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

(disco.cloud)
804 points jryio | 2 comments | 21 Oct 25 20:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.005s | source
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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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czhu12 ◴[21 Oct 25 21:47 UTC] No.45662140[source]▶
> 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.

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nicoburns ◴[21 Oct 25 22:02 UTC] No.45662287[source]▶
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.
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gregsadetsky ◴[21 Oct 25 22:16 UTC] No.45662421[source]▶
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..!
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bcrosby95 ◴[21 Oct 25 22:23 UTC] No.45662488[source]▶
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...

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1. bragr ◴[22 Oct 25 05:58 UTC] No.45665351{3}[source]▶
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.
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2. bcrosby95 ◴[22 Oct 25 15:22 UTC] No.45670536[source]▶
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.