No affiliation with Heroku but to be honest, that price is basically nothing compared to the salary of an engineer who maintains a system like that.

The real problem is that their extremely high costs are an enormous barrier to entry for anyone trying to build a product that is more than just a low throughput CRUD app.

$35 vs. $500 means that when you are in the bootstrap phase you do not use Heroku. Meaning you do not get used to the very nice quality of life features they have for deployment, CI, etc. Then by the time you have income or an investment switching to Heroku makes even less sense because you've already invested into whatever stack you are using.

With the availability of high level tools on AWS and GCE, it does not take that much work to get to a functional system for CI and deployment. My small team of three at my last gig managed to tie Bamboo to a large scale AWS deployment with what amounted to basically a side project worth of effort.

Furthermore it's harder for developers to learn these things if they have a pay out of pocket for them. I know a lot of people who'd love to dive into kubernetes but don't feel like dropping $200+ to use it in a semi-production environment on GCP or AWS. The free $50-100 credits these services provide does not last long when the services are presumably designed to be used much more then that!

It's a significant portion of a salary of an average sw engineer in my country, and I live in Western Europe.

Cloud66 gives you a substantial chunk of what Heroku offers, atop whatever cloud you want. Deployment can be done via a c66 webhook, which you add to Circle/Codeship/Travis etc when your tests pass. Within a few minutes you have Heroku workflow at fraction of cost.

Convox is in similar space.

Unfortunately Convox's pricing is much higher

I thought convox was free?

They have a free tier for a single user. However, for all of the features you get with Cloud66, it looks like you need their $500/mo plan (though those features may not be necessary for many use cases)

Not if it's a side project.

True but I assume that it is very infrequent that an engineer ever needs to worry about (and manually fiddle with) a 3GB memory allocation anyway.

The word you're looking for is exorbitant.