I agree. And I know this is unpopular, but I think none of these companies should be expected to have a free tier. A low-cost tier? Certainly. Perhaps even a free trial with a credit card? Great.
But our team, who has used Heroku for over a decade, got bit multiple times by Heroku having a free tier.
Why were we impacted by other apps? Because Heroku’s load balancers are shared amongst all their apps. That includes all the sketchy apps running on the platform.
If Heroku could somehow isolate us from everyone else? Great - and they offered that for awhile with a reasonably-priced Add-On supported by them called SSL Endpoint. It cost about $15/month and put us into a pool that was shared with other folks willing to spend that much per month to run their app.
I understand that’s not great for a hobby project. But for those of us trying to run a large product on Heroku and not have to spend multiple extra thousands of dollars every month for a Heroku Private Space, this was a great way of pooling: put a small fee in place for one pool of resources. Not many malware writers or other misbehaving app creators will probably want to spend that much per month.
But they axed that a few years ago. Only a couple months after when we were thrown back into the load balancer pool with all the other free apps, one of the IPs was marked as spam and we had to figure out a kind of janky solution.
Additionally, Heroku seemingly spent a ton of resources on free tier support, malware fighting, etc. I hope to see more features on Heroku since they’ve dropped that support… but I haven’t seen much evidence of that in roughly six months since they did that. But we’ll see.
Most of these platform have reached their critical mass to stay in business (and time to attract the customers like you) only because of the free tier.
Sorry but even a low cost tier is too much for most wanting to give a try to a new infrastructure/stack. Most of these adoptions come from hobby projects trying it first and then recommending to use it in a professional setting. In a professional setting yes. you can afford to pay to low cost to evaluate it but you cant afford the time to do so. So they always rightly offer a trade of time to evaluate for the free cost. This is what actually brings the initial customers.
Do you have examples of companies in this space that actually reached break-even? Heroku never hit profitability as far as I remember and with the Salesforce acquisition the question of profitability is moot. AWS is a counter-example to using a free tier as a GTM strategy. AWS did not start with a free-tier offering for S3 or EC2, that only came years later. By then they already had significant traction in the market.
I don't know if they have reached break-even. I know that they are in business for a long time and are clearly getting investments based on the usage and the potential. Usage that would not be there were it not for the Free time contributed to test-drive their offering and the free "evangelizing" done by those "free-loaders". AWS/Google/Microsoft are in a different league because they can afford the waiting game for actual Enterprise Evaluations or can afford massive sale forces (Azure case). Smaller players can not afford it and have to rely on "recommendations" based on past experiences.
I wish I shared your enthusiasm for where Heroku could go but I have a few friends at Salesforce I've asked about how they see Heroku internally and it really doesn't seem like it is going to get much love. Hope to be wrong though.
Thanks! I have talked with two Heroku folks who say (to me, a paying customer of Heroku Enterprise) that Heroku is absolutely in active development.
I let them know they need to demonstrate that to me. They have a roadmap [1], but it seems to have barely anything moving forward, including some really important concepts like http/2 support.
But our team, who has used Heroku for over a decade, got bit multiple times by Heroku having a free tier.
Why were we impacted by other apps? Because Heroku’s load balancers are shared amongst all their apps. That includes all the sketchy apps running on the platform.
If Heroku could somehow isolate us from everyone else? Great - and they offered that for awhile with a reasonably-priced Add-On supported by them called SSL Endpoint. It cost about $15/month and put us into a pool that was shared with other folks willing to spend that much per month to run their app.
I understand that’s not great for a hobby project. But for those of us trying to run a large product on Heroku and not have to spend multiple extra thousands of dollars every month for a Heroku Private Space, this was a great way of pooling: put a small fee in place for one pool of resources. Not many malware writers or other misbehaving app creators will probably want to spend that much per month.
But they axed that a few years ago. Only a couple months after when we were thrown back into the load balancer pool with all the other free apps, one of the IPs was marked as spam and we had to figure out a kind of janky solution.
Additionally, Heroku seemingly spent a ton of resources on free tier support, malware fighting, etc. I hope to see more features on Heroku since they’ve dropped that support… but I haven’t seen much evidence of that in roughly six months since they did that. But we’ll see.