Heroku announces the end of its free plans

After providing them for over a decade, Heroku recently announced that it would discontinue offering free product plans on November 28th and shut down free dynos and data services.

Beginning on October 26 of this year, inactive accounts and the storage space tied to such accounts will be deleted. Any account that has been inactive for more than 90 days will be deleted on November 28th. Heroku has stated that the decision was made to focus on their paid plans and improve the overall quality of their service.

“Our product, engineering, and security teams are putting in a lot of work to minimize fraud and misuse of Heroku’s free product plans.” “We will be discontinuing our free Heroku Dynos, Heroku Postgres, and Heroku Data for Redis plans, as well as erasing inactive accounts,” Bob Wise, Heroku General Manager and Salesforce EVP, noted in a blog post.

Heroku also announced the launch of an interactive Heroku product roadmap on GitHub and a future initiative to assist schools and organizations in conjunction with its charitable team.

The company will keep contributing to open-source projects like Cloud Native Buildpacks and will give Heroku credits to some open-source projects through Salesforce’s Open Source Program Office.

They’ll also continue to support the Heroku Deprecate Relicensing Program for communities that want to use Heroku’s platform and tools.

For unfamiliar people, Heroku allows programmers to develop, operate, and grow apps in various programming languages such as Java, PHP, Scala, and Go. Salesforce paid $212 million for the firm in 2010 and since then has added support for Node.js and Clojure, as well as Heroku for Facebook. This package simplifies the process of installing Facebook apps on the Heroku infrastructure.

According to Heroku’s website, it has been used to generate 13 million apps to date.

The elimination of Heroku’s free tiers will affect more than just amateurs. Some users mention Heroku’s free plans as a suitable staging area for testing apps before deployment in a discussion thread on Y Combinator’s Hacker News forum. According to one user who goes by the handle “driver dan,” many of his company’s apps only require free-tier databases and “dynos” (Heroku jargon for Linux containers), and switching to Heroku’s subscription plans will drastically raise expenses without bringing little benefits.

“This update will almost quadruple the cost of a basic app on pro dynos + DB + Redis,” driver dan remarked. Heroku Dynos costs $7 per month, Heroku Data for Redis costs $15 per month, and Heroku Postgres costs $9 per month. “It would be good if this adjustment included a price cut to better match alternatives.” However, as it stands, this modification will drastically raise the cost for everyone who uses specific free resources.”

Heroku’s outlook grew a little cloudier today.