It’s not, strictly? It’s just more of a tragedy of the commons.

Heroku is not "the commons", they're a company and people are playing within the rules that they set out.

This has to be the analog of "the first amendment only protects you from government restrictions on speech" in this conversation.

Heroku can protect itself from abuse of its free tier by changing the rules - which they eventually did.

I'm sure that the only reason why they kept the free tier as long as they did was because it brought in enough users (who were eventually converted into paying customers) to be worth the cost.

I think it's more of sadness that abuse took it away. It would be nice if hobbyists only used the free tiers and not successful businesses.

This is definitely the "software engineer" way of conceptualizing and solving the problem. You have discrete limitations, you optimize around them.

This is clearly not "working at intended" though and I'd like to believe everyone knows that, including the people building this system.

Of course it’s well within Heroku’s domain to structure their services however they choose. The tragedy is that if everyone uses the platform’s free tier to maximum utility in a self beneficial way, it exhausts the resources available and the common utility ceases to exist. So it’s not ethically wrong as was my response to the GGP. But it’s functionally “wrong” because it exhausts the common resource.

If a service is broken down into n microservices such that each of them fits into the free tier, these n microservices are likely to consume more resources in total.

One day, compute requirements will be part of a companies eco-statement.

Eg. Amazon will be forced to say 'For every item purchased from Amazon, 370 grams of CO2 are emitted by our servers and other business operations :-P'