Is Heroku really that expensive? I use their new $7/month instances and I have no complaints with performance and features. $50/month for a managed Postgres database is a bit expensive but other cloud storage options like Cloudant (use the service in same AWS region as Heroku) can be very reasonable.

Heroku is expensive when considering you can use similar tools on a vps for a fraction of the cost (or get a whole lot more for your money).

And yeah, when you charge $20 for SSL, you're expensive.

When you have to spend even 10 hours a year maintaining that vps, I think most PaaS pay for themselves.

I'm sorry but at $20/mo for basic SSL, you can easily spend $40/mo on Heroku for ONE app, almost $500/yr!

A private VPS with enough resources for 4 of those same apps would be 2-4X cheaper.

If your time is so valuable that you can waste money like that, congratulations, but many of us find halving a price and learning marketable skills in the process to be valuable.

It's $20/month for basic SSL for custom domains. You can still have SSL at https://your-app-name.herokuapp.com.

If your app is so important that SSL is necessary, that's worth $500/year. Or your app isn't that important and the point is moot.

I front end with Cloudflare to get HTTPS.

I have probably spent a thousand (paid) hours doing devops for customers. For my own projects I don't want to spend the time.

> Heroku is expensive when considering you can use similar tools on a vps

Do you know what Heroku offers over a VPS? They're not the same thing.

Heroku does not offer much over VPS+Dokku.

For the money, Heroku offers far far less than VPS+Dokku

Speaking as one of the Dokku maintainers, that is a false statement.

Security, true isolation, the ability to easily scale horizontally and vertically, integrations into many services are all things Heroku offers that you need to work hard for in Dokku. Disregarding the fact that you need to maintain your own server(s) with Dokku, Heroku is tthe clear winner here.

The only thing Dokku offers people is the ability to save some money at the cost of their own time. Sure, I can manage just fine as I was maintaining my own servers anyhow - and know how - but honestly I already have a dayjob, why would I want to make my programming hobby more work?

It adds up really fast. $7/month for an instance then $20/month for ssl (even if you don't want the wildcard) and add another $9/month for backend.

$ 36/month in 12 month is $432/month

That is indeed a cheap service. However, relatively expensive for people not making a profit for their projects.

It would be nice if Heroku lowered their prices occasionally as well.

It's expensive if you need decent performance - Isolated Dynos (i.e. running in their own EC2 instance) start at $250/month. We found that the shared Dyno options had significant noisy-neighbour problems.

Got a 4 core, 3GB ram server I pay <$7/month (paid yearly) on a reputable low end host, so yes it is expensive

Which hosting provider?

Out of curiosity, is there much of a performance hit using Cloudant vs a Heroku managed DB?

Not much if you are in the same AWS region.