It's important to note that "sleeping while inactive" is not quite paying for what you use. These Dynos will start up to serve a request, and stay active constantly until they receive no traffic for 30 minutes.

This means, if you want to run a small cron job once an hour, you'll still pay for half a month of usage. Similarly, a very small amount of traffic spread evenly will still use up these hours quickly. It also doesn't come with any Postgres, that's another $5.

$5-10 a month isn't a lot, but it's very different to Free, and if you're going to pay it might be worth considering hobbyist-friendly alternatives. A $5 VM goes a long way for services with a little traffic or a bunch of hourly cron jobs.

A suggestion for free hobbyist-friendly alternative: Oracle ARM instances have a very generous Always Free tier (4 vCPU + 24GB RAM).

+ 10GB of free object storage.

Enough to run SQLite with streaming backup.

One-off Eco dynos driven by Scheduler will still be discarded immediately after being run? A small repetitive task as such will just consume it’s run wall time.

Maybe it works but this really feels like too little too late. Heroku was amazing for so long and then just stagnated.

Already switched to fly.io. It is also great, and its VM will not "sleeping while inactive"

I haven’t used Heroku in a few years mostly because I haven’t had the need but also because it feels too expensive.

The 30 minute sleep is way too high and as others have mentioned will easily drain half your hours away. If you could configure it between say 10 and 30 minutes (I’d say as low as 5 but this is the Hobby tier) that’d feel a bit fairer.