Today I heard of http://phpfog.com/ which might be good for Facebook apps too.
I think the headline is a bit linkbaitish, especially because the bundle is so specific. It's not just Heroku+Facebook. If you take away RPM and use something else, the bundle is no longer cheaper. So it's for people who want Heroku+Facebook+RPM.
A bit out of subject but... the design of the overall Heroku website is just fantastic. For every new sections added, I'm always amazed by how the page looks great.
It is a great design except when you try and enter your credit card late at night and have to think about your expiration date because it's on your card as 03/13 and they make you translate it to March 2013 instead of just putting the numbers in front of the month drop down.
Then you have to make sure the CC number is entered with or without the dashes - I don't remember which. Then after you mess up the CC format they reset the expiration date back to the defaults and you don't notice and then have to start all over again for a third time. Great design - except for the part where you try and pay them.
I emailed them about it but I guess they have better things to do or don't want to offend their designers sensibility.
I wonder what the split between apps using the free instance and the rest of their products is? Are 90K of the apps just free accounts? I bet 5K are just people who went through RailsTutorial.org...
Still though - Heroku has a great service, and deserve their props.
I imagine the breakdown is pretty heavily weighted toward free accounts. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if 90% or so are free - I know I have a few projects on there that are mostly idle deployments of weekend tinkering. Personally, I haven't made anything yet that is "big" enough (ie generating enough traffic/data) to warrant me taking the leap to a paid account.
That being said, their infrastructure is such that I imagine free accounts only hurt them from a business perspective if they're consuming a lot of resources (bandwidth, processor time). And even then, if that is the case the user has probably already upgraded to a paid account. The overhead for idle projects is low, as apps are spun up on demand and killed for inactivity.
I think the headline is a bit linkbaitish, especially because the bundle is so specific. It's not just Heroku+Facebook. If you take away RPM and use something else, the bundle is no longer cheaper. So it's for people who want Heroku+Facebook+RPM.