The fact that we (Fly.io) require a credit card is evidence that we don't plan to take the free plan away any time soon. (The credit card requirement is purely an anti-fraud thing). :)

As I think a lot of people will point out: Heroku's DX is better than ours in a bunch of ways. Their superpower is DX, and our superpower is scaling apps out across the globe (our secondary superpower is running clusters of services). We're working hard on simplifying our Docker-based DX (our schtick is that we convert Docker/OCI images into VMs) --- we have a `flyctl launch` command that will automatically generate containers from standard framework repositories --- but Heroku has us solidly beat on that stuff.

Also, we're proudly CLI-first. If you're allergic to CLIs, we're not your best bet. We love our CLI very, very much.

I could say lots of nice things about us, but so can every hosting provider; the useful things to know are where you might be tripped up by us vs. Heroku. Also, I think Heroku is a pretty incredible accomplishment, and they've had 15+ years to work on it, so I wince at the idea that we're doing everything they do --- seems unlikely!

What's your approach towards hobbyist programmers under 18, people living in a country that doesn't commonly use the Visa/Mastercard duopoly, or otherwise unable to get a credit card for any reason?

I started learning to code as a teenager, with cash being my only way of spending money, so all services that either had a price or required CC verification were completely unavailable for me. Not being able to afford them wasn't the problem, not being able to pay was.

I really enjoyed Heroku for that reason, it was the only service that allowed me to put apps up on the internet that I could actually get access to. It's really sad that something like that is going away.

It's a good question, and we don't have a good answer for it yet. You're not wrong to be annoyed by this. It's a consequence of us being a young team with limited resources; if you do nothing to qualify free-tier users, then several people end up with the full-time job of tracking and shutting down abuse.

It won't make you feel much better, but this issue is very close to the top of our stack (we'd also convert visitors and window-shoppers better if they could boot something up without a credit card). The incentives are there for us to fix this; it's mostly a matter of time.

I'm glad you called it out.

Idea: give an option for developers to qualify by proving ownership of an active GitHub/GitLab/Sourcehut profile?