---
title: "The Legacy of Heroku's Free Tier"
date: 2022-08-25
tags:
  - heroku
  - salesforce
  - capitalism
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
---

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.

<XeblogConv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">
  This post is hard to write. Please bear with me.
</XeblogConv>

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.

<XeblogConv 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.
</XeblogConv>

<XeblogConv 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.
</XeblogConv>

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 valid 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.

<XeblogHero
  ai="Stable Diffusion"
  file="red-door-closed"
  prompt="a bright red closed door, black background, hanzi inscription"
/>

<XeblogConv 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.
</XeblogConv>

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.

<XeblogHero
  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"
/>
