Heroku alternatives for bootstrapped founders?
Costs on Heroku can quickly add up. Do you know of any good alternatives for bootstrapped founders?
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Costs on Heroku can quickly add up. Do you know of any good alternatives for bootstrapped founders?
Render is also another platform I'd recommend and they seem to be much cheaper when scaling.
+1 render
Started using render too. I'm quite happy with it. Would be great to have basic metrics with alerts like heroku has.
That's the only thing I find is critically missing at the moment.
+1 to Render. Been using it for some Rails and Node prototypes and really enjoying it
Thank you for suggesting this. I am definitely going to try this. I have been searching for Heroku alternative since they are shutting free dynos totally.
Also use Render. We're using it for both the product app hosting and marketing site hosting for our latest product.
Render is awesome. I use it for freelance.one and am pretty happy with it.
I'm currently (at this moment) facing a huge spike in requests and concurrent users on the page. I just had one instance running, and my service was unreachable at that point.
I switched on their "Autoscale" feature, and it immediately scaled up to 4 instances smoothly. My service is now available and runs "like butter"! 👍
Yup. All while having a very intuitive UI.
I used this for my new project and it's great -- more affordable, a little bit more effort, but once it's up and running it's great.
I have about 30 apps running on a $10/m Digital Ocean droplet with Piku. It's an open source alternative to Heroku etc. Because it is so lightweight it is perfect for indie hackers deploying lots of prototypes.
Disclaimer: I'm a core contributor to Piku.
Never heard of Piku, what is different compared to Dokku?
Dokku:
Piku:
In general I would say Piku is more minimal and indie. No Docker means it is exceptionally lightweight.
Sounds interesting. Maybe I will give it a try later, I will check out your codebase too. Thanks.
How did you point domain names to each port?
Piku looks really cool. I've always used Dokku if I wasn't using Heroku, but it's a pain setting up the image and getting everything configured for small projects. I'm gonna have to check it out for my next side project!
If you run into any problems please leave an issue on the repo. UX is really important to me.
I’m joining @Vitukov in the question
Thanks for your interest - see above.
I'm currently using https://fly.io/. Good pricing and easy paths to set up everything I need which is an app container and postgres.
Same here, enjoying fly.io so far.
+1 for fly. The anycast network is great for low latency apps.
I really like https://dokku.com/, but it's not quite the same -- you'll have to throw it up on a VPS. Super affordable though. For me it's a happy medium between doing everything myself and paying $$$ for a fully GUI based platform like heroku.
This is what I do! Dokku on DigitalOcean is very affordable.
Nice! I've been using Vultr, but only because they had a really good signup deal.
I've build MyPaas for this purpose. An open source PaaS, somewhat similar to Dokku.
https://github.com/almarklein/mypaas
I see some products being mentioned in the comments that I don't know yet, I'll certainly check these out!
For production deployments I will not recommend to give access to your source code to any third party other than the one where it is hosted because there is no guarantee that what happened with Heroku will not happen with other cloud computing provider. So if you want to stick to Heroku and your code is hosted on github then you can use github actions to build docker image, push it to a container registry and then let Heroku deploy from container registry ( I hope it is possible). Dockerizing an app / microservice is a basic skill which every developer must be aware of as this has lots of advantages over giving raw source code to a third party for deployment which is actually doing same thing under the hood.
These days any serverless ( e.g. FaaS - Functions as a service, CaaS - Containers as a service) offering is capable of deploying the code from a git repo (e.g. github) or from a container image registry (e.g. dockerhub).
Here are serverless offerings from big players -
Google Cloud - Cloud Run ( CaaS), Cloud Functions ( FaaS)
AWS - App Runner (CaaS), Lambda functions ( FaaS)
Azure - Azure Container Instances(CaaS), Azure Functions ( FaaS)
There are reasons why setting up something on these players may be cumbersome. These players are serving all kinds of customers who develop applications which can either be very basic or highly complex.
I have not used serverless offerings from small players (e.g. DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode etc) and so can't comment on those but these must be good for any non production code. These small players definitely offers a very good developer experience compare to any big player. But in today's world, where hackers are way ahead of everyone else, you will need services from big players if your code is valuable / worth millions as these players have all the money / talent to avoid a hacking incident which occurred with Heroku. You may jump from one small player to another small player but the fact is that the moment hackers see that another small player is becoming popular among developers they will go behind it.
In addition to big / small cloud computing players there are players (e.g. Cloudflare, Netlify, Fastly etc) who are shinning on edge computing front. So you can host your application ( if it is build using a frontend framework - VueJS, React etc) on these providers for free (I host my blog / portfolio (https://mechcloud.io) on one of these providers which is a VueJS application) and use their FaaS offerings to build backend logic.
While indie hackers mainly focus on developing new features, marketing etc, with increasing hacking attempts you will need to put equal focus on infra part as well if you are exposing your application over the internet and you wish to make some good money from your (SaaS) application.
If you loved heroku and dokku seems great but without any GUI, try caprover!
I'm using it for postresql and a few app (next.js / remix / ruby... you can upload everything). It's really cool
https://www.caprover.com
+1 for caprover!
It got a 1-click app installs, HTTPS certificate and much more
I'm also using it for my personal projects and loving it! 👍
1-click installs (Wordpress, MySQL, Postgres, Elasticsearch, GitLab, Kibana, Jenkins, RabbitMQ,...) and 1-click HTTPS activation (Let's Encrypt) are just working.
UI is nice and does the job.
You can host your own Docker containers with no problem. And you can add your own nginx configuration if you're ambitious 😉.
There are also options for monitoring and cluster-management, but I never used it myself.
Heard about DigitalOcean App Platform but not sure how good they are.
