Heroku alternatives for bootstrapped founders?

Render is also another platform I'd recommend and they seem to be much cheaper when scaling.

I have about 30 apps running on a $10/m Digital Ocean droplet with Piku. It's an open source alternative to Heroku etc. Because it is so lightweight it is perfect for indie hackers deploying lots of prototypes.

Disclaimer: I'm a core contributor to Piku.

I'm currently using https://fly.io/. Good pricing and easy paths to set up everything I need which is an app container and postgres.

I really like https://dokku.com/, but it's not quite the same -- you'll have to throw it up on a VPS. Super affordable though. For me it's a happy medium between doing everything myself and paying $$$ for a fully GUI based platform like heroku.

I've build MyPaas for this purpose. An open source PaaS, somewhat similar to Dokku.
https://github.com/almarklein/mypaas

I see some products being mentioned in the comments that I don't know yet, I'll certainly check these out!

For production deployments I will not recommend to give access to your source code to any third party other than the one where it is hosted because there is no guarantee that what happened with Heroku will not happen with other cloud computing provider. So if you want to stick to Heroku and your code is hosted on github then you can use github actions to build docker image, push it to a container registry and then let Heroku deploy from container registry ( I hope it is possible). Dockerizing an app / microservice is a basic skill which every developer must be aware of as this has lots of advantages over giving raw source code to a third party for deployment which is actually doing same thing under the hood.

These days any serverless ( e.g. FaaS - Functions as a service, CaaS - Containers as a service) offering is capable of deploying the code from a git repo (e.g. github) or from a container image registry (e.g. dockerhub).

Here are serverless offerings from big players -
Google Cloud - Cloud Run ( CaaS), Cloud Functions ( FaaS)
AWS - App Runner (CaaS), Lambda functions ( FaaS)
Azure - Azure Container Instances(CaaS), Azure Functions ( FaaS)

There are reasons why setting up something on these players may be cumbersome. These players are serving all kinds of customers who develop applications which can either be very basic or highly complex.

I have not used serverless offerings from small players (e.g. DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode etc) and so can't comment on those but these must be good for any non production code. These small players definitely offers a very good developer experience compare to any big player. But in today's world, where hackers are way ahead of everyone else, you will need services from big players if your code is valuable / worth millions as these players have all the money / talent to avoid a hacking incident which occurred with Heroku. You may jump from one small player to another small player but the fact is that the moment hackers see that another small player is becoming popular among developers they will go behind it.

In addition to big / small cloud computing players there are players (e.g. Cloudflare, Netlify, Fastly etc) who are shinning on edge computing front. So you can host your application ( if it is build using a frontend framework - VueJS, React etc) on these providers for free (I host my blog / portfolio (https://mechcloud.io) on one of these providers which is a VueJS application) and use their FaaS offerings to build backend logic.

While indie hackers mainly focus on developing new features, marketing etc, with increasing hacking attempts you will need to put equal focus on infra part as well if you are exposing your application over the internet and you wish to make some good money from your (SaaS) application.

If you loved heroku and dokku seems great but without any GUI, try caprover!

I'm using it for postresql and a few app (next.js / remix / ruby... you can upload everything). It's really cool

https://www.caprover.com

Heard about DigitalOcean App Platform but not sure how good they are.

Is anything totally free available to replace Heroku, with the caliber of Heroku?

Hey! We're familiar with this space since our product adds a collaboration layer on top of preview environments. We collected our notes on Heroku Alternatives here - https://livecycle.io/blogs/complete-list-of-heroku-alternatives/. Hope it's valuable.

The day I heard about it I stopped using heroku https://railway.app

For the WBE Space I use google functions and so far has worked really well

Just use Github? Github Pages with the actions deployment. It's free to host each page if it's public. But for academics it's free for private and public. Even then it doesn't cost much.

I was running Linode and Dokku for a while. Would recommend if you can set it up. I had to get another dev to help as it did take some getting used to.

I have been using Dokku + DigitalOcean for a long time for small projects. Also, I have heard good things about fly.io, you can try that.

I'd argue AWS is the cheapest, thus why I started building my SaaS starter using serverless, unfortunately, it also can be the hardest to set up.

1. How much are you paying, and for what services?
2. What kind of traffic are we talking?

Tradeoffs of paying more=f(Team Size, Monthly Budget, Tech Needs)

Cheapeast Possible (assuming the server isn't a desktop on your apartment floor):
$5 / month:
-AWS
-Bluehost
-Linode
-Digital Ocean

For managed DBaaS, are you willing to spend an additional $15/month? The nice thing is you can use the DB server for multiple apps... the alternative is having a separate nano DB server you manually configure for $5 / month... for me the extra $10 / month is tptally worth it.

If you don't run a separate DB server (app server and DB server are the same), you can do everything for $5/month, but if you do get an increase in traffic, you'll have to upgrade everything and migrate the DB at the same time, which is a huge pain in the butt.

Also, you'll need to be willing to learn your way around linux...

Anyone know how to go cheaper?

I have the same concerns. I will go with SSD nodes + dokku. Will update after some period how stable it is

The cheapest will be https://appliku.com + https://hetzner.com/

This way you will get a Heroku-like experience and cheap servers and a flat fee for managing those servers.

Tier 2 cloud providers like render and DO Apps, let alone AWS new offering, will still be expensive.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Firebase. I have several apps hosted there for free.

Hetzner are cheapest. Downside is there is no managed database. No kubernetes. But, did i say cheap?

I'm super happy running AWS EC2 with Caddy and Docker containers. For non critical stuff, you can use EC2 spot instances with up to 90% off retail (machine can be shut down in 3 minutes) and reserved instances (buying a server for 1-3 years) for things which need to run 24/7.

Fly.io and Render are probably the closest.

I personally just run things myself since I am not at scale when it would be annoying. I use just a bit of Bash so I don't have to keep up with latest tool updates. I wrote a book on the topic too:)

I'm curious how do costs on heroku quickly add up, unless you have a lot of users?

the one and only, deta.sh, I have used it for over 6+ month, and never look back, they have a generous offer on storage, super fast server (faster than what google cloud offer, no joke) and free no-sql DB, you could visit my twitter, I use deta.sh for all of my project

I'm building https://www.utopiops.com which gives you the same experience on your own cloud. You'll have massive savings.

I just switched one of my apps to Railway and like it so far!

What about Azure? And by Azure I mean not AWS. Full Control 😎. Full Responsibility 😅.

Although there are other non PAAS (platform as a service) offerings if you don't want a full VM. I don't use those tho.

https://acrobox.io for a flat cost option. I am the founder. Feel free to ask me any questions.

Cloudflare Pages and Workers have been great for me :)

How do you deploy your apps, via git/cli or something else? Which approach would be the best approach to you? Because there are a lot of companies offering this kind of service.

We'll be glad to have you on https://qoddi.com and we offer credits for bootstrapped startups : https://blog.qoddi.com/flashdrive-startup-program/ Let me know if you need more info

What don’t you like about Heroku? Not found too many issues myself (compared to running your own server it’s pretty good)