Free (as in beer) Dynos

https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2015/5/7/heroku-free-dynos

by jvanbaarsen • 11 years ago

92 68 11 years ago

blog.heroku.com

task_queue3• 11 years ago

So they're getting rid of their free option for another free option that gives you only 18hrs of non-sleep time a day.

How is this not a downgrade?

mapleoin• 11 years ago

It is a downgrade. The whole post sounded like a downgrade since they felt the need to emphasize their commitment to experimentation.

I am one of the people affected by this since I was running a one-page website dyno and had pingdom keeping it out of sleep mode. This is what they are referring to as well in the last paragraph. I didn't know it was that many people doing this, though the solution for me would be a simple one: just allow me to serve static files.

csdrane• 11 years ago

People wouldn't have been pinging their dynos to remain awake if it didn't take so long for them to spin back up. Know of any alternative places for projects that don't use a lot of resources?

Lockyy• 11 years ago

I also used Pingdom to keep my Heroku apps alive, although I found it annoying having a separate free account on pingdom for every site and recently swapped over to StatusCake (https://www.statuscake.com).

Whilst you're right that it is a downgrade, it was clearly iffy to be using Heroku for free 24/7 hosting with essentially no downside on our end. I had no qualms however because it was just so expensive to move up to any other tier and it took so long for the Dynos to boot up.

Since they're adding the Hobbyist tier at only $7 I really don't mind this change and will happily swap over to it.

addandsubtract2• 11 years ago

You could use the free heroku tier to build your projects and host the static pages somewhere else, like S3.

thinkbohemian2• 11 years ago

If you've got a static files you could still serve it using Heroku free. Put cloudflare or another CDN in front of it and boom you've got 24 hours of fast responses. Though if it's a static site why do you need Heroku? Kind of like using a cannon to kill a mosquito.

pvh5• 11 years ago

A better static files offering is definitely something we've been asked for a few times. Near-term, if you put a CDN in front of a static app your dyno will wake up on release, fill the cache, and go to sleep. You shouldn't see much, if any difference for your apps at all.

seanwilson• 11 years ago

Why not use GitHub Pages? It's free, supports static sites only and has Git based deployment.

task_queue3• 11 years ago

Given the blog post calling people who use pingdoms freeloaders for using the service they advertised as free and changing offerings like this, there are other VPS hosts that don't pull a bait and switch after encouraging dependence that are cheaper.

yebyen6• 11 years ago

I want to say that in the terms of service, they always forbade you from using a cron job to keep all of your dynos alive, I heard someone say this once, but I don't believe it's true (I have not read the TOS).

Heroku has offered the New Relic monitoring plugin for free which has this same functionality (pretty much as a checkbox), so it would not make sense for them to forbid this in the TOS.

So, if you're using Heroku to serve up your apps 24/7, how is that not worth $7/mo?

Unless your business is geographically distributed (or otherwise operates 24/7), you can still use Heroku for internal applications for free during business hours (and use monitoring to keep it fast.) If you are serving your public website from Heroku, that's probably worth $7 or more (even as a hobbyist).

So, yes it's a downgrade to users in the free tier, but what's wrong with Heroku attempting to monetize their (most likely very, very) long, free tail?

I am not surprised by this announcement because it was reported on HN a few weeks ago that they were doing something like this in a beta (and the details were not supposed to be released, NDA, blabla). For anyone who was already paying Heroku, your bill is going down.

We actually use the free tier at my business, and this may affect us. Oh well.

pvh5• 11 years ago

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.

arsenide2• 11 years ago

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!

task_queue3• 11 years ago

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.

tburch• 11 years ago

why not allow 36 hours per day of 'heroku run' or 'heroku web'?

hayksaakian• 11 years ago

So what's the down side they failed to mention?

Whats the difference between a hobby (7$) dyno than a real dyno?

gt565k2• 11 years ago

https://www.heroku.com/beta-pricing

addandsubtract2• 11 years ago

A real dyno costs $34. So in essence, they're replacing the 24h free tier with an 18h free tier, but lowering the cost of the first paid dyno to $7. At least that's how I'm reading it...

yebyen6• 11 years ago

They also lowered the cost of that 1x dyno in the Pro tier, and if I'm reading correctly that $7 actually buys you two full-time dynos (but only one of them can be web, the other has to be a background worker.)

You can use both 1x web and 1x worker in the free tier too, as long as you abide by the new policy of sleeping 6 hours.

pvh5• 11 years ago

Hobby dynos are real dynos. :) Professional dynos, like the new `standard-1x` will have scale-out, Heroku Metrics, preboot, and mix with other dyno types: all features we have found are most useful for apps at scale.

We hope that between the new `free` and `hobby` dynos you should have good choices that support almost any personal or small scale professional app you might want to build.

freditup• 11 years ago

So hobby dynos should be able to run the same type of application as a 1x dyno, just with fewer other features more or less?

I have a small scale web application (around 5K pageviews per day) that runs very well on the one free web dyno currently offered. (We do have costs for the DB and SSL). I assume in the next few months I'll have to move it to either a hobby or 1x dyno. Obviously I'd rather move it to the hobby one because I don't need an additional $220 or so cost per year. It would be great to have a few more details on the site about the specs behind the free and hobby dynos!

jackcarter• 11 years ago

Seems like they're walking back from the previous announcement, which said they'd give 12 hours of non-sleep time per day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9295874

There's a huge difference between 24 hours/day and 18 hours/day, but I don't think there's such a big difference going from 18->12, so I don't think many people will care about this improvement.

pvh5• 11 years ago

We looked at the numbers and it's actually a very, very small percentage of applications that run between 18 and 24 hrs per day.

