How many apps are allowed on a 'Hobby' Heroku plan? - heroku

A 'Free' tier Heroku account allows up to 5 apps. How many apps does a 'Hobby' plan allow for?
I have looked on the Heroku general pricing page, detailed pricing page, and on a few related pages e.g. 'Choosing the Right Heroku Postgres Plan', but I can't see any explicit mention of how many apps I can deploy
Could it be that a "Dyno" is in fact another word for an app? And therefore there is no limit on the 'Hobby' tier, but I must pay $7/app/month?

In case it's useful to someone else the answer is:
"there is a soft limit of 100 apps per (Hobby tier) account".
The quote comes from my email to Heroku support

Although the question was on the Hobby plan, there is an update now that lets you have more than 5 apps for the Free plan (which is one reason one might have asked this question).
If you verify the account by adding a credit card on file, you can have up to 100 apps on the (verified) free plan, and still the 5 app limit for unverified.
Source (Heroku link)

According to the new rules, one can at most 5 apps if the account is not verified (no credit card details). If you add your credit card, you can have as many as 100 free apps as your account is now verified.
If we talk about free dynos, it's 550 for un-verified accounts and an additional 450 for verified accounts.
Reference: https://www.heroku.com/free

Related

Do I need to pay if I have more than 5 apps on Heroku?

I deployed 5 very simple React apps on Heroku.
Today, when I wanted to add a 6th one, Heroku came up with the error message:
You've reached the limit of 5 apps for unverified accounts. Delete
some apps or add a credit card to verify your account.
Account Verification Required Your account must be verified to create
this app. Please add payment information to verify your account.
For verification Heroku basically needs me to give them my payment details.
Doe's it mean that from the 6th app, Heroku is going to charge me?
Heroku will only charge you for paid services. If you continue to use only free dynos and free add-ons you shouldn't be charged.
Note that you might initially see some holds on your card:
Every bank works differently, and some of them require a one dollar hold by the verifier before a card can be confirmed. After a few business days the hold will be released and your card will be verified if successful.
If you see multiple instances of a $1.00 charge, it may be because the card information was submitted multiple times. The duplicate holds will also be released and returned to your account after a few business days.

How do I create a scheduled task with Heroku's free site?

I’m using Rails 4.2.7. I want to host my app with Heroku so I first decided to create the free hobby account to see how everything works. I would like to create a task that runs every day and so was reading about Heroku’s scheduler app. However, when I try and add the add-on I get the error
$ heroku addons:create scheduler:standard
Creating scheduler:standard on ⬢ myproject... !
▸ Please verify your account to install this add-on plan (please enter a credit card) For more information, see https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/billing Verify now at
▸ https://heroku.com/verify
I’m not ready to shell out any money yet. How do I create a scheduled task or is Heroku not a good hosting service for this, and if not, where else should I go?
You must verify your account to use add-ons (some exceptions are there, like Heroku Postgres and Heroku Connect add-ons).
You don't need to spend any money to verify your account. You need to have a valid credit card. Heroku will try to verify the credit card and on successful verification, your account will be verified. You can read more information about accepted credit cards and detailed verification procedure here.
Quoting from the link mentioned above,
Heroku needs to be able to reliably identify and contact our users in the event of an issue. We have found that having a credit card on file provides the most reliable way of obtaining verified contact information. Account verification also helps us with abuse prevention.
You must verify your account if you, or collaborators of your app, want to:
Add any add-on to the app, even if the add-on is free. The only exceptions to this are the free plans for the Heroku Postgres and Heroku Connect add-ons, which can be added without verification.
If you do not have a credit or debit card (or do not have one that we are able to accept), you can still use the parts of Heroku that do not require account validation.
So currently, no other option is available to verify your account except using your credit card.
I use openshift online (1X CPU-512MB memory-1GB storage, 3 free gear) from RedHat but recently, they stopped new registration as they are building Openshift Online (NEXT GEN). You can apply for developer preview and use it for 30 days but the waitlist is too long. During Developer Preview period, OpenShift Online (Next Gen) is free (2 GiB memory, 4 CPU cores, and 2 x 1 GiB persistent volumes, 1 project).

Adding the billing card to the Heroku account and cons/pros of using dynos

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.

Billing issues with google geocoding api

Billing was added to our gmaps-api project. And the billing definitely propagated, as it was added around 4 weeks ago.
In the project dashboard, billing shows as available. However, when we try to adjust our quotas, it says that we need to activate billing.
We contacted just about every channel at Google and were told that there is absolutely no provided support for billing issues with developer APIs.
Us: "We want to give you money."
Google: "No, and we won't help you."
Has anyone else encountered billing issues with API projects, and if so, how did you resolve them?
--- update ---
Note: Finally a rep reached out. You can ONLY get around the quota by getting a Google Maps for Work license.
The billing option is just a false lead if you're looking to go above the quota.
So it seems there are 2 limits.
You can only geocode 2500 addresses per day without billing.
You can geocode up to 100000 per day if you provide billing but you are limited to 2500 per session.
I seem to have this issue as well. I have a billing operation setup but I need to set up multiple sessions in order to go above the 2500 limit.
If you want to go above 2500 per session then you need the "Google Maps for Work" license. Is that correct?

Can I set a cap on costs in Windows Azure?

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

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