Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

Just saw Nate Berkopec who does a lot of rails performance stuff posting about the same idea yesterday saying Heroku is 25-50x price for performance which is so insane. They clearly have zero interest in competing on price.

It's a shame they don't just license all their software stack at a reasonable price with a similar model like Sidekiq and let you sort out actually decent hardware. It's insane to consider Heroku if anything has gotten more expensive and worse compared to a decade ago yet in comparison similar priced server hardware has gotten WAY better of a decade. $50 for a dyno with 1 GB of ram in 2025 is robbery. It's even worse considering running a standard rails app hasn't changed dramatically from a resources perspective and if anything has become more efficient. It's comical to consider how many developers are shipping apps on Heroku for hundreds of dollars a month on machines with worse performance/resources than the macbook they are developing it on.

It's the standard playback that damn near everything in society is going for though just jacking prices and targeting the wealthiest least price sensitive percentiles instead of making good products at fair prices for the masses.

> It's a shame they don't just license all their software stack at a reasonable price with a similar model like Sidekiq and let you sort out actually decent hardware

We built and open sourced https://canine.sh for exactly that reason. There’s no reason PaaS providers should be charging such a giant markup over already marked up cloud providers.

It's insane how much my local shop charges for an oil change, I can do it much cheaper myself!

It's insane how much a restaurant charges for a decent steak, I can do it much cheaper myself!

...!

I know you mean this sarcastically but I actually 100% agree with this particular on the steak point. Especially with beef prices at all time record highs and restaurant inflation being out of control post pandemic. It takes so much of the enjoyment out of things for me if I feel i'm being ripped off left and right.

This looks decent for what it is. I feel like there are umpteen solutions for easy self-hosted compute (and tbh even a plain Linux VM isn't too bad to manage). The main reason to use a PAAS provider is a managed database with built-in backups.

This argument doesn't work with such commoditized software. It's more like comparing an oil change for $100 plus an hour of research and a short drive against a convenient oil change right next door for $2,500.

Not the best comment but I agree with the sentiment. I fear far too often, people complain about price when there are competitors/other cheaper options that could be used with a little more effort. If people cared so much then they should just use the alternative.

No one gets hurt if someone else chooses to waste their money on Heroku so why are people complaining? Of course it applies in cases where there aren't a lot of competitors but there are literally hundreds of different of different options for deploying applications and at least a dozen of them are just as reliable and cheaper than Heroku.

The price value proposition here seems similar to that of a stadium hot dog.

It's just trendy to bash cloud and praise on-premises in 2025. In a few years that will turn around. Then in another few years it will turn around again.

Fully agreed - our recommendation is to /not/ run your prod Postgres db yourself, but use one of the many great dedicated options out there - Crunchy Data, Neon, Supabase, or AWS RDS..!

It really depends upon how much data you have. If its enough to just dump then go crazy. If it isn't its a bit more trouble.

Regardless, you're going to have a much easier time developing your app if your datastore access latency is submillisecond rather than tens of milliseconds.

So that extra trouble might be worth it...

Does it run Sentry and I can send logs, metrics, and traces to it, and the queries are fast?

Where’s the beef inflation? Local butcher has prime rib fillet $30 AUD/KG cut to your liking.

Nobody is forced to go to the expensive one. If they are still in business then enough people apparently consider it a reasonable deal. You might not, but others do. Whether I'm being downvoted or not.

Indeed, there are levels to the asymmetry though. Oil change might be ~5x cheaper vs the 20-50x claimed for Heroku...

The problem with Heroku's pricing is that it's set high enough that I no longer use it and neither does anyone else I know. I suspect they either pivoted to a different target market than me, which would be inconvenient but I'd be okay with it, or killed off their own growth potential by trying to extract revenue, which I would find sad.

One also doesn't get shamed by the steak snobs if you have different steak preferences.

> $50 for a dyno with 1 GB of ram in 2025 is robbery

AWS isn't much better honestly.. $50/month gets you an m7a.medium which is 1 vCPU (not core) and 4GB of RAM. Yes that's more memory but any wonder why AWS is making money hand-over-fist..

Or having to cut the steak with a serrated "steak" knife that tears the meat.

Heroku is pricing for “# of FTE headcount that can be terminated for switching to Heroku”; in that sense, this article’s $3000/mo bill is well below 1.0 FTE/month at U.S. pricing, so it’s not interesting to Heroku to address. I’m not defending this pricing lens, but it’s why their pricing is so high: if you aren’t switching to Heroku to layoff at least 1-2 FTE of salary per billing period, or using Heroku to replace a competitor’s equivalent replacement thereof, Heroku’s value assigned to you as a customer is net negative and they’d rather you went elsewhere. They can’t slam the door shut on the small fry, or else the unicorns would start up elsewhere, but they can set the pricing in FTE-terms and VCs will pay it for their moonshots without breaking a sweat.

