I was a long time Heroku user/lover (~10 years) for both personal and company projects. I've recently moved to Render[1], and so far it's been great. I haven't been using them long enough to put it through it's paces, but I'd certainly say it's worth a look. Other alternatives I've heard good things about are Fly.io[2] and Porter[3].

[1] - https://render.com/

[2] - https://fly.io/

[3] - https://porter.run/

Checked out render.com in the context of side projects that I want on the air but don't expect anyone to ever use (I have so many on heroku, who got rewarded for their generosity with many thousands of dollars of business from me), which means I'm willing to pay a few dollars but not to pay per-app. Looks great except that they delete your free databases after 90 days, making it completely useless for this use case. Their announcement blog post says they plan to remove this limitation "early 2022", but it hadn't happened yet.

I next looked at fly.io, which seem ok for the first two apps, assuming they use the same database. If I ever want more than two apps, it seems I will need to start hosting different apps together, which is the opposite of the headache-free experience I'm looking for.

Porter runs on my own cloud account, so I can't trust it to not cost too much.

Maybe I can get a Kubernetes cluster somewhere (DigitalOcean?) and deploy all my small apps to it, but it sounds like a headache.

I'm staying with heroku.

Dokku on top of a Digital Ocean droplet is a pretty cheap and easy option if you're OK with a single-server solution (i.e. small side project) and you're looking for something Heroku-like.

What about DO App Platform? I was thinking of trying that next. I’ve read a lot about slow build times and random build failures, but at the same time they at least seem to be actively developing the service.

Elsewhere in this thread is a link to a blogpost comparing it to doing things manually with GCP and quickly dismissing it as extremely limited, so I didn't delve further.

Heroku only gives you one free app too? Fly.io pricing is a lot cheaper. You can run a small service for $2/month whereas Heroku is $7 minimum.

If you want a more minimal do-it-yourself option you could self-host something like Dokku[1].

[1] https://dokku.com/

I feel confident nobody using heroku is doing it because they want a more minimal do-it-yourself option.

fly.io is an excellent alternative. I am slowly migrating all of my clients over.

Cloud Foundry maybe? Some companies are offering it as a service (e.g: IBM Cloud Foundry)

There's Clever Cloud which I use personally