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

(disco.cloud)
804 points jryio | 8 comments | 21 Oct 25 20:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.868s | source | bottom
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jdprgm ◴[21 Oct 25 21:44 UTC] No.45662112[source]▶
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.

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1. layoric ◴[21 Oct 25 22:58 UTC] No.45662802[source]▶
> $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..

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2. electroly ◴[22 Oct 25 00:19 UTC] No.45663511[source]▶
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.

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3. bearjaws ◴[22 Oct 25 00:20 UTC] No.45663515[source]▶
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.

4. selcuka ◴[22 Oct 25 01:34 UTC] No.45663982[source]▶
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.
5. troyvit ◴[22 Oct 25 04:42 UTC] No.45664954[source]▶
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.
6. NohatCoder ◴[22 Oct 25 12:50 UTC] No.45668299[source]▶
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.

7. layoric ◴[23 Oct 25 10:07 UTC] No.45680188[source]▶
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?
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8. electroly ◴[23 Oct 25 16:43 UTC] No.45683998{3}[source]▶
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.