We saw this coming (like most people) a while ago when Heroku started flaking without status updates, and moved part of our workload to Fly. We ended up moving off Fly as well (significant unreliability and just some very strange network load balancer issues that would cause us downtime) and went to Railway, and that's been fantastic so far. We've moved our whole workload onto it.
Moved from heroku to fly.io three years ago and I don’t regret it, great platform occasionally goes down and requires a bit of attention but the support forum is great
I had an issue with one of my Sprites (Fly.io also runs sprites.dev) and the CEO responded to me personally in less than 10 minutes. They got it fixed quickly.
I was a free customer at the time. I pay for it happily now.
It didn't seem quite as fire-and-forget as doing `Heroku create` when I tried to use it 3-4 years ago, especially the database setup. Do you use their Postgres offering?
No my one is a simple ruby sinatra app with no DB. Yeah unfortunately it wasn’t super reliable as heroku but they’re getting better at keeping the instances up
Build.io came out of this exact problem a few years ago (I joined in 25Q4) - trying to be what Heroku could have been if it had continued to evolve.
We offer the same default simplicity/speed, but with the ability to go deeper once teams hit scale, cost, or workflow limits. Plus a pricing model that stays understandable and improves as teams scale rather than punishing them for it.
Fair warning: the website is pretty light right now. It’s mostly a placeholder while we prep a broader push over the few months. Happy to answer questions here if helpful.
Do you care to show prices? The true benefit of heroku for me was really predictable pricing model. Build.io website doesn’t have it on mobile site at all. I don’t want to look at demo, i want to hook up my credit card, set a monthly budget and explore
llIIllIIllIIl & runako give me an email on steven[at]build.io and I'll share. As mentioned, we stripped the site back while we overhaul and we certainly didn't expect this today!
You’re right - reading that back, it comes across as a “no,” and that wasn’t my intent.
We should show pricing, and we will. We temporarily stripped the site back while overhauling positioning and pricing, which is why it’s missing right now. That’s on us, not a stance against transparency.
In the meantime, I’m more than happy to share pricing directly.
At a high level on our pricing:
- Current customers are on a mix of usage-based and fixed monthly plans, depending on their needs. We've found many of our customers love the fixed plan as it's a whole new level of predictability.
- We’re generally architected to land well below Heroku’s Enterprise pricing and to be competitive with a IaaS.
- We want pricing to get out of your way as you scale, so no big steps in pricing as you add services.
- Databases are HA by default and support replication.
- Pipelines and review apps don’t require hacks to avoid per-review-app database costs.
Happy to answer specifics here or over email if helpful.
If you like VPS, Hetzner with Dokploy. It works great, the UI has essentially all the features of Fly or Render that you'd use for deployment, like preview build URLs and environments.
Eh, no, depends on why you used Heroku in the first place. Way back when, I used it because the UI was dead simple and it Just Worked™. If I can replicate that with a VPS and have a good UI around it that takes care of everything, it's functionally the same to me.
Heroku was one of the first to have that seamless UX, only after which others like Fly or Render or Railway came to copy it. I wager people were primarily attracted to that user experience and only minimally cared that it was fully hosted versus not, because there was also AWS at that time.
Having used Heroku at multiple startups during the 2012–2015 years, this is not correct.
With heroku you could `git push heroku master` and it would do everything else from there. The UX was nice, but that was not the reason people chose it. It was so easy compared to running on EC2 instances with salt or whatever. For simple projects, it was incredible.
That's literally the UX I'm talking about and that's what other companies copied too. To be clear, I'm not (just) talking about how heroku.com looks and works, I'm talking about the entire user experience including git push to deploy, so I believe you are agreeing with me here. That is why I said VPS with Dokploy or Coolify and so on have the same UX, both in the command line with git push deploys supported as well as (now, at least) a vastly superior website user experience, akin to Vercel.
Dokku is better. And neither is what Heroku's bread and butter customer needs.
But alas, my interest in painstaking explaining why self-hosting is fundamentally incompatible with a product who's value prop was "nothing to install" is waning.
You and I simply have different opinions on what Heroku's value proposition was, because, again, AWS was also right there and also was "nothing to install." Therefore Heroku was used primarily for its dead simple UX, something which is replicated even in a self-hosted environment, because, again, the value prop was never about PaaS or self-hosting, it was always about the user experience.
Kamal is basically self hosting though right? So you have to take care of keeping the underlying os patched etc. With heroku you only needed to think about git push.. ?
What's the best alternative?
We saw this coming (like most people) a while ago when Heroku started flaking without status updates, and moved part of our workload to Fly. We ended up moving off Fly as well (significant unreliability and just some very strange network load balancer issues that would cause us downtime) and went to Railway, and that's been fantastic so far. We've moved our whole workload onto it.
Moved from heroku to fly.io three years ago and I don’t regret it, great platform occasionally goes down and requires a bit of attention but the support forum is great
I had an issue with one of my Sprites (Fly.io also runs sprites.dev) and the CEO responded to me personally in less than 10 minutes. They got it fixed quickly.
I was a free customer at the time. I pay for it happily now.