> for an oil change, I can do it much cheaper myself

Really? I mean oil changes are pretty cheap. You can get an oil change at walmart for like 40 bucks.

m7a doesn't use HyperThreading; 1 vCPU is a full dedicated core.

To compare to Heroku's standard dynos (which are shared hosting) you want the t3a family which is also shared, and much cheaper.

That is assuming you need that 1 core 24/7, you can get 2 core / 8gb for $43, this will most likely fit 90% of workloads (steady traffic with spikes, or 9-5 cadence).

If you reserve that instance you can get it for 40% cheaper, or get 4 cores instead.

Yes it's more expensive than OVH but you also get everything AWS to offer.

Its the flexibility and power of Kubernetes that I think is incredible. Scaling to multiple nodes is trivial, if your entire data plane is blown away, the recovery is trivial.

You can also self host almost any open source service without any fuss, and perform internal networking with telepresence. (For example, if you want to run an internal metabase that is not available on public internet, you can just run `telepresence connect`, and then visit the private instance at metabase.svc.cluster.local).

Canine tries to leverage all the best practices and pre-existing tools that are already out there.

But agreed, business critical databases probably shouldn't belong on Kubernetes.

Jacked up prices isn't what is happening here. There is a psychological effect that Heroku and other cloud vendors are (wittingly or unwittingly) the beneficiary of. Customer expectations are anchored in the price they pay when they start using the service, and without deliberate effort, those expectations change in _linear_ fashion. Humans think in linear terms, while actual compute hardware improvements are exponential.

Heroku's pricing has _remained the same_ for at least seven years, while hardware has improved exponentially. So when you look at their pricing and see a scam, what you're actually doing is comparing a 2025 anchor to a mid-2010s price that exists to retain revenue. At the big cloud vendors, they differentiate customers by adding obstacles to unlocking new hardware performance in the form of reservations and updated SKUs. There's deliberate customer action that needs to take place. Heroku doesn't appear to have much competition, so they keep their prices locked and we get to read an article like this whenever a new engineer discovers just how capable modern hardware is.

Not sure if it's an apples-to-apples comparison with Heroku's $50 Standard-2X dyno, but an Amazon Lightsail instance with 1GB of RAM and 2 vCPUs is $7/month.

And you get the stripped out bolt hole for free too.

What you're missing here is that companies happily pay the premium to Heroku because it lets them focus on building the product and generating business rather than wasting precious engineering time managing infra.

By the time the product is a success and reaches a scale where it becomes cost prohibitive, they have enough resources to expand or migrate away anyway.

I suppose for solo devs it might be cheaper to setup a box for fun, but even then, I would argue that not everyone enjoys doing devops and prefers spending their time elsewhere.

My understanding is that here in Oz we get access to cheaper beef than the rest of the world...

Yeah, I choose railway app for my PaaS hosting for this reason

Heroku is the Vercel of Rails: people will pay a fortune for it simply because it works. This has always been their business model, so it’s not really a new development. There’s little competition since the demand isn’t explosive and the margin is thin, so you end up with stagnation

Vercel should have a ton of competition on account of the frontend space being much larger than Heroku's market.

Netlify sets the same prices.

Just throw it into a cloud bucket from CI and be done with it.

You'd be surprised. There are very few because it takes a lot more work to build reliable systems across mid-market cloud providers (flakey APIs, missing functionality, etc). Plus you need to know the idiosyncrasies of all the various frameworks + build systems.

That said, they are emerging. I'm actually working on a drop-in Vercel competitor at https://www.sherpa.sh. We're 70% lower cost by running on EU based CDN and dedicated servers (Hetzner, etc). But we had to build the relationships to solve all the above challenges first.

> If they are still in business then enough people apparently consider it a reasonable deal.

Or they didn't check. A business still existing is pretty weak evidence that the pricing is reasonable.

I mean Heroku is also offering all of the ancillary stuff around their product. It's not literally "just" hosting. It's pretty nice to not have to manage a kube cluster, to get stuff like ephemeral QA envs and the like, etc....

Heroku has obviously stagnated now but their stack is _very cool_ for if you have a fairly simple system but still want all the nice parts of a mode developed ops system. It almost lets you get away with not having an ops team for quite a while. I don't know any other provider that is low-effort "decent" ops (Fly seems to directionally want to be new Heroku but is still missing a _lot_ in my book, though it also has a lot)

I am not sure what's there to license. The hard and expensive part is in the labor to keep everything running. You are paying to make DevSecOps Somebody Else's Problem. You are paying for A Solution. You are not paying for software. There are plenty of Heroku clones mentioned in this thread.

Now I know why the teaching platform I use is trying to kick me off...

Every other time I login to the admin site I get a Heroku error.

