Recently I was informed that Heroku will be terminating their free dynos which offered 1000 hrs/month to users with a registered credit card. Users will have to upgrade to the $7/m Hobbyist plan on the minimum before the 28th of November 2022 to continue with the service.
With this offer gone I was curious to know what the StackOverflow community thinks is a viable alternative to Heroku?
For me Fly.io, render.com, Supabase (for postgres databses) just to name some alternatives. But Render would be the best choice in my opinion.
Related
Will my apps which I deployed on Heroku be available after the elimination of free tier/plans?
If yes, in addition to this, will I be able to build and make changes to the same applications?
If your apps are running on free dynos and you don't upgrade, and you aren't eligible as a student, they will not be available:
Starting November 28, 2022, free Heroku Dynos, free Heroku Postgres, and free Heroku Data for Redis® plans will no longer be available. If you have apps using any of these resources, you must upgrade to paid plans by this date to ensure your apps continue to run and retain your data. For students, we will announce a new program by the end of September. See our blog and FAQ for more info.
The referenced blog post contains a bit more info (emphasis added):
Starting October 26, 2022, we will begin deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year. Starting November 28, 2022, we plan to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data services. We will be sending out a series of email communications to affected users.
Since I am not very familiar with Heroku I need opinion of a specialists like you. I got two questions to which I cannot find an answers on the web.
Heroku tempts with the 450 dynos if I add the billing card.
Is that secure to add it?
Will they take the money from my account without my permission? If for instance I have used all the dynos, would they take the money from my account to add some dynos?
Do dynos last for long? How many users can use my site if I got 1000 dynos?
I tried to understand the answers from the another questions here in stack, but I could not understand them.
Please do not use the technical language, try to answer these questions as simply as you can (for me and users who will read it).
This is a very vague question, so I'll do my best to answer it clearly.
Adding your credit card to Heroku is perfectly safe. They are a legitimate company.
Heroku will automatically charge your credit card at the end of the month if you go OVER their free tier, meaning you use more than 450 dyno hours across your Heroku account, or if you provision paid addon services.
Dynos last forever, until you remove them. Heroku allows you to add dynos, remove them, etc., all instantly.
You also asked how many users your site can support if you have 1,000 dynos: this is equivalent to asking how many users your site can support if you have 1000 web servers. This is dependent on many factors: what does your site do? How was your site built? Etc.. In general, most webapps on Heroku only require 1 dyno to run indefinitely.
I have a Rails app deployed to Heroku on the Cedar Stack. I'd like to start running a nightly scheduled task, but in order to add the scheduler add-on, I need to give Heroku my credit card details.
I'm not sure how much this will end up costing, though, so I'd like to be able to set a spending limit on my Heroku account.
In other words, I'd like to be able to say "Please don't let me use dyno hours that will cost me more than $XXX per month".
Any ideas? Thanks!
I asked this same question on the Heroku forums. The answer is no, there is currently no way of setting a spending limit.
It is a feature they are considering implementing, though.
No, it's currently not possible to manage your cost natively with Heroku because they don't offer such feature at the moment.
However, there are a few third party solutions available. For example, the Heroku add-on cloudvertical claims to be able to track and analyse cloud infrastructure usage and costs.
There is also HireFire, a dyno manager.
If you search for Heroku scaling, or Heroku autoscaling, you will find a few solutions.
Disclaimer: I haven't tried them.
I currently try to implement amazon ec2 and I read that after one year they charge you. I used google app engine before(using java) and there is the feature that you can enable/disable charging. I just want to try the free ec2 instance, so here are my questions:
Does Amazon EC2 AUTOMATICALLY charge you after one year?
How to disable the automatically charging function?
I ended up closing my account by visiting the account page
At the bottom of the page you will find "close account"
It is currently not possible to disable charging. You might need to go over the free tier (for example if you setup a production environment, you might not want it to be killed automatically by amazon). Google App engine is a bit different because it is free if you have zero http requests, so it will just stop serving your app.
If you delete your credit card on your account, amazon will still charge it if there is an unpaid balance.
Amazon will not remind you that you will go over your free tier, so I would recommend to put a little reminder in one year on your calendar in one year to not forget to shutdown your server.
There is no way to control how much you will have to pay on AWS, that's why I wouldn't use it.
Amazon is really vague on the free tier (for instance it's not very clear whether the storage volume comes with the instance is counted against free EB2 storage quota). There are so many ways you can get a bill for using the free tier.
Yes you will be billed after 12 months, if you don't terminate all the instances and detach all storage volumes.
