This is a sad day. Pricing changes are always hard, and having been through some of the earlier pricing changes at Heroku you can't make everyone happy. But, so many developers deployed their first app on Heroku and was a staple for so many bootcamps. Without it I'm confident we'd have less developers in the world.

It is still one of the gold standards for developer experience. Years after its heyday companies and tools talk about and try to emulate that experience. I recall polling on twitter a few months back which the key feature was:

- git push heroku master

- Heroku add-ons

- Heroku Postgres

- Review apps

And the reality is any one of those could standard on their own. But put together, Heroku simply lets you forget about ops and focus on shipping, and shipping is king.

I fully get it's a business, but can't help but feel this is the writing on the wall for the future.

Gonna pour one out tonight for Heroku.

Edit: And may be trying to figure out how to offer free Postgres databases, cause shutting down databases with 3 months notice feels pretty short. Not sure if that means deleting the data itself or what, but ouch.

Why do you think nobody has been able to fully emulate this experience?

It seems to me like there’d be a big market for an identical feature by feature Heroku “clone” with a more dedicated (from the outside looking in) team. No more features, no less, just exactly what Heroku did but without the intent to shut down. What’s preventing that from existing?

Another start-up I've been playing with is Railway, who offers 5-10$ of free usage per month, certainly enough to play with react/nextjs app and a postgres db to your hobbyists hearts content (as long as you turn if off when you're done).

If I were to host a bootcamp on starting a web app from scratch I'd do something like stand-up a T3 App https://github.com/t3-oss/create-t3-app on Vercel Hobby https://www.vercel.com . Not sure I'd even consider Heroku for teaching anymore.