I've got a lot of "hobby" apps I'm going to need to turn off...

You can just turn the pinging off. Then they're going to go to sleep by themselves. I've got a hobby app and it goes it sleep. The dyno comes back up in seconds. It's not bad.

Google App Engine also seems like a good place for a hobby app. More constrained, but Heroku is not really that much more flexible compared to totally free-form architecting.

Actually, looks like you could leave pinging on and Heroku will just force "exhausted" free dynos to sleep after 18 hours:

"During the beta period you’ll only get an informational email. In the future, we will force exhausted apps to sleep until they have been idle for at least six hours of the past twenty-four hours." -https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-types#dyno-sleepi...

that's ok for a portfolio or dev site

for a toy _app_, if it's not up 24/7 it's pretty worthless

Actually, it is too bad that they closed this loophole. 7$ for each low traffic app is too much.

If you're looking for an alternative, you might want to check out https://www.tutum.co/. They are a bring-your-own-cloud solution that lets you deploy Docker containers to services like DigitalOcean and AWS, and they do a lot of the deployment automation Heroku does.

That's still $5 a month minimum from, for example, DigitalOcean. For that, why not just pay the extra $2 and skip any potential headaches?

For a single app, yes. if you can fit 2 or three on a $10 VPS things look different.

I didn't like the fact that this installs its own docker that is incompatible with the docker from the official site.

It's actually the same binary - the tutum agent just downloads it and upgrades it when requested. If you had docker already installed using a storage engine different than AUFS, because the tutum agent installer tries to use the AUFS storage engine (way more stable than "devicemapper"), you won't be able to "see" what you had in your previous storage engine. But the binary is the one from https://docs.docker.com/installation/binaries/#get-the-linux...

Our research suggests that almost all low traffic apps should continue to run fine on the `free` dynos. If yours don't, send me an email: pvh at heroku

Background workers aside, one of the most compelling reasons I've seen for a pinging service is the several seconds of waiting that beta users experience in experimental projects.

Running lots of experiments is always good (hobby or otherwise), and I'm very happy to see Heroku still embracing experimentation. But it hurts your experiment when you tell someone to visit a site and they click away after a few seconds of a blank page.

Is there any work going into speeding up the wakeup time?

I have had good experiences running several low traffic web apps (written in Clojure + Compojure + Clojurescript) on one Digital Ocean instance. Right now I am running a ton of stuff on one small Azure instance, getting perhaps just a few hundred thousand HTTP requests per day. But, a $5/month Digital Ocean VPS would probably handle all of your hobby sites.

I am looking to migrate a few of my hobby projects to the Heroku $7/month tier and try that for a few months as a test.

I am happy with their new pricing scheme - seems fair all around.

Yep, $7 is way too much

I've quit buying domains for a lot of my "hobby" apps cuz $12 a year is wasteful

Really depends. Of course Heroku is way more convenient, but you can squeeze quite a few small apps on a $10 VPS. I'm not sure how they count ressource usage, but maybe an even smaller tier would be another option.

That said, for testing and stuff for personal use only the 18h deal is fine (although technically trolls could just go around calling random heroku instances every half hour, burning through the awake-time on free instances). And I can understand that they want to limit free usage.

And of course Redhat OpenShift still gives you three apps for free ;)

I had given some thoughts to this before. Using DigitalOcean (with perhaps Tutum) is cheaper if you are running a handful of small apps.

However the convenience of using something like Heroku can be underappreciated. I once lost data (docker data volume) on my Digital Ocean instance because I was too lazy to set up backups. With Heroku (and their Postgres service) I wouldn't have to worry about these "administration" stuff, and focus only the idea and the app ... which is exactly what I enjoy doing.