So many people have complained about Amazon's billing practice. Amazon has never changed. I guess this is the way Amazon decided to make $. Let you in for "free" but you will most likely accidentally spend some money. If you decide to use it, you won't know how much you will have to pay. If you have the capability to use colo/dedicated server, you might find out it's actually so much cheaper to go with a fixed monthly payment instead of billing based on usage.
With Amazon EC2, you are billed per hour of usage. If you are a new user, your account is credited with something like 8,760 free hours (24*365) which expire after 1 year. (I'm working from fuzzy memory here, so double-check the official terms instead of taking my word for it.)
After your free hours expire or are otherwise used up, Amazon EC2 will begin billing for normal hours (which can be as cheap as 2 cents per hour -- http://ec2instances.info). There is no such thing as a "free" EC2 instance.
So, to answer your questions:
Does Amazon EC2 AUTOMATICALLY charge you after one year?
Once your free hours are used up or expire, then you are automatically billed for normal hourly usage.
How to disable the automatically charging function?
You can't. All EC2 instances cost money. You are responsible for keeping an eye on your account and ensuring that you don't go over your free hours if you don't want to pay anything.
I was charged for a service that practically i never used.
a) Its true that Amazon never told you that the free tier is done. However, Amazon is prompty to charges you. Its my mistake but i admit that a little advice doesn't hurt, specially since practicaly everybody do that.
b) Even for a free tier, i wasn't impressed with the performance. I am owned a shared-hosting that are more powerful.
c) As some comments said, you can't delete your credit card, neither you can cancels the service. Its really low.
d) Finally,as some comment said, i closed my account. As far i can remember, its not tied with your Amazon (not cloud) account.
The service its so convoluted and overly complex, its filled with paid-traps and i am not impressed at all. Thanks Amazon but not thanks, i will stick with VPS/Dedicated.
You get 1 year of free usage http://aws.amazon.com/free/ .
Try reading AWS Free Usage Tier: http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Guide-Usage-ebook/dp/B007Q4JESC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343213452&sr=8-1&keywords=aws+free+tier .
I want to set up a Windows Azure account.
I'm an MSDN Subscriber so I get it for "free" the first 16 months.
Still, Microsoft want my credit card number just in case I go over the free limit.
In theory, this means I'm writing a carte blanche to MS to bill my credit card.
I want to know if anyone has been using Azure and if there's anyway of setting it to simply stop working if it gets near the cap where it would start to cost me something??
Today, there are no usage caps you can place on your account. Regarding the credit card and carte blanche ability to bill you: you'd only be billed for overage beyond the "free" stuff. Microsoft recently instituted an email-alert feature that lets you know when you've used 75% of your available resources. I believe that went live a few weeks ago.
Simply put: you get 750 compute-hours monthly (metered on a 1-hour boundary). This gives you enough hours to run a single, small instance 24x7, as there are just under 750 hours in a month. If you leave two instances running full-time, you'll go over your allotment and be charged.
If you're just learning, the MSDN account is fantastic. Just remember to delete your deployment at the end of the day (or when you're done trying something out), instead of letting it run 24x7. With a bit of prudence, you'll easily be able to test multi-instance applications and avoid ever being charged.
You can also log into the billing portal from the Azure portal. This shows a very detailed breakdown of your monthly usage, and with a quick scan you'll see how you're doing regarding compute-hours.
I keep mentioning compute-hours but not storage or bandwidth. Unless you're doing some extreme development, I doubt you'll run into any storage or bandwidth overruns. Same goes for SQL Azure - stick with Web Edition databases (and only 3 databases) and you'll have no issue there.
I wrote two blog posts that might also be helpful when thinking about how to manage cost so you don't get charged:
The True Cost of Web and Worker Roles
Staging and Compute-Hour Metering
In addition to David's answer, I would also suggest maximizing your use of the local Azure runtime that comes with the SDK. You can create web & worker roles and blobs/tables/queues. Iterate there until you are happy with how everything works - then publish to the public cloud.
There is no charge for the SDK or the local runtime.
The December 2011 release of Windows Azure introduced a much revamped billing portal which, amongst other things, introduced the ability to cap spend on introductionary accounts and MSDN accounts.
Whilst you still need to provide credit card for your MSDN Account, all accounts are automatically created with spending limit of $0; a limit one can remove from the billing portal.
See - http://www.brianhprince.com/post/2011/12/20/New-Sign-Up-for-Windows-Azure-and-Spending-Caps.aspx