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.

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.