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Just moved off https://github.com/majodev/google-webfonts-helper today from their free tier to my own private infra and replaced current the Heroku dyno with a 301: https://github.com/kenmickles/heroku-redirect
AFAIK sadly Heroku does not provide some other _free_ permanent redirect option for *.herokuapp.com apps without actually running a dyno there.
Just moved off https://github.com/majodev/google-webfonts-helper today from their free tier to my own private infra and replaced current the Heroku dyno with a 301: https://github.com/kenmickles/heroku-redirect
AFAIK sadly Heroku does not provide some other _free_ permanent redirect option for *.herokuapp.com apps without actually running a dyno there.
There's Glitch if you want a new playground: https://glitch.com/
Last time a post about Heroku was posted, I talked about my great experience using Coolify:
I am using Coolify (https://coolify.io), an open source self-hosted PaaS which is a relatively newer kid on the block compared to Dokku and CapRover. I tried both of these and I just didn't like how they were, always had some problem or another.
In contrast, Coolify has a great GUI that abstracts away the most common things about PaaS hosting, like connecting to GitHub automatically for git push deploys, SSL certificates, reverse proxying and custom domain support, and best of all, having support for Heroku style buildpacks as well as Dockerfiles. I've been quite happy with it, the creator has a Discord and responds to issues very quickly.
With regards to non-self-hosted options, I did try out Render, Fly.io and Railway but I found that their free servers were too anemic. I was compiling a Rust backend and it simply could not compile on their free servers. On Hetzner, for 5 bucks I could get a 2 AMD vCPU and 2 GB RAM machine that was sufficient to compile my Rust apps in a way that the non-self-hosted ones were not. I have a JS frontend app that works fine though but I wanted to keep everything under the same VPS, plus I can run other types of self-hosted services on it too, like Plausible analytics and a Ghost blog. I'm not sure if those are allowed on non-self-hosted options.
All in all, it costs me 5 bucks a month, and I never have to worry about sudden upcharges for traffic à la AWS as in the very worst, my VPS goes down for a while. I'm now running about 20 different services on this 5 dollar box including databases and applications as well as other services, works just fine.
- they use more cost efficient hardware (e.g. databases running on 3rd gen SSD disks) to run your workloads.
Since these companies are renting raw hardware, on which they run your workloads (and are not using cloud-provider-native services, such as RDS), they need to hire experienced operators able to run and manage those workloads in production. This (for obvious reasons) is not exactly easy, and requires a lot of experienced talent with operational experience.
Hiring those people is very hard, as these experts are not usually available on the market.
This leaves us with with the obvious problem:
Are the operators of the given PaaS provider really able to run your production workloads? Are they able to to withstand all the issues that may arise?
Don't get me wrong. There definitely are companies (the most succesful) able to hire very capable talent (such as https://supabase.io), but this definitely isn't the case for all of those PaaS providers.
And I believe that these companies will need to increase their prices (and be less lucrative for their customers) or changes their business model.
This is something that we at stacktape.com built our business case on. We took a different path. We just wanted to make the existing (AWS) offerings 2 orders of magnitue easier to use, so that any developer (withou Cloud or DevOps experience) can use them productively.
We're not running your workloads for you. We are just making AWS services (run by experienced operators) significantly easier to consume (97% less difficult, so that any developer can do the job). For that, we're charging 30%->20% of the AWS infrastructure costs managed by us premium. This also means that you are not restricted to our platform, but can easily extend your infrastructure by any AWS service (using AWS CloufFormation or AWS CDK).
AWS offers areasonably generous free tier, and Stacktape won't charge you for any resources withing the free tier.
We're launching our v2 soon (~1-2 weeks), and if the offering we have sounds interesting, we'll be very happy to hear your thoughts.