No more free Heroku. What's next?
How many of you Indie Hackers use Heroku for your prototypes or apps? And where do you plan on heading instead?
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Probably not a popular opinion, but I think it is a good move that they abandoned the free tier. Heroku needs to focus on the paying customers (like me) or else more companies like mine will walk away.
I hope this ends the series of issues (several serious issues with downtime over the last months) and we all can get back to a rock-solid reliable Heroku experience.
I'm in this boat as well.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
I have been exploring going severless with AWS. Their “always” free tier includes everything needed to launch an app. They include Lambda for logic and API delivery, dynamoDB for app data storage, S3 for file storage, and SNS/SES for email and push message delivery. So far I’ve really liked not having to worry about servers, load balancing, patching, etc.
Do it! Building all my web apps entirely on AWS and serverless is super simple to deploy and maintain. I can't say enough good things about going serverless. You won't regret it.
@joralac you can check out Microtica. We have production-ready templates and AWS resources to get you started on your serverless journey. Lambda is on the list of templates that will come out next. Let me know if you have any questions.
Render is always an honorable mention. That is what indie hackers is hosted on.
I recently migrated a handful of Github Pages sites to Render and it was a very pleasant experience.
I migrated because Render offers free static sites with automatically managed TLS certs for custom domains (which is key for .app and .dev domains) and autodeploy from a private Github repo. Github charges for Github Pages from a private repository so this was a huge win for my side projects.
Recently I'm a fan of fly.io. Its like a CDN but for containers.
https://fly.io/
Agreed. Fly's free tier has a ton of nice capabilities.
The use of containers provides a ton more flexibility than serverless platforms like Lambda and is way easier to get started on than Firebase. I recently landed on fly after being overwhelmed by the complexity of trying to deploy a one endpoint API to Lambda and Firebase.
The one shortcoming with fly right now is that it can be difficult to troubleshoot app issues that require access to container logs/etc. I've found the container logs can be incomplete, which was really time consuming to track down.
The good news is that the fly team is constantly improving their service and are super responsive in their free community support.
Can I suggest you an open source alternatives to Heroku? Please check https://opensourcealternatives.to. For example, minio, Dokku, OpenFaas, Caprover, Flynn, Tsuru, StaticDeploy. Maybe these can remove headache.
Link is dead?
Thanks for pointing out. Here is the link.
https://www.opensourcealternative.to/
Great resource!
Netlify and Vercel is smooth
I've used both and had great experiences with each. In fact, my experience with using Netlify for front end apps is part of what made me want to create a similar experience for back end and full stack apps.
I just do a simple cheap VM deploy now (same as I write about in in my book Deployment from Scratch).
If you want to support a couple of fellow Indie Hackers, check out Adaptable.io as an alternative. We've got a free tier that includes your database (Postgres or MongoDB). And we'd gladly help you migrate from 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.
Firebase and NextJS have good free plans but word to the wise Firebase is not great for many kinds of web app and using a SQL database is way easier. Plus it has way to many pointy edges and quirks. In retrospect
I would just pay for DB hosting PostgreSQL but Vercel/NextJS is great for a free back end for hobby projects.
Amazonlightsail.com for cheap VPS hosting. I run about 5 sites on the medium instance ($20/month). Also run a lot of serverless on AWS Lambda and Amplify or Apprunner
fly.io
I'm thinking of giving a Railway a shot. They provide you with a cluster instead of individual services with a really user-friendly interface.
They also have a free tier, but it's rather limited I'd say. Not even sure it can fit a prototype without exceeding the paywall.
Bummer. Didn't know about this.