I'm hurt because a service I'm using is based on Heroku. I'm on the "unlimited" plan but they have backtracked on that and now say I'm too big for them...

This, plus as a backup plan going from Heroku to AWS wouldn't necessarily solve the problem, at least with our infra. When us-east-1 went down this week so did Heroku for us.

You're running at a pretty small scale if running your database locally for sub-milisecond latency is practical. The database solution provided by the DBA team in a data center is going to have about the same latency as RDS or equivalent. Typical intra-datacenter network latency alone is going to be 1-3ms.

I think it’s easy to forget how much you get with a modern setup like this, and how much work it is to maintain it. If you’re at a big corp, the team who maintains this stuff is larger than most mid corp’s engineering departments. For a solo person, it’s fine. But if you have 10-30 engineers, it’s a lot of work, and paying heroku $1000/mo is significantly cheaper than having even a junior engineer spend 40% of their time on keeping up.

> other cloud vendors

To be fair, AWS quite proudly talk about all the times they've lowered prices on existing services, or have introduced new generations that are cheaper (e.g. their Graviton EC2 instances).

Canine looks cool man.

Well said. I’ve been expecting an obvious spiritual successor for a long time. They have a surprising number of features compared to most platforms. Their databases/redis and features like forking were quite good (as long as you were super big), logplex/log shipping, auto scale, add-on ecosystem, promotion pipelines, container support if needed (good build packs/git support if you don’t), good CLI or API, OS/patch management, hobby plans and enterprise plans, and more. And on top of all of that, the user/projects system is something mortals can wrap their heads around. They found the sweet spot between raw servers and the complexity quagmire of the mega-clouds a surprisingly long time ago.

There are some folks with good offerings (Fly, Railway, etc), but the feature set of Heroku is deeper, and more important for production apps, than most people realize. They aren’t a good place for hobbyists anymore though. I agree with that.

AWS certainly also does daylight robbery. In the AWS model the normal virtual servers are overpriced, but not super overpriced.

Where they get you is all the ancillary shit, you buy some database/backup/storage/managed service/whatever, and it is priced in dollars per boogaloo, you also have to pay water tax on top, and of course if you use more than the provisioned amount of hafnias the excess ones cost 10x as much.

Most customers have no idea how little compute they are actually buying with those services.

They were talking about using things like Supabase, not just RDS.

Also, "small scale" means different things to different people. Given the full topic at hand, I would call it "nano scale". Depending upon your specific schema, you can serve tens of thousands of queries per second with a single server on modern hardware, which is way more than enough for the vast majority of workloads.

Maybe what bothers people so much is more of the fact that when Heroku first came out, it was much harder to do what that platform does. In the past 20 years or so, there has been a ton of improvement in the tools available. What could’ve taken you three full-time employees can probably be done with 20% of someone’s time after the initial set up which also isn’t that hard. So, it seems like instead of charging like 50X the cost of the servers themselves, maybe Heroku could be charging 10X. But it seems like salesforce probably just bought Heroku as a cash-generating machine. They probably figure they have a lot more to lose in cutting the bills of their old customers who don’t want to migrate anything, then they could gain from attracting new customers who aren’t already locked in.

Honestly, reading these threads it sounds to me like a lot of people are still launching new projects on Heroku. I wouldn’t have guessed that was true before reading this.

I’m pretty sure their target market is people who have already built something kind of complex on there and don’t have the time/money budget to do a big migration. In that way, they know their customers are stuck but can afford the current prices, so keeping pricing static or gradually increasing makes sense.

Looks like it: https://artifacthub.io/packages/helm/sentry/sentry

Heroku made an application I worked on possible. I don't think we had the team to maintain the application stack without something like it. It enabled the company to exist long enough to get the magical stock exit. I'm forever grateful for it existing.

I must be confused, my understanding was m7a was 4th generation Epyc (Genoa, Bergamo and Siena) which I believe all have 2 threads per core no?

Is it deeper than render.com? Can heroku run static sites or distributed Elixir/Erlang? Personally I’m on fly as the pricing is even better and I prefer the UX, but render is basically what heroku should be in 2025.

If your needs are really simple, check out bugsink.com which is sentry compatible. I swapped out few weeks ago and so far, so good.

You're not confused--AWS either gets custom chips without it, or they disable the SMT. I'm not sure which. Here's where AWS talks about it: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/m7a/

> One of the major differences between M7a instances and the previous generations of instances, such as M6a instances, is their vCPU to physical processor core mapping. Every vCPU on a M7a instance is a physical CPU core. This means there is no Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT). By contrast, every vCPU on prior generations such as M6a instances is a thread of a CPU core.

My wild guess is they're disabling it. For Intel instance families they loudly praise their custom Intel processors, but this page does not contain the word "custom" anywhere.