Re:Rapid growth, lessons learned and improvements at Fly.io
by jrochkind1 on Monday March 06, 2023 @05:38PM
(#35048784)
> As Heroku fans, we never really felt like it needed a replacement.
If Salesforce kept investing in heroku, it might not. But there is a huge loss of confidence in heroku's future going on among heroku's customers right now, which is part of what you're seeing.
And frankly... your tool seems more mature and... not to be rude to competitors but seems to have more of that certain `je ne sais quoi` of Developer Experience Happiness that heroku _used_ to have and other competitors including the one you mention don't really quite seem to have yet. Does what you expect/need in a polished and consistent way.
That work you put into the underlying infrastructure definitely shows, and was the right choice.
So I understand why people are looking to you as a heroku replacement. I am too! (And I don't really need the edge compute stuff; although I could potentially see using it in the future, and it shows you folks are on top of things).
And while I kept reading you saying on HN comments that you _didn't_ want to be a heroku replacement, so were unconcerned with the few places people were mentioning where you still felt short -- when I saw your investment in Rails documentation and tools (and contribs back to Rails), I thought, aha, i think they've realized this is a market _looking for them_, which they are only a couple steps from.
When you mention in OP a "heroku exodus" to you... I'm curious if that was all people who left when heroku ended free tier stuff, and they've all come to you for your free tier stuff... becuase that does seem dangerous, such a giant spike in users who are not paying and don't bring revenue with them! I don't personally use very much heroku free tier stuff. I hope if that's a challenge, it's one you can get over. I don't think you are under any obligation to offer free stuff that can be used for real production workloads indefinitely -- although, as I'm sure you know, free stuff is huge for allowing people to try _before_ they buy, and whatever limits you put on it to try to prevent indefinite production use get in the way of someone's "try before you buy" too... and at this point, _reducing_ your free offerings is a lot harder PR-wise than having started out with less in the first place. :(
If Salesforce kept investing in heroku, it might not. But there is a huge loss of confidence in heroku's future going on among heroku's customers right now, which is part of what you're seeing.
And frankly... your tool seems more mature and... not to be rude to competitors but seems to have more of that certain `je ne sais quoi` of Developer Experience Happiness that heroku _used_ to have and other competitors including the one you mention don't really quite seem to have yet. Does what you expect/need in a polished and consistent way.
That work you put into the underlying infrastructure definitely shows, and was the right choice.
So I understand why people are looking to you as a heroku replacement. I am too! (And I don't really need the edge compute stuff; although I could potentially see using it in the future, and it shows you folks are on top of things).
And while I kept reading you saying on HN comments that you _didn't_ want to be a heroku replacement, so were unconcerned with the few places people were mentioning where you still felt short -- when I saw your investment in Rails documentation and tools (and contribs back to Rails), I thought, aha, i think they've realized this is a market _looking for them_, which they are only a couple steps from.
When you mention in OP a "heroku exodus" to you... I'm curious if that was all people who left when heroku ended free tier stuff, and they've all come to you for your free tier stuff... becuase that does seem dangerous, such a giant spike in users who are not paying and don't bring revenue with them! I don't personally use very much heroku free tier stuff. I hope if that's a challenge, it's one you can get over. I don't think you are under any obligation to offer free stuff that can be used for real production workloads indefinitely -- although, as I'm sure you know, free stuff is huge for allowing people to try _before_ they buy, and whatever limits you put on it to try to prevent indefinite production use get in the way of someone's "try before you buy" too... and at this point, _reducing_ your free offerings is a lot harder PR-wise than having started out with less in the first place. :(