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A comment on Free (as in beer) Dynos. Parent comment

Re:Free (as in beer) Dynos by pvh on Thursday May 07, 2015 @12:24PM (#9506245)
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.
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Re:Free (as in beer) Dynos by arsenide on Thursday May 07, 2015 @12:46PM (#9506404)
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!
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Re:Free (as in beer) Dynos by arsenide on Thursday May 07, 2015 @01:23PM (#9506712)
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.
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Re:Free (as in beer) Dynos by yebyen on Thursday May 07, 2015 @03:33PM (#9507666)
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.

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Re:Free (as in beer) Dynos by senorprogrammer on Thursday May 07, 2015 @12:52PM (#9506458)
> 24/7 uptime is essential

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

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Re:Free (as in beer) Dynos by infecto on Thursday May 07, 2015 @01:10PM (#9506621)
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.
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Re:Free (as in beer) Dynos by fooey on Thursday May 07, 2015 @06:51PM (#9508925)
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 :(

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Re:Free (as in beer) Dynos by task_queue on Thursday May 07, 2015 @01:10PM (#9506609)
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.
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Re:Free (as in beer) Dynos by tburch on Thursday May 07, 2015 @02:28PM (#9507180)
why not allow 36 hours per day of 'heroku run' or 'heroku web'?
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Re:Free (as in beer) Dynos by yebyen on Thursday May 07, 2015 @03:53PM (#9507810)
"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.

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