It's probably worth it for your company to pay the $84/yr rather than have you go through hoops to move Hubot somewhere else.

I run my companies hubot on a $5 a month Digital Ocean instance. It's also far easier than using Heroku because it's just a regular linux server and not a managed/restricted instance.

I also use the $5-tier Digital Ocean droplets to host some side projects.

I've had some processes die semi-regularly, though, because the OS does a scheduled maintenance task that maxes out the 512mb RAM.

Adding a swap file seems to have taken care of it, though. I wish they enabled them by default on their smallest droplets: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-add-...

Or try running an alternate operating system that doesn't run a task semi-regularly that uses up all of your RAM.

I'm in the same boat with my blog. I'm not paying $7 for a single dyno when it's footprint is no-where near 512 mb. They should offer a smaller dynos at say 128 mb for $1.75, that I might be interested in.

I'll be interested to see what they do to my existing apps.

Viable business models for B2B businesses that involve charging the price of a fountain soda per month for anything are few and far between. Just charging your card that dollar costs a quarter or two, and sets up expectations that free tiers don't come with. So you may want a $1.75 fully managed PaaS, but it's doubtful anyone wants to sell that to you.

Indeed, which is why they'll probably lose a lot of people.

I'd be happy to put credit onto the account to use the smaller tier, or PayPal it or something, but I'm not paying for a big footprint that I'm not using.