Got tired of Deployments, burnt by Heroku invoices, built my own Heroku

I have no knowledge of what you are talking about. Can you give me a link?

I couldn’t find anything about the DigitalOcean feature/service you are referring to. Are you referring to the DigitalOcean Marketplace?

Piku seems to be nice, wanted something like that for my ARM servers, Thank you for sharing.

I've added it to my curated list of startup tools as well.

I wish success to the OP for their project as well.

That's why I love publishing stuff in communities with smart people :) I get exposed to stuff I never would have otherwise.

And no, haven't seen Piku.

TBH when I first started I found very little alternatives to Heroku at all. There was Forge for PHP and Hatchbox which was the final validation of the demand for such services.

hehe yeah, @AndrewV the dev journey was A LOT OF FUN!
As I said in the article I've learned a lot.

Here is a thing – you either have a tool that works for you while you are busy making other project or you are making other projects as an excuse to polish your deployment skills even more.

Tinkering, fine-tuning and all this stuff – you get fed up with it at some point if you started building something interesting.

If you still find yourself working on your deployment scripts – maybe it is just your therapy? You run from everything serious to work on scripts?

It happened to me. Maybe the whole Appliku started from that, I have a feeling, but no definitive answer.

Wish you the best either way!

Basically Appliku solves that PITA. You can take free AWS year and Appliku will handle the server setup problem. You don't need to manage anything yourself.

Hey!

Thanks for registering!

Appliku can host any dynamic app. For static apps, you will be better off on Netlify with their CDN.

Appliku provides built-in databases (PostgreSQL, Redis, Rabbitmq). They are free of charge – they run on your server in containers.

If you host your database elsewhere – you provide credentials in your app settings in Config Vars (Environment Variables).

The tutorial for hosting an app on AWS and Appliku: https://appliku.com/articles/how-to-deploy-django-ec2-https-ssl

If you need more help – I will be happy to help, I'll drop a line to your email shortly!

Thanks for asking. I can make it happen, subscribe to release newsletter to be the first to know.
But can't tell exactly when it happens right now.
You can still use managed mongo from mongo itself, but that will probably cost money.
Thanks again!

Heroku is overpriced.

Yes, their pricing is open.

It is easy to start there.

It is easy to increase resources consumption (like add an additional line to Procfile).

$7 here, $7 there.

Oh right, I have another app I wanted to run. Screw this, with Heroku it is so easy.

By the end of the month they did all the math for you and that number is charged from your card. $7 alone doesn't seem much, but when you multiply it by 10 (10 dynos or 5 different apps with 2 dynos? it becomes $70 which is already noticable.

What if you were fine with little dynos and now you need to scale?

There are guys who moved to Appliku + Digital Ocean and saved $300/mo right away by hosting all background workers on a single droplet.

What, they didn't read the pricing page of Heroku? They did. But $250 per dyno was just wrong. And it took 40 minutes to decide AND move that workload to D.O.

Heroku IS WOW. Yes. But costs TOO MUCH.

I think you're right that Heroku is open about their pricing, but I think we need alternatives because they're really overpriced, as are the plugins.

I've worked with Heroku on one app I did consulting for. The app slowly grew over time (memory, cpu needs, db size, etc), and there was a sudden jump from around $75/mo to $300+ to run it efficiently. It's not a perfectly fair comparison (uptime/load balancing), but that app would've run fine on a single $40 DO instance with a ton of room to grow.

I think Heroku needs a little more competition to make their pricing a bit more reasonable ;-)