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Lorenzo Zarantonello
Lorenzo Zarantonello

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Bye Bye Heroku

If you are a developer, you might have used or heard of Heroku.

Heroku is a cloud programming platform designed to help build and deploy online applications.

Founded in 2007, it is now one of the largest PaaS platforms in existence, with hundreds of thousands of customers spread around the world.

It supports six programming languages (through which to develop apps for distribution on the Web) and is based on the Debian operating system or, more recently, Ubuntu (two Linux distributions).

Goodbye Heroku

According to a recent update, "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".

Why is this a pity?

Because many people/students/dev have their first experience with deploying an application on Heroku!
And to be honest, the quality of the environment was pretty good, even in terms of analytics.

What's next?

I am sure many will move to other platforms to deploy their apps. Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages are all good options.
Do you know more?

Oldest comments (43)

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mmarulka profile image
Marija N. • Edited

Microtica offers a Heroku-like platform experience to deploy your apps securely on the cloud. You can use our Freemium plan to get started and then move to your own AWS account when ready (prices start at $19/month). Check out the platform at app.microtica.com and contact me to get help with free AWS credits.

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lorenzojkrl profile image
Lorenzo Zarantonello

Interesting! Thanks for sharing:)

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meshvpatel18 profile image
Meshv Patel

Cool. Thanks for this link.

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mterrel profile image
Mark Terrel

Give Adaptable.io a try. It's easier to use than Heroku and the free tier includes your database (Postgres or MongoDB).

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lorenzojkrl profile image
Lorenzo Zarantonello

Never heard of it! Thanks for sharing! I’ll give it a try!

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lukeecart profile image
Luke Cartwright

Here's a great Github repo I was shown recently that could help you.

There's a webhosting section that gives some great options as replacements.

github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev#...

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lorenzojkrl profile image
Lorenzo Zarantonello

Thanks! I need to spend some time on this! Quite some stuff 🥳

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ngocsotn profile image
The Ngoc Nguyen

Good share, thank you

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mezieb profile image
Okoro chimezie bright

thanks for puting all this together.

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lukeecart profile image
Luke Cartwright

This wasn't me, I was told about it

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koleajeolayinka profile image
KOLEAJEOLAYINKA

Thanks for sharing this amazing info i really appreciate

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gurchiekt profile image
Thomas Gurchiek

I knew about the inactivating of accounts, but i guess i missed that part about free dyno time. That free dyno time was perfect for quick staging of applications for testing. Not to mention a great place for Rubyists.

I mean pay as you go im sure will still be around, but thats still ops maintenance to remember to cycle up/down. /rollEyes

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alonedatascientist profile image
alonedatascientist

Yep. "But just go to [insert platform here] it starts as low as 99$ for a chunk of time and data that will be sure to change every 2 months" ...(there is no emoji committing suicide but imagine him here)

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lorenzojkrl profile image
Lorenzo Zarantonello

Ahahah nailed it!

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timhub profile image
Tech Tim (@TechTim42) • Edited

There are a few quite good heroku alternatives.

For self hosted options

In my own experience, I used heroku before, even applied a paid dyno when I was a student,

caprover

later I switched to caprover, which I realised for most of small individual, low-traffic apps, it is much cheaper to use one single AWS Cheap EC2 instance.

switch to k8s
After that, credits oracle cloud free tier, I built a free k8s cluster on Oracle cloud, it is basically one time for all, the hard part is basically the initialising part, after initialising, it is quite easy for app deployment and management. simply do kubectl apply -f infra-deploy.yaml

Oracle Free tier offer up to 4 free ARM instance (32GB Ram), and 2 AMD instances

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timhub profile image
Tech Tim (@TechTim42)

I made an article to talk about dokku, caprover and self host alternatives.

dev.to/timhub/self-host-heroku-alt...

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agonzales profile image
Alexandre Gonzales

qoddi.com is compatible with most of Heroku's buildpacks. We wrote a guide to help with the migration: dev.to/qoddiapps/migration-guide-h...

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kostjapalovic profile image
Kostja Appliku.com

hey, Lorenzo!

3 years ago, I started working on a Heroku alternative.

A Heroku alternative deployment service that uses your cloud server from any provider to run your apps.

appliku.com/

The primary focus is on Python/Django but also runs node apps.

I posted the story here a while ago: dev.to/kostjapalovic/tired-of-depl....

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lorenzojkrl profile image
Lorenzo Zarantonello

What kind of bots do you have there 😂😂😂

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hicmtrex profile image
hichem

any other platform where we can deploy an api for free? 🤔

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agonzales profile image
Alexandre Gonzales

qoddi.com is here to help if you need us :)

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kenramiscal1106 profile image
Ken Daniele Ramiscal

Yes, I know another platform. And that other platform is railway

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mrdulin profile image
official_dulin

GG heroku.

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alonedatascientist profile image
alonedatascientist

Pouring out a little drink for Heroku.

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danielf76025698 profile image
Daniel Franken

Yea, just take your Git Repo which you deployed to Heroku and throw it to mogenius. Same thing, faster build pipelines, easier to maintain. ^^
See you on Discord :)

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sarozpradhan64 profile image
Saroj Pradhan • Edited

eu.pythonanywhere.com/pricing/ is the good option for the python web apps. Its backed by Anaconda

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elijahtrillionz profile image
Elijah Trillionz

Keyword "students".

When I just started learning back-end development, Heroku was the first PaaS I encountered. I was excited it was free and I could try it out immediately along with the tutorial I was watching.

It was great while it lasted.