Welcome to the cloud, where you need to rely on a third party service to keep your other third party service online. Of course, what happens when setcronjob.com goes down.... well you then use pingdom to check that it is up...... down the rabbit hole we go!
Welcome to the web, where you get an easy hosting service like Heroku without paying a dime and then complain about how you need to put some effort to hack the system so you can continue to pay nothing.
Just to be clear: I am paying $70/mo for SSL and Postgres, so it's not that I'm paying nothing. However, based on the minimal server requirements for my app (most users are using our client-side Javascript tools), one dyno "should" be enough.
I completely agree, but sometimes third party tools are better than baking in-house, especially single purpose services. App crash analytics for example, or performance trending tools like NewRelic.
