Ask HN: What should I use instead of Heroku?

• supabase

  767 65,869 10.0 TypeScript

  The open source Firebase alternative.

  

I’d add [supabase](https://supabase.com/) to the list as well. They have some compelling hosted Postgres options.

• CapRover

  31 12,181 7.6 TypeScript

  Scalable PaaS (automated Docker+nginx) - aka Heroku on Steroids

  

I recommend Caprover. It's a simple container environment that hosts your services via sensible nginx configurations and Docker swarm, has a cli tool that can be utilized for CI purposes, and provides easy spin-up for common OSS web-apps.

I utilize it to host many different PHP and Java apps.

https://github.com/caprover/caprover

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io sponsored

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• bgproc

  1 10 6.5 Shell

  bash loop to run tasks in the background. used as an anacron alternative

(disclosure: I don't use tasker and am not associated with them, I do work on something in the similar space of "compute without servers")

First, you're coming at this from the wrong perspective. The OP is about alternatives to Heroku - the starting position is "I don't want to use servers". There are a number of rational reasons for this, including OS maintainence and the mental overhead of setting up continuous deployment from your repo (ansible to configure cron? a self-hosted PaaS?). "Don't worry about servers" doesn't just make sense in principle, it's also quite popular in practice - just consider the uptake of things like serverless.

So, starting from "no servers", how do you run something on a regular basis? Let's say "send me a message on telegram daily with some info". Serverless and similar offerings are useless for this, they're a different model (request/response). I did research on "hosted cron" at the time and the options were pretty terrible - there's definitely space here for tasker.

FWIW, this is coming from someone with a default position of "self-hosted only". For my own use, I tried out cron and airflow - they're both annoying and I settled on bgproc [0] as least-worst on my already-existing personal server. I really wanted to move to something hosted by the time I was done (tasker didn't exist).

[0] https://github.com/seanbreckenridge/bgproc

• templates

  271 325 4.3

  Railway starters (by railwayapp)

  

Been a long-time fan of Railway (https://railway.app) — seems like it would be a great option here.

If you wanna see pure magic, CMD+K —> PostgreSQL (or Redis). ~3s and you’re good to go.

• flyctl

  544 1,307 9.9 Go

  Command line tools for fly.io services

  

I know others have suggested this too but https://fly.io is great! Very generous free tier, and it feels as magical as Heroku did when I first used it years ago.

I’ve worked as an SRE and do a fair amount of infrastructure work at my job, so I’ve had periods of time where I ran my own k8s cluster for side projects and more recently ran a nomad cluster. The big caveat here is I enjoyed doing this and it helped my career experimenting with infra in my free time before suggesting it internally. I’ve also had bare metal servers and some of the whole classic fabulous monolith thing which is its own beast.

All that said, if you just want some small easy to use compute with little maintenance definitely give Fly a try! (Not affiliated, just a happy new customer)

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

Suggest a related project