Eighteen hours a day is enough to keep your app running from 9AM to 3AM every day, and unless your application has a global reach, it should naturally equilibrate into a comfortable place.

We are asking that if you want 24x7 wake-time that you pay for a hobby dyno, but if you can let your application sleep when you do, you won't see any difference at all.

frewsxcv• 11 years ago

Relevant links:

https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2015/5/7/new-dyno-types-pub...

https://www.heroku.com/beta-pricing

gt565k2• 11 years ago

Hmm looks like the 1st and 2nd tier dynos are actually cheaper now at $25 and $50. Before they were $34.99 and something else.

websitescenes• 11 years ago

Heroku has great services/integrations and deployment is dead simple but when you commit to them you introduce a level of uncertainty into your stack. Services being deprecated, pricing changes and addons breaking are all very real issues. I initially enjoyed the simplicity of the platform but find myself feeling a little jerked around lately.

pvh5• 11 years ago

Hey there, we absolutely want to make this the smoothest, easiest pricing change you've ever been through.

We're just announcing the beta today and almost every single customer we have will see savings in some form here. We'll keep the old pricing until the end of January next year and let people opt in at their leisure until then.

Artemis2• 11 years ago

A pricing change was long overdue. AWS (which Heroku relies on to host everything) has been getting a lot cheaper in the last few years, but Heroku never changed its pricing and pocketed the difference.

danneu3• 11 years ago

Unfortunately it's strictly a price increase for everyone who bought a second dyno to get out of the freeloader tier. $35/mo (one free + one standard dyno @ $35/ea) to $50/mo (two standard dynos @ $25/ea).

It's only a price decrease for people with 4+ dynos.

Shank2• 11 years ago

As one of a small niche group who hosts Hubot on Heroku, this is horrible news. Chatroom bots are useless if they aren't in a room 24/7; that's the only reason why we have a keepalive. It's not as if the chat bot is doing a lot of computation, but this really does make it sound like I'll have to toss Heroku despite the convenience factor with it.

briandear• 11 years ago

Or pay $7 per month?

Shank2• 11 years ago

It's for an open source project, not an internal work instance or anything. As a student at uni with no full time job, adding more monthly charges is hard to deal with.

Grue3• 11 years ago

Pretty sure you can get a cheap VPS for less than that and it will allow you to do much more.

CoachRufus87• 11 years ago

What exactly is a Process Type?

danneu3• 11 years ago

Probably each line of your Procfile.

JoshGlazebrook• 11 years ago

In your Procfile you can have any type of process you want. The "web" process type is just special because it expects you to open an listening tcp socket on the port it provides in their environmental variable to your app. Aside from that you could say have a worker process, emailer process, etc and scale them independently.

dang• 11 years ago

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9506244.

If the other URL is better, we can change this one.

peregrine• 11 years ago

So ahh when are they going to lower prices on the "professional" dyno pricing? AWS has only gotten cheaper and heroku has only gotten more expensive.

stfnkolb• 11 years ago

I understand the thoughts about changing the current pricing. However, it would be really good if Heroku would support the community with a 24/7 dyno for open source projects. It hurts if you need to put in additional monetary effort into projects you provide for free.

jk5_• 11 years ago

The good news is, they decided to keep the custom domain on the free tier. Last news we had, it was only available with the hobby.

Also, 18 hours daily sounds good compared to the initial 12 hours.

Not as disappointed as expected about these changes :)

zebracanevra• 11 years ago

Previously, worker dynos never slept. On the new free dynos, you now get a free worker dyno, but the tradeoff is that the app must sleep for 6 hours/day.

Does that sleeping time include the worker dynos? If it does, when do they sleep? Workers can't "timeout" like web dynos can.

petitmiam• 11 years ago

The updated help pages only mention the scenario of a worker dyno running along a web dyno.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-types#dyno-sleepi...

It's unclear what happens to apps which just have a single worker dyno. Are we meant to use the scheduler to kill workers for 6 hours a day?

mysterymachine• 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure pinging services and such were out of their ToS anyway. They're better facilitating non-sketchy free users by giving them the Scheduler and a worker, and have given people who absolutely need 24/7 service a great service for dirt cheap.

I bet most people who need the 24/7 service probably have the money to spare, and I bet most people are overestimating the uptime they need anyway.

On the flip side, for a small flat fee, I can now have 10 processes running on a 24/hr server, effortlessly. I'll pay the 7 bucks for an easy deploy. Most of my projects are going to be hosted on Github Pages or Heroku's free tier anyway.

fiatjaf2• 11 years ago

Stupid people who were abusing Heroku by pinging the apps caused this, now they might as well suffer. All my hobby apps go to sleep regularly and it is not bad.

I am grateful to Heroku for providing me all this free computing and I hope they get rid of the freeloaders.

matt2000• 11 years ago

I've probably posted a similar comment a few times before, but why don't the dynos ever improve? I have no problems with the pricing, but dyno performance and memory has been the same for, what, 5 years? Longer? The whole time I'm getting emails from AWS telling me about cheaper, better instances. Doesn't make sense.

egomaksab• 11 years ago

You can move your apps to Openshift https://www.openshift.com .

They provide 3x512MB gears for free and you can use your custom domain.

Free (as in beer) Dynos

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