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Signed-off-by: Xe Iaso <me@christine.website>

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+---
+title: "The Legacy of Heroku's Free Tier"
+date: 2022-08-25
+tags:
+ - heroku
+ - salesforce
+---
+
+<xeblog-hero ai="Stable Diffusion" file="forlorn-tabaxi-mage" prompt="a sad tabaxi mage looks hopelessly at the sky, ukiyo-e, anime style, digital art, trending on artstation, 8k uhd, unreal engine, sunset, red sun, fire in the distance"></xeblog-hero>
+
+Heroku is a platform-as-a-service that lets you push git repositories to the
+cloud and then magically get a URL to that application running somewhere. This
+"Heroku magic" was _catalytic_ to my career. Add in the fact that as a high
+school student I could do this _for free_ (back when I was so price sensitive
+that I couldn't even have my own domain name or VPS because I didn't have a
+credit card), I'd say that Heroku and its free tier was so utterly important to
+my career that I literally am unable to state how vital it was to my career.
+
+Without that door the free tier opened into really understanding how websites
+work, I would have never been able to get to the point I am today and certainly
+wouldn't be writing this post right now.
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">This post is hard to write. Please bear
+with me.</xeblog-conv>
+
+Alas, Heroku is [sunsetting their free
+tier](https://blog.heroku.com/next-chapter) due to abuse from people that don't
+want to genuinely learn or try out the platform. They just wanted to take
+advantage of the higher resources that are put into the builder nodes, using
+that to mine dogecoin, monero or whatever. They wanted to make their own
+shadowsocks proxies for torrenting terribly filmed pornography. They wanted to
+do literally anything but learn how to develop web applications and use that
+knowledge to further their careers (and in the process get addicted to Heroku's
+magical ability to Just Work so that they would hopefully become customers for
+life).
+
+This may just be me getting old, but I have watched as door after door into tech
+gets firmly shut and locked. This is sad to me. I have seen so many passionate,
+intelligent, and overall worthy people try and fail to get into tech because of
+the pointless obstacles that have built up over the years. I know brilliant
+people that cannot write a goddamn cover letter to save their lives. I know
+systems programmers and SRE types that cannot leetcode at all, but can help
+conceptually model the failure domains of complicated applications intuitively
+in a way that would be _revolutionary_ to responding to downtime.
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Numa" mood="delet">Hold on there buddy, you're saying that
+society lacking a backbone of education and social services means you are
+entitled to free compute time and hosting from a startup. You ain't entitled to
+shit from corpos unless you can make their line go up. The fact that it was a
+successful part of your life ain't mean that it's the point of the program at
+all.</xeblog-conv>
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">Well, yes. It's incredibly ridiculous
+that as a person wanting to get involved with tech that I had few options for
+making things on the web. I'm pretty sure that my case is kind of exceptional
+(though when I worked at Heroku I did run into at least one other person that
+also got their in on tech from the free tier) and not the point of the program.
+I guess my point here is that the side effects of that program _have created
+good_ even if going out there to create good wasn't their goal in the first
+place. I am mourning that removal of that source of good outcomes.</xeblog-conv>
+
+It is so hard to watch people give up on their dreams to work in tech because of
+all the hoops they have to jump through. And now I am seeing another hoop show
+up for very unfortunate but understandable reasons. Abuse of free compute
+resources is an unfortunately lucrative field. At some point, people give up
+trying to fight the abuse and just close the door because doing that is cheaper
+than keeping the door open.
+
+It feels like giving up on the future to protect things the way they are now.
+This is a vaild choice to have to make as a company, it's understandable. I was
+part of the group that advocated for keeping the free tier. I talked with the
+people that were trying to destroy it when I was inside Salesforce and I told
+them my story about how the free tier (and web.py of all things) was the reason
+that I was able to break into tech. They were always stunned and confused and
+then sharply ended the conversation. They must have been focused so much on the
+toil that it caused them to have to respond to the build cluster falling over
+because of Monero _again_ that they didn't see the human factor in the equation.
+The lives that the free tier enriched. The people that were made able to _create
+things_ because of the ability to share them. In a world full of group chats on
+closed platforms, sharing a link in the chat is the new IRC bot that
+intelligently appends "in my pants" to random chat messages.
+
+<xeblog-hero ai="Stable Diffusion" file="red-door-closed" prompt="a bright red closed door, black background, hanzi inscription"></xeblog-hero>
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">I mean, the sheer cost of doing this is
+also a huge factor for wanting to get rid of this. If the barrier to entry is so
+low that most people won't have to pay and can keep using the service
+indefinitely, there are a large number of people that just won't pay at all.
+This can turn a loss leader into an absolute loss in ways that will piss people
+off if you get rid of it, but also piss off internal people if it stays. There
+is no limit to how much effort people will put into being cheap when it comes to
+free resources. The point of free tiers is to give people the first hit for
+free so they pay more in the long term. It's a trade between short term adoption
+and long term revenue potential. I can't imagine the sheer scale of Heroku at
+this point and the number of resources they are going to be able to decommission
+with this change.</xeblog-conv>
+
+I really don't know what to think about all this. This change _feels_ scary to
+me. Heroku now has a public roadmap, but I'm really not sure if the best days
+are ahead for Heroku or if they have passed. I really hope that this retreat
+upmarket won't torch the good will that people have for Heroku because Heroku as
+an idea is something worth learning from. It is a revolutionary thing and it
+defined the startup boom of the aughts and tens.
+
+It's the end of an era. I don't really know what the era that comes will bring,
+but at the very least it's no longer going to involve Heroku as the market
+leader for platform-as-a-service development tools. Heroku has died to me, and I
+really don't know how I feel about this. Maybe this kind of understandable
+sadness is just part of getting old.
+
+I just hope that the next era will bring equitable tech to everyone. Hopefully
+capitalism doesn't kill that off before it has its time to shine. Maybe
+[fly.io](https://fly.io) will reclaim that mantle of responsibility.
+
+<xeblog-hero ai="Stable Diffusion" file="googly-flies" prompt="housefly, fly, horsefly, pest, insect, biblically accurate, surrealist, surrealism, cubism, surreal, digital art, ukiyo-e, trending on artstation, 8k uhd"></xeblog-hero>