Heroku provides value in other ways for us. We run on a number of other solutions, most involve shipping a ~100mb image. This can be dramatically reduced in size with a slimmer base image, which we plan on doing eventually.

In this case, heroku handles a lot of things we otherwise need to do ourselves: - DB + backups + DR - Network security - Network routing - SSL certs - Easy scaling of resources - Access control to operations (redeploy, restart etc) - Audits of operations etc

We can do all these things, and under various compliance frameworks, outside of heroku; its just exhausting and expensive. This project we want to focus on the product so we opt for heroku as it was a few lines of bash we were all familiar with to get up and running nearly prod ready.