Fly.io are absolute G’s. The product is awesome and the tech blogs they write are fantastic.
It didn't seem quite as fire-and-forget as doing `Heroku create` when I tried to use it 3-4 years ago, especially the database setup. Do you use their Postgres offering?
No my one is a simple ruby sinatra app with no DB. Yeah unfortunately it wasn’t super reliable as heroku but they’re getting better at keeping the instances up
Digital Ocean App Engine has the easy setup and GUI management that made Heroku popular.
Build.io came out of this exact problem a few years ago (I joined in 25Q4) - trying to be what Heroku could have been if it had continued to evolve.
We offer the same default simplicity/speed, but with the ability to go deeper once teams hit scale, cost, or workflow limits. Plus a pricing model that stays understandable and improves as teams scale rather than punishing them for it.
Fair warning: the website is pretty light right now. It’s mostly a placeholder while we prep a broader push over the few months. Happy to answer questions here if helpful.
Do you care to show prices? The true benefit of heroku for me was really predictable pricing model. Build.io website doesn’t have it on mobile site at all. I don’t want to look at demo, i want to hook up my credit card, set a monthly budget and explore
FWIW it doesn't look like pricing or details of the service offerings are available on the desktop site, either.
llIIllIIllIIl & runako give me an email on steven[at]build.io and I'll share. As mentioned, we stripped the site back while we overhaul and we certainly didn't expect this today!
To be clear, you just answered "Do you care to show prices?" with No.
You’re right - reading that back, it comes across as a “no,” and that wasn’t my intent.
We should show pricing, and we will. We temporarily stripped the site back while overhauling positioning and pricing, which is why it’s missing right now. That’s on us, not a stance against transparency.
In the meantime, I’m more than happy to share pricing directly.
At a high level on our pricing: - Current customers are on a mix of usage-based and fixed monthly plans, depending on their needs. We've found many of our customers love the fixed plan as it's a whole new level of predictability. - We’re generally architected to land well below Heroku’s Enterprise pricing and to be competitive with a IaaS. - We want pricing to get out of your way as you scale, so no big steps in pricing as you add services. - Databases are HA by default and support replication. - Pipelines and review apps don’t require hacks to avoid per-review-app database costs.
Happy to answer specifics here or over email if helpful.
Not to be confused with builder.io, or worse, builder.ai
If you like VPS, Hetzner with Dokploy. It works great, the UI has essentially all the features of Fly or Render that you'd use for deployment, like preview build URLs and environments.
Very close to the worst alternative for people who actually need Heroku, but it won't stop people from plugging it to death and back.
Eh, no, depends on why you used Heroku in the first place. Way back when, I used it because the UI was dead simple and it Just Worked™. If I can replicate that with a VPS and have a good UI around it that takes care of everything, it's functionally the same to me.
"Depends on what you used it for" applies to just about any platform.
Realistically, self-hosting the PaaS defeats the purpose of a PaaS for the crowd Heroku was attracting.
Heroku was one of the first to have that seamless UX, only after which others like Fly or Render or Railway came to copy it. I wager people were primarily attracted to that user experience and only minimally cared that it was fully hosted versus not, because there was also AWS at that time.
Having used Heroku at multiple startups during the 2012–2015 years, this is not correct.
With heroku you could `git push heroku master` and it would do everything else from there. The UX was nice, but that was not the reason people chose it. It was so easy compared to running on EC2 instances with salt or whatever. For simple projects, it was incredible.
That's literally the UX I'm talking about and that's what other companies copied too. To be clear, I'm not (just) talking about how heroku.com looks and works, I'm talking about the entire user experience including git push to deploy, so I believe you are agreeing with me here. That is why I said VPS with Dokploy or Coolify and so on have the same UX, both in the command line with git push deploys supported as well as (now, at least) a vastly superior website user experience, akin to Vercel.
How do you think self-hosting affects that seamless UX they value.
As I said, the correct software on top handles it all for you. I don't think you've actually tried Dokploy.
Dokku is better. And neither is what Heroku's bread and butter customer needs.
But alas, my interest in painstaking explaining why self-hosting is fundamentally incompatible with a product who's value prop was "nothing to install" is waning.
Have a good one.
You and I simply have different opinions on what Heroku's value proposition was, because, again, AWS was also right there and also was "nothing to install." Therefore Heroku was used primarily for its dead simple UX, something which is replicated even in a self-hosted environment, because, again, the value prop was never about PaaS or self-hosting, it was always about the user experience.
Have a good weekend.
Ok so I am researching what to use in this space - a Vercel-ish clone on cheap VPS - and, is Dokploy really the best option?
What do you think about Caprover? https://github.com/caprover/caprover
Or uh.. Dokku https://github.com/dokku/dokku
Right now I am using Coolify but so far it has not been exactly reliable
I don't like their UIs, Dokploy's is far more modern. And yes Coolify is not known to be very reliable, especially because it's built on PHP.
Check out these videos:
https://youtu.be/ELkPcuO5ebo
https://youtu.be/RoANBROvUeE
Kamal works well
Kamal is basically self hosting though right? So you have to take care of keeping the underlying os patched etc. With heroku you only needed to think about git push.. ?