Heroku has great services/integrations and deployment is dead simple but when you commit to them you introduce a level of uncertainty into your stack. Services being deprecated, pricing changes and addons breaking are all very real issues. I initially enjoyed the simplicity of the platform but find myself feeling a little jerked around lately.
A pricing change was long overdue. AWS (which Heroku relies on to host everything) has been getting a lot cheaper in the last few years, but Heroku never changed its pricing and pocketed the difference.
Unfortunately it's strictly a price increase for everyone who bought a second dyno to get out of the freeloader tier. $35/mo (one free + one standard dyno @ $35/ea) to $50/mo (two standard dynos @ $25/ea).
It's only a price decrease for people with 4+ dynos.
For production apps, 2 dynos is the least you need not only because of sleep, but also because of redundancy. So there's no way of downgrading to the Hobby tier for lots of us.
Hey there, we absolutely want to make this the smoothest, easiest pricing change you've ever been through.
We're just announcing the beta today and almost every single customer we have will see savings in some form here. We'll keep the old pricing until the end of January next year and let people opt in at their leisure until then.
