andout_

Hey, author here. I guess one option that could help is Encore’s free hosting for hobby projects, then GCP Cloud Run + Neon for relatively cheap production hosting.

Author here - happy to take any questions!

Sorry about that - just pushed a fix :)

Hey everyone - author of the article here! Happy to take questions.

Yes, that's what the article is about? Is this a bot reply?

It's important to tell the readers how long you've been doing this - especially to those that also manage ADHD or ADHD-like symptoms.

Why? Because those individuals tend to spin something up, tell everyone about it (online, and offline) and then stop doing it few days later.

The result then ends up being a false signal for others in the same boat. People who read it, feel a spark of recognition ("someone like me actually figured this out"), and then invest real time, energy, maybe money, into replicating something the author themselves quietly abandoned two weeks later.

Just a small heads up from someone who used to get burned in the past :)

Yes, Encore[0] is an open source framework (ts/go) that has been around for a while now.

[0]: https://encore.dev

yeah we're seeing the same thing from the infrastructure side. small opinionated api surface means less code and you can actually read what the agent wrote.

yeah totally. an example from the article is that when when you're reviewing 31 lines of business logic instead of 150 lines of boilerplate it's a lot easier to catch bad error handling or security issues - which kinda goes hand in hand with what you're saying.

This is close to what we're doing with [Encore](https://encore.cloud). The framework parses your application code through static analysis at compile time to build a full graph of services, APIs, databases, queues, cron jobs, and their dependencies. It uses that graph to provision infrastructure, generate architecture diagrams, API docs, and wire up observability automatically.

The interesting side effect is that AI tools get this traversability for free. When business logic and infrastructure declarations live in the same code, an AI agent doesn't need a separate graph database or MCP tool to understand what a service depends on or what infrastructure it needs. It's all in the type signatures. The agent generates standard TypeScript or Go, and the framework handles everything from there to running in production.

Our users see this work really well with AI agents as the agent can scaffold a complete service with databases and pub/sub, and it's deployable immediately because the framework already understands what the code needs.

I work at Encore so I'm biased.

We've had a bunch of people migrate over from Heroku in the last couple years, especially after they killed the free tier.

The main difference from other alternatives is that you don't write any infrastructure config - you just declare what you need in your code (databases, cron jobs, pubsub, etc) and Encore handles provisioning it in your AWS/GCP account (works locally as well where local is 1:1 to your prod env). So there's no Terraform to maintain or Docker setup to mess with.

If you're looking to move off Heroku it's pretty straightforward, most folks get their app running in an afternoon. Happy to help if you run into anything: https://encore.cloud