevent any disruption to your apps or data using free plans, you will need to upgrade from a free plan to a paid plan before November 28, 2022.
The free tier on Heroku has long had an abuse problem, there are lots of people who cycle free accounts to do things like run torrents, host bots, etc. My guess is they found it easier to deprecate the free tier rather than build out more robust enforcement mechanisms, the minimal cost savings in terms of compute and resources is just a side effect.
Heroku Free Alternatives:
- Supabase https://supabase.com/ has a free tier
- Darklang https://darklang.com/ is still free, if you’re into learning a new functional programming language and way of testing and deploying stuff.
- There’s also Fly.io https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/ which has a “trial” tier that seems decent.
- Railway https://railway.app/pricing has a pretty good looking free plan (more memory than some of the other options at least).
- Deta https://www.deta.sh/ seems to be entirely free — I just had a browse around the main page and couldn’t figure out what the catch is, other than it’s limited to Python and Node.
https://blog.heroku.com/next-chapter
Heroku’s Next Chapter
Never before has Salesforce given Heroku’s future more of a priority. We’re announcing today:
- Launch of our dynamic product roadmap for Heroku on GitHub. Public roadmap.
- Put your attention where it matters most: stop offering free product plans and erase inactive accounts.
- Program for supporting organizations and students: In collaboration with our nonprofit team, this initiative will benefit nonprofits and students.
- Support for open source projects: We will keep making contributions to open source initiatives, particularly Cloud Native Buildpacks. Through Salesforce’s Open Source Program Office, we will provide Heroku credits to a few selected open source applications.
Open Road Map
We promised to be more open and forthcoming when you requested us to discuss our ideas for Heroku’s future. We are moving forward by posting the Heroku roadmap on GitHub live today! We invite your thoughts on the roadmap itself as well as your feedback on this new initiative. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this project and are eager to engage with you there.
Focus on the Mission Critical
Customers adore Heroku’s today’s incredibly simple developer experience. Customers are expecting us to maintain that experience going ahead while giving security advancements, dependability, regional availability, and compliance top priority. The mutual TLS and private key protection we released in June is an excellent illustration of security innovation.
The management of fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans is a major focus for our product, engineering, and security teams. We will gradually phase out our free plan for Heroku Dynos, free plan for Heroku Postgres, and free plan for Heroku Data for Redis®, as well as delete inactive accounts, in order to concentrate our resources on providing clients with mission-critical capabilities.
We will start removing dormant accounts and related storage for accounts that have been idle for more than a year on October 26, 2022. We intend to stop providing free product plans on November 28, 2022, and we intend to begin shutting down free dynos and data services. We will contact impacted users via email in a number of different ways.
With Heroku Dynos starting at $7/month, Heroku Data for Redis® starting at $15/month, and Heroku Postgres starting at $9/month, we will continue to offer affordable options for compute and data resources. For up-to-date information, see Heroku Pricing Information. These have all the capabilities of the free plans plus additional certificate management and the guarantee that your dynos do not slumber, which helps to guarantee the responsiveness of your apps.
Program for Students and Nonprofits
We value Heroku’s history as a teaching tool. On Heroku, many students get their very first taste of releasing their program into the real world. Salesforce is dedicated to giving students the tools and opportunities they require to reach their full potential. At Dreamforce, we will make more announcements regarding our student program. We collaborate closely with our nonprofit staff on behalf of our nonprofit community.
Open Source Support
We are still actively involved in open source. Salesforce is pleased with the significant contribution that Cloud Native Buildpacks have made. We are the project’s maintainers. The Buildpacks project creates a runnable OCI image from the source code of your application. In 2018 the project was added to the CNCF Sandbox, and in 2020 it moved on to the incubation stage. Buildpacks eliminate the concern over how to package your application for deployment for the majority of Heroku users, and we are extending their internal use in tandem with our Kubernetes-based Hyperforce project.