I learned web development through "Ruby on Rails Tutorial" by Michael Hartl. The book is a project-based tutorial where you create a Twitter clone complete with a basic authentication system.
The book had you host your app on the free version of Heroku. I imagine this book has taught a lot of people, and influenced a lot of people to use Heroku.
Not anymore I guess.
I essentially earned a college degree’s worth of languages/frameworks (Ruby, Node ecosystems) on free Heroku instances, and I owe my career to it. Other comments speak to this point as well. There’s probably a generation of us who completed some blog/O’Reilly “curriculum” involving Heroku > Digital Ocean > AWS > etc.
I never paid Heroku a dime and, after everything has shaken out, I don’t know why I would start now.
There are plenty of cool alternatives but one I’ve used and don’t see mentioned here is Dokku, which was trivial for me to set up on, in my case, a cheap droplet on DigitalOcean.
This made me have feelings, I wrote them up on my blog: https://xeiaso.net/blog/rip-heroku
I wish that things were better such that we could have nice things.
Will there be a new pricing tier or lowest being $7?
This was discussed largely in this thread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594533