I agree with most of what you say. The question I have is why would anyone care about new developers coming to their platform unless they had a plan, one day, to monetize those folks?
I think that’s part of the problem. They have no good plan on how to monetize them which is a problem. Instead of fixing that problem they just threw the baby out with the bath water.
Removing the free tier signals they can’t compete so they decided to remove something that only costs them money. Removing the free tier might even be a good/right decision, given their circumstances. What I am saying is removing the free tier appears to be them giving up on Heroku. It’s not like I’ve ever heard of someone migrating TO Heroku, especially not with their prices (and what you get for it). $25/mo per 512MB dyno? That’s just insane.
So if they aren’t trying to court new developers and they aren’t compelling as a PaaS to new customers then it seems the only place they can go is down. The lack of investment in the platform has already caused them to shed developers and today’s news will only accelerate that. All that’s left are people who are using it with Salesforce’s other products. Maybe that’s enough to make plenty of money but the Heroku we all knew (and some of us loved) seems to be gone, and that’s sad.
