We switched from Heroku to Render about 6 months ago. It was a great experience initially, but there are a lot of sharp edges we've encountered since then, to the point that if I were switching away from Heroku today, I'd consider something else.

For example, we had a monitor set up in Papertrail that notifies us if it doesn't see our application's heartbeat log entry in a 10-minute period. We had to disable that monitor because Render will regularly have outages related to logging where logs simply don't make it to the log stream. Their status page is all green and I've unfortunately had to reach out to support on more than one Friday night.

Deploys take a little too long, around 5 minutes on the paid Pro Plus tier.

And, minor gripe, but the web UI feels like an SPA, and I think it's built to be one, but the frontend state isn't stable and will often show the wrong information. From time to time, you'll need to manually refresh the page to get the correct information.

The security issue that happened with Heroku back in April and the subsequent flubbing of communication around the issue made it so we had no choice but to migrate. But the platform itself was rock solid in my experience. I don't get that same feeling from Render.

I'm holding out hope that it improves in the coming months!

EDIT: I double checked the deploy times because of the comment below, and it's actually closer to 5 minutes, not 10, so I've updated my comment accordingly. 5 minutes is much more reasonable.

I'm sorry you ran into these issues and feel your frustration. The tl;dr is we hit completely unexpected scale overnight when Heroku's free tier news broke, and had to find and fix unpredictable bottlenecks quickly. We're in better shape now, and I feel confident about the rough edges fading away over the next few weeks.

For example, we've worked hard to get logging to a stable state over the last couple of weeks, and I hope you've noticed the improvements already.

Regarding deploys, I'm surprised they're taking this long on paid plans. I'd love to follow up if you could share details over email (address in profile). We have internal SLOs around build times and we've made (and observed) improvements recently, so I'm wondering if this is specific to how your build is being cached.

Totally understand re the unexpected scale, and Render did pretty well, all things considered.

I double checked the deploy times and it's closer to 5 minutes, so I updated my comment accordingly.

I'm rooting for you!

Much appreciated. I'm sure we can do better on builds; stay tuned.

I just deployed my first app to render. Was a good experience.

However, they delete your database after 90 days if you do not have a paid plan. From https://render.com/docs/free#free-postgresql-databases

"Render’s free database plan allows you to run a PostgreSQL database that automatically expires 90 days after creation. Free databases are suspended after 90 days (unless they are upgraded to a paid plan), and are no longer reachable at this point."

The paid plans do start at $7, and you can share a database across many apps, though.

And if you have static site or a site without a database, it looks like it is forever free.

You can try Neon(neon.tech). Disclaimer I’m CEO. We architected Neon such that it’s very cheap for us to keep the database forever.

It’s still behind the waitlist but it’s coming off in a few weeks. Also if you onboard via hasura.io there is no gate.

Another great option with a similar approach that's now publicly available with a generous free tier is CockroachDB serverless

This looks pretty cool! From the docs it sounds like one can pick the underlying cloud provider and region, is that true?

Free tier deploys are slow (but not on purpose). We're planning to unify our free and paid architectures so builds are fast across the board.

Supabase is the best place to let a VC fund your free DB.

Only if you are willing to fuck with it every week or two to keep it alive. They changed their free tier recently and they now turn off your project if it’s not “active”. (They don’t delete it, but your have to log in and turn it back on.)

I'm not an expert but I believe it boils down to something connecting to the DB within a week, which seems do-able once things are running and maybe a tiny hassle during initial dev if it's a weekend hobby project.

-- fwiw had an awful interview process with railway - long call with the CEO - asked some follow up questions via email - got a reply to move forward - put in 6 hours of work - ghosted --

Oh man, that’s not at all what I’m aiming for here (Railway Founder)

Could you bump the email in my inbox? Even if you hate my guts and have no interest in the company, I‘d like to know cause I don’t recall this at all :(

We do a 30 minute screen with me (to protect our engineers time) and share the problem ahead of time (to not surprise the interviewee)

Is delta just ... free? I cant see any price anywhere on the site, which just leaves me suspicious.

They do seem to be pushing some sort of creative-focus, maybe they intend to just keep it really small user base, invite only, just people who actually make things vs a platform just to run your SaaS on?

I've been using deta for a (quite small) side project for a year now. It's free, but it has quite the limitations: max RAM of 512 MB (recently upgraded, before it was 128), and their database is a custom thingy, which doesn't have too many features.

One more, my personal favorite.

https://northflank.com/ - The comprehensive developer platform to build and scale microservices, jobs and managed databases with a powerful UI, API & CLI.

I’ve run a couple Telegram bots on Fly’s free tier and it’s been very slick - I especially like the remote docker builders they added recently. Remote docker building is ideal vs. having to debug my local Podman install on Fedora.

I will say I’m not sure how the reporting is supposed to work. Fly thinks I’ve been running a failed process for the last couple days but it sure is working!

