Speaking as a pure hobbyist with no formal background in programming or computer science, I've learned a ton playing around with free Heroku dynos. That "holy shit, it worked" feeling is a hell of a drug.
My proudest achievement so far is a dumb-as-rocks little Clojure program that runs on a schedule in
a free Heroku dyno. It sends alerts to a Slack channel when there's updates to a Trello board we use at work. All it does is ping Trello's API, check for changes in the new state against a Postgres Heroku add-on that stores the last seen state, and then send formatted messages based on the diff to a Slack channel for me and the few coworkers of mine who pay attention to it. It starts up hourly in a Heroku free dyno, runs for six or seven seconds (JVM lol) and then goes back to sleep. But I'm super proud of it because it's actually useful and I made it myself instead of relying on Zapier or IFTTT or something like that. It sparks joy for me every time I see that it ran correctly.
Now I'll have to find somewhere else to host the little thing, I reckon.
You'd think a company the size of Salesforce would have the long-range vision to use a tiny fraction of their resources to capture developer "goodwill" from projects just like this. But apparently you'd be wrong.
Nah, some beancounters/MBAs found they could they could save a tiny amount of money and completely ignored the knock-on effects, tale as old as time. That said Heroku hasn't been relevant in many years now so maybe removing the free tier won't matter. They just have the people who are stuck there or for those who are neck-deep into Salesforce crap and Heroku is the best option. Neither of which sound like a winning strategy long term.
Developer interest has moved on (due to Heroku's mismanagement) and I'd bet the majority of talent has long since left Heroku. It's in a death spiral now.
I think the situation may be perhaps different to the one you describe. Heroku seems to have been pretty clear about the abuse and fraud that led to this move. It's a shame all round.
I don't have an MBA and am not a beancounter, but have some experience on the economics of the free tier. It's not pretty.
If you take them at face value that's the reason, personally they've lost nearly all my trust so I'm wary of accepting that as the reason. Also fraud and abuse are not unique to Heroku, every hosting provider with a free tier has to worry about that. This is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater as well as showing they don't really care about new developers coming to their platform.
In this thread and the other on the frontpage currently there are many people who started using Heroku on the free tier and now run or work at companies that spend thousands or tens of thousands a month on Heroku. This change is causing at least some of them to start looking around or even say for sure they plan on moving off of Heroku. This will effect Heroku today (people leaving) as well in the future (people never coming in the first place). To me that's a sign of them giving up (if it wasn't already clear by their actions over the last years).
I agree with most of what you say. The question I have is why would anyone care about new developers coming to their platform unless they had a plan, one day, to monetize those folks?
I think that’s part of the problem. They have no good plan on how to monetize them which is a problem. Instead of fixing that problem they just threw the baby out with the bath water.
Removing the free tier signals they can’t compete so they decided to remove something that only costs them money. Removing the free tier might even be a good/right decision, given their circumstances. What I am saying is removing the free tier appears to be them giving up on Heroku. It’s not like I’ve ever heard of someone migrating TO Heroku, especially not with their prices (and what you get for it). $25/mo per 512MB dyno? That’s just insane.
So if they aren’t trying to court new developers and they aren’t compelling as a PaaS to new customers then it seems the only place they can go is down. The lack of investment in the platform has already caused them to shed developers and today’s news will only accelerate that. All that’s left are people who are using it with Salesforce’s other products. Maybe that’s enough to make plenty of money but the Heroku we all knew (and some of us loved) seems to be gone, and that’s sad.
Its costs something, yes - but the fact that effectively the entire professional development community is well aware of Heroku's offerings, have had good experiences with them, and most have direct knowledge of how it all works is also worth something.
I'd wager that's worth significantly more than the few seconds of compute most of us have gotten in exchange.
I think back in the day, that six or seven seconds was likely someone learning, someone playing around with something, but these days people are signing up millions of accounts to try to mine shitcoins six seconds at a time.
My proudest achievement so far is a dumb-as-rocks little Clojure program that runs on a schedule in a free Heroku dyno. It sends alerts to a Slack channel when there's updates to a Trello board we use at work. All it does is ping Trello's API, check for changes in the new state against a Postgres Heroku add-on that stores the last seen state, and then send formatted messages based on the diff to a Slack channel for me and the few coworkers of mine who pay attention to it. It starts up hourly in a Heroku free dyno, runs for six or seven seconds (JVM lol) and then goes back to sleep. But I'm super proud of it because it's actually useful and I made it myself instead of relying on Zapier or IFTTT or something like that. It sparks joy for me every time I see that it ran correctly.
Now I'll have to find somewhere else to host the little thing, I reckon.