I want to say that in the terms of service, they always forbade you from using a cron job to keep all of your dynos alive, I heard someone say this once, but I don't believe it's true (I have not read the TOS).

Heroku has offered the New Relic monitoring plugin for free which has this same functionality (pretty much as a checkbox), so it would not make sense for them to forbid this in the TOS.

So, if you're using Heroku to serve up your apps 24/7, how is that not worth $7/mo?

Unless your business is geographically distributed (or otherwise operates 24/7), you can still use Heroku for internal applications for free during business hours (and use monitoring to keep it fast.) If you are serving your public website from Heroku, that's probably worth $7 or more (even as a hobbyist).

So, yes it's a downgrade to users in the free tier, but what's wrong with Heroku attempting to monetize their (most likely very, very) long, free tail?

I am not surprised by this announcement because it was reported on HN a few weeks ago that they were doing something like this in a beta (and the details were not supposed to be released, NDA, blabla). For anyone who was already paying Heroku, your bill is going down.

We actually use the free tier at my business, and this may affect us. Oh well.

It is a downgrade. The whole post sounded like a downgrade since they felt the need to emphasize their commitment to experimentation.

I am one of the people affected by this since I was running a one-page website dyno and had pingdom keeping it out of sleep mode. This is what they are referring to as well in the last paragraph. I didn't know it was that many people doing this, though the solution for me would be a simple one: just allow me to serve static files.

I also used Pingdom to keep my Heroku apps alive, although I found it annoying having a separate free account on pingdom for every site and recently swapped over to StatusCake (https://www.statuscake.com).

Whilst you're right that it is a downgrade, it was clearly iffy to be using Heroku for free 24/7 hosting with essentially no downside on our end. I had no qualms however because it was just so expensive to move up to any other tier and it took so long for the Dynos to boot up.

Since they're adding the Hobbyist tier at only $7 I really don't mind this change and will happily swap over to it.

People wouldn't have been pinging their dynos to remain awake if it didn't take so long for them to spin back up. Know of any alternative places for projects that don't use a lot of resources?

Redhat's OpenShift runs on the same AWS regions as Heroku and offer a free tier.(https://www.openshift.com/products/pricing).

IBM are also putting a lot of resources in to Bluemix which offers a 512MB dyno equivalent in their free tier, it doesn't run on AWS though. (https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/)

Why not use GitHub Pages? It's free, supports static sites only and has Git based deployment.

If you've got a static files you could still serve it using Heroku free. Put cloudflare or another CDN in front of it and boom you've got 24 hours of fast responses. Though if it's a static site why do you need Heroku? Kind of like using a cannon to kill a mosquito.

Isn't that the exact purpose Divshot aims to fill?

You could use the free heroku tier to build your projects and host the static pages somewhere else, like S3.

A better static files offering is definitely something we've been asked for a few times. Near-term, if you put a CDN in front of a static app your dyno will wake up on release, fill the cache, and go to sleep. You shouldn't see much, if any difference for your apps at all.

Given the blog post calling people who use pingdoms freeloaders for using the service they advertised as free and changing offerings like this, there are other VPS hosts that don't pull a bait and switch after encouraging dependence that are cheaper.

You could call it a side-grade. We're also allowing users to add a worker dyno and use up to 18hrs/day of `heroku run` and scheduler one-off dynos as well. All told you can get quite a few more compute-hours for free applications now than before.

You can call it what you want, but for what I (and others presumably) use it for, the 24/7 uptime is essential. Sure an argument can be made for needing to pay for 24/7 uptime, but it is very clearly a downgrade in such a case where such an argument even needs to be made!

To clarify: I'm particularly speaking about the parent's use of the term "sidegrade." I'm not disagreeing with the idea that 24/7 uptime should be paid for (because I agree), but to call the change in terms of service a "sidegrade" is a misrepresentation of what it actually is: a downgrade in services for my particular use case.

You can have a web dyno and a worker dyno running side-by-side 18h/day for free in the new free tier (unless I've misunderstood something.) You can't have one web worker running 24h/day for free, not as of next January.

18+18 > 24

I understand that your (and my) particular use case are affected negatively by this, but if it wasn't totally clear what he means by sidegrade, that's about the size it. More compute hours for your $0, but less availability.

> 24/7 uptime is essential

And all that for only $7/month. Seems reasonable, for an essential service.

No argument needs to be made. If you want 24/7 uptime, you need to pay for it. Under the old model you were just freeloading.

nearly all my free tier apps are worthless if they aren't up 24/7

i have a bunch of open source, public service sorts of things and I don't know what I'm going to do with them now :(

It's too bad. For me, the free web worker option was an avenue that made it easy to consume Heroku's paid and partner services.

why not allow 36 hours per day of 'heroku run' or 'heroku web'?

"We charge less than we pay our upstream, but it's ok because we'll make it up in volume."

Seriously though, they're saying that most deployments use less than 18 hours per day, and if they just let them stay up 24/7 regardless of that, they're basically leaving money on the table. Heroku pays Amazon for all of what we're getting for free. Their free tier is a loss-leader.

If they don't spin down your app when it's idle, it absolutely costs them more than if they do. Regardless of how much (or even whether) they bill you for it.