We have been using render in production for about 8 months (paid services). Overall happy but some things are annoying:

- Latency of the oregon region is very high. A simple health endpoint is around 500ms from north america and europe, 1.3s from Asia/Australia (we have been monitoring it for many months with better uptime)

- Services tend to die at least once a week, so you do need at least two instances all the time

- Logs are often delayed for a long time, though it has been more severe recently.

- Build time is just horrible, our rust service takes around 40m to deploy. I get that it is free, but at least give me a docker registry so I can build it elsewhere and push the image

- No option to pay for support 24/7, so if there is an outage during the US night you are on your own

Glad to hear you're happy overall, and I want to add that we're working to address the things you mentioned. We also have paid 24/7 support with response and uptime SLAs: https://render.com/pricing#support

I'm surprised to hear about the service dying once a week: in my experience this is typically an application issue. Happy to help debug if you'd like to shoot me an email.

I recently migrated OnlineOrNot's uptime checks to run (mostly) on fly.io, strong recommend for ease of use and reliability!

I wrote about the experience here: https://onlineornot.com/on-moving-million-uptime-checks-onto...

How does alwaysdata work? The pricing just references different storage tiers - how is that related to vCPUs or RAM or the number of apps, DBs etc. deployed? Couldn't really find anything on their site...

Can you include Hatchbox ( https://hatchbox.io/ )? Coupled with Linode.

Hatchbox doesn't provide hardware and is tied down to Ruby.

Request for startup: something like Render, but that is HIPAA compliant from day one.

(Render CEO) We now offer a standard BAA for HIPAA compliance. Email support@render.com to get started.

Thanks for the response, anurag! Is that usually the most that your customers passing PHI through Render will ask for? Or are there a few other steps they have to take in order to feel like their compliance requirements are met by the platform?

It depends on the customer, but the BAA is the most we've been asked for so far outside of our regular security practices.

That's good to know, appreciate you sharing that.

You might check out https://www.aptible.com/. It's not quite as ridiculously simple as Heroku but they are HIPAA compliant.

fly advertises HIPAA

https://fly.io/docs/about/healthcare/

Reading what they offer, you'd think Java runtime didn't exist anymore.

What’s unclear about it? I read the pricing page and it seems clear to me.

I wish they provided more clarity considering they are seen as a Heroku alternative, let me explain that.

I am not saying that it fails to provide clarity to someone who is willing to pay for it, but the rule of thumb of pricing pages offering a "free" product is to explicitly mention this ⇒ "$0". Am I being picky? Yes. Why? Because it is a Heroku alternative, and Heroku did mention free in an obvious way in describing their pricing plans.

When you mention overage charges immediately after the free tier, it kinda feels a little bit weird. In the pricing plans section, they don't mention a free plan.

https://fly.io/plans

https://render.com/pricing

https://www.heroku.com/pricing

I wrote a pricing comparison guide at https://fly.io/docs/rails/getting-started/migrate-from-herok...

What’s important is that pricing isn’t the same and the free plan is really a way for you to try Fly before deciding to dial up the resources. You can use it for really small apps, but trying to squeeze a Rails app into 256Mb RAM on 3 servers is tough.

I moved few of my Heroku apps over to Fly and pay about half much for about 4x what I was getting on Heroku. When v2 of the Fly app platform goes out, I expect that price to go down even more since apps can sleep when they’re not serving up requests.

We're happy people are running workloads on us that they used to run on Heroku, but we are our own thing; we've been around for years, long before Heroku killed their free tier.

My apologies. I totally understand fly.io being a distinct company with their offering and history.

To me, fly.io is an alternative to Heroku as the title of the thread is "on: Heroku Free Alternatives". So I was comparing it to Heroku and their pricing section UX.

Totally fair! Whatever our pricing does to surprise or annoy Heroku free tier users, it's totally fair to call it out! The only thing that moved me to comment was the implication that we had somehow set out to be the second coming of Heroku. We set out to make every app in the world run close to its users globally. That we're amenable to Heroku people is just a bonus for us. :)

> The only thing that moved me to comment was the implication that we had somehow set out to be the second coming of Heroku.

Dude, I didn't mean it like that. Again, I am sorry.

My cloud experience is very limited. I have seen people talk about your SQLite related blog posts on HN, but I didn't participate in those threads, because I simply wasn't passionate enough or had an understanding about those topics.

I, too, love my job. But sometimes people with limited exposure to our product say some things about that mildly annoys me. But at the end, they don't know any better. I have unfortunately become one of those guys in this circumstance here. To me, the value proposition of a PAAS is only limited to the free pricing tier. It is a very insignificant comment about a UX thing.

I wish I could delete that comment. Please, I hope you take no further offense.

I've taken no offense! I took no offense to begin with! I'm only still writing because this is very funny.

:)