(Disclaimer: I was at Heroku from Jan 2019 - July 2022, supporting Heroku Data products for most of that time. I have no special insight into this latest news beyond what's being reported publicly.)
> We host a lot of individual apps, many that only need free tier DBs and Redis.
I saw a lot of this, and while it's certainly not abuse it was - to my mind - a failure to turn Heroku's multi-tenant DB services into a real product.
Obviously it's not free to provide free services, but because they are "free" they don't get the same treatment and respect. Over time, these free or "hobby" services end up underpinning real production workloads such as SaaS providers using them for low-usage tenants of their own services, or for critical infrastructure stuff like review apps.
Tons of work goes into making those hobby redis and postgres plans work smoothly, abstracting away the complexity involved. If only someone were to put a customer-facing UI and API in front of that, and charge for it - so that you could pay one fixed price for a service that let you host as many DB tenants as you can fit on it, isolated from any other customers? It wouldn't be free, but it would be a killer feature.
It's a pity I don't see anything like that on the roadmap! Oh well, maybe someone else will do it first.
I agree. I support paying for everything because everything has a cost. But I also think the amount I pay should reflect the cost it takes to run the service and the value I get out of it. We do not get $15/m in value out of the $15/m tier of redis for most of our apps. A multi-tenant solution that costs us something like $1/m per app would be much more reasonable.
> We host a lot of individual apps, many that only need free tier DBs and Redis.
I saw a lot of this, and while it's certainly not abuse it was - to my mind - a failure to turn Heroku's multi-tenant DB services into a real product.
Obviously it's not free to provide free services, but because they are "free" they don't get the same treatment and respect. Over time, these free or "hobby" services end up underpinning real production workloads such as SaaS providers using them for low-usage tenants of their own services, or for critical infrastructure stuff like review apps.
Tons of work goes into making those hobby redis and postgres plans work smoothly, abstracting away the complexity involved. If only someone were to put a customer-facing UI and API in front of that, and charge for it - so that you could pay one fixed price for a service that let you host as many DB tenants as you can fit on it, isolated from any other customers? It wouldn't be free, but it would be a killer feature.
It's a pity I don't see anything like that on the roadmap! Oh well, maybe someone else will do it first.