Like @jcusch mentioned, they've been great in my experience. I've been using their app platform since they released it to the public. It seems to have the best mix of price, simplicity and stability.
My prior experience with AWS at the day job made me shy away from it for my own indie hacking ventures. It's flexible as all hell but with that flexibility comes complexity, high amounts of maintenance for to said complexity, and (most scary of all) potential to be hit with a really high bill unless you stay on top your usage.
Really good in my experience. Easy to use and automate, perfect for prototypes or relatively straightforward containerized apps.
Is anything totally free available to replace Heroku, with the caliber of Heroku?
Hey! We're familiar with this space since our product adds a collaboration layer on top of preview environments. We collected our notes on Heroku Alternatives here - https://livecycle.io/blogs/complete-list-of-heroku-alternatives/. Hope it's valuable.
The day I heard about it I stopped using heroku https://railway.app
For the WBE Space I use google functions and so far has worked really well
Just use Github? Github Pages with the actions deployment. It's free to host each page if it's public. But for academics it's free for private and public. Even then it doesn't cost much.
Well depends on what your needs are. If you only need to store static pages and don't need your own backend then why not indeed. But if you need your own backend, then as far as I know, Github pages don't allow that, right?
I'm wondering if you can with their whole like Github actions where you can rig up a standing server with their codespaces. I don't exactly know, I'm actually exploring that now.
I was running Linode and Dokku for a while. Would recommend if you can set it up. I had to get another dev to help as it did take some getting used to.
I have been using Dokku + DigitalOcean for a long time for small projects. Also, I have heard good things about fly.io, you can try that.
I'd argue AWS is the cheapest, thus why I started building my SaaS starter using serverless, unfortunately, it also can be the hardest to set up.
Cheapest? Only for small deployments. Better watch your costs when you grow.
I'd even say it's the cheapest at scale assuming you've configured things correctly.
Even so, I believe it's the best option for indie hackers since it allows devs to deploy and keep alive as many services as they want which is a great option for experiments.
I agree it's great to run many small experiments for cheap.
But cheapest at scale? That's not my experience - but well.
Mile ages do vary.
Tradeoffs of paying more=f(Team Size, Monthly Budget, Tech Needs)
Cheapeast Possible (assuming the server isn't a desktop on your apartment floor):
$5 / month:
-AWS
-Bluehost
-Linode
-Digital Ocean
For managed DBaaS, are you willing to spend an additional $15/month? The nice thing is you can use the DB server for multiple apps... the alternative is having a separate nano DB server you manually configure for $5 / month... for me the extra $10 / month is tptally worth it.
If you don't run a separate DB server (app server and DB server are the same), you can do everything for $5/month, but if you do get an increase in traffic, you'll have to upgrade everything and migrate the DB at the same time, which is a huge pain in the butt.
Also, you'll need to be willing to learn your way around linux...
Anyone know how to go cheaper?
This is a really good summary of the tradeoffs and costs if you go the IaaS route. I put my app and db on the same server (DO droplet) for $5 to save on cost but am dreading the day when I need to migrate the db to a managed database
I have the same concerns. I will go with SSD nodes + dokku. Will update after some period how stable it is
The cheapest will be https://appliku.com + https://hetzner.com/
This way you will get a Heroku-like experience and cheap servers and a flat fee for managing those servers.
Tier 2 cloud providers like render and DO Apps, let alone AWS new offering, will still be expensive.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Firebase. I have several apps hosted there for free.
Hetzner are cheapest. Downside is there is no managed database. No kubernetes. But, did i say cheap?
I'm super happy running AWS EC2 with Caddy and Docker containers. For non critical stuff, you can use EC2 spot instances with up to 90% off retail (machine can be shut down in 3 minutes) and reserved instances (buying a server for 1-3 years) for things which need to run 24/7.
Fly.io and Render are probably the closest.
I personally just run things myself since I am not at scale when it would be annoying. I use just a bit of Bash so I don't have to keep up with latest tool updates. I wrote a book on the topic too:)
I'm curious how do costs on heroku quickly add up, unless you have a lot of users?
the one and only, deta.sh, I have used it for over 6+ month, and never look back, they have a generous offer on storage, super fast server (faster than what google cloud offer, no joke) and free no-sql DB, you could visit my twitter, I use deta.sh for all of my project
I'm building https://www.utopiops.com which gives you the same experience on your own cloud. You'll have massive savings.
I just switched one of my apps to Railway and like it so far!
What about Azure? And by Azure I mean not AWS. Full Control 😎. Full Responsibility 😅.
Although there are other non PAAS (platform as a service) offerings if you don't want a full VM. I don't use those tho.
What's the reason folks don't use AWS?
Because Azure exists. I won't even mention that other cloud provider.
AWS kept changing configuration of my VM in a way that causes it to be inaccessible. I fix it and it changes back again. I reported the issue.
I had the option to pay $30 for technical support (in addition to the few hundred I already pay ) OR just leave for another provider. Guess what I chose?
Azure is working really well for me so far.
I've recently migrated Page2API from Heroku to AWS.
From what I saw:
https://acrobox.io for a flat cost option. I am the founder. Feel free to ask me any questions.
Cloudflare Pages and Workers have been great for me :)
How do you deploy your apps, via git/cli or something else? Which approach would be the best approach to you? Because there are a lot of companies offering this kind of service.
We'll be glad to have you on https://qoddi.com and we offer credits for bootstrapped startups : https://blog.qoddi.com/flashdrive-startup-program/ Let me know if you need more info
What don’t you like about Heroku? Not found too many issues myself (compared to running your own server it’s pretty good)
H12 Errors (30 seconds request timeout).
They can be a deal-breaker for some use cases.
Aside from that, Heroku is a go-to solution for MVPs, prototypes, and small-to-medium apps.
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