> Salesforce's pricing feels wrong out of principle
What do you mean exactly? If it takes multiple engineers multiple months to build an alternative on kubernetes, then it sounds like Heroku is worth it to a lot of companies. These costs are very "known" when you start using Heroku too, it's not like Salesforce hides everything from you then jump scares you 18 months down the line.
SF's CRM is also known to be expensive, and yet it's extremely widely used. Something being expensive definitely doesn't always mean it's bad and you should cheap out to avoid it.
Couldn't you move to AWS? They offer managed Postgresql. Heroku already runs on AWS, so there could be a potential saving in running AWS managed service.
It's still a lot of work obviously.
So does GCP and Azure. At least in GCP land the stuff is really quite reasonably priced, too.
I moved our entire stack from Heroku to Render in a day and pay 1/3 less. Render is what Heroku would be if they never stopped innovating. Now I’m thinking of moving to fly as they are even cheaper.
Heroku's price is a niggling problem for every startup that uses it.
Rebuilding Heroku's stack is an attractive problem (evidenced by the graveyard of Heroku clones on Github). There's a clear KPI ($), Salesforce's pricing feels wrong out of principle, and engineering is all about efficiency!
Unfortunately, it's also an iceberg problem. And while infrastructure is not "hard" in the comp-sci sense, custom infra always creates work when your time would be better spent elsewhere.