I know you mean this sarcastically but I actually 100% agree with this particular on the steak point. Especially with beef prices at all time record highs and restaurant inflation being out of control post pandemic. It takes so much of the enjoyment out of things for me if I feel i'm being ripped off left and right.
What you're missing here is that companies happily pay the premium to Heroku because it lets them focus on building the product and generating business rather than wasting precious engineering time managing infra.
By the time the product is a success and reaches a scale where it becomes cost prohibitive, they have enough resources to expand or migrate away anyway.
I suppose for solo devs it might be cheaper to setup a box for fun, but even then, I would argue that not everyone enjoys doing devops and prefers spending their time elsewhere.
Maybe what bothers people so much is more of the fact that when Heroku first came out, it was much harder to do what that platform does. In the past 20 years or so, there has been a ton of improvement in the tools available. What could’ve taken you three full-time employees can probably be done with 20% of someone’s time after the initial set up which also isn’t that hard. So, it seems like instead of charging like 50X the cost of the servers themselves, maybe Heroku could be charging 10X. But it seems like salesforce probably just bought Heroku as a cash-generating machine. They probably figure they have a lot more to lose in cutting the bills of their old customers who don’t want to migrate anything, then they could gain from attracting new customers who aren’t already locked in.
Honestly, reading these threads it sounds to me like a lot of people are still launching new projects on Heroku. I wouldn’t have guessed that was true before reading this.
