Heroku Is Dead, Here's What I Recommend

The death of Heroku does not mean the death of your hobby projects!!! There are SO MANY great solutions for full stack web development
Links to some of my favs:
railway.app/?ref=theo
planetscale.com/?ref=theo
vercel.com/?ref=theo
JOIN OUR DISCORD t3.gg/discord
THANK YOU IDEZ AND MIR FOR THE EDIT

[@victornwanguma2427]

Heroku was good for startups and MVPs. When startups hit production and start making profit, they begin to scale and purchase more services on their platform (Heroku). Honestly I thought this was their business model, if not they are messing up badly

[@dickrichard626]

I'm not really involved in any of this and didn't know what Heroku was before, but out of curiosity I went to the website and all I got out of it is that they host a bunch of weird apps, that no one uses and I didn't see anything about other types of services on there. Pretty sure they are just trying to make more money and focusing on the handful of small successes they have, rather then all the random everything else, free users do with them that's basically farts in the wind. I don't know what I'm talking about though, this is just makes sense to me. Also some free users have tons of apps and they're basically charging per "slug", which basically translates to per charging per app. So it's to get people that do that to either pay through the nose, reduce their usage, or move on.

[@MyPhuckDub]

@@dickrichard626 Heroku free tier used by millions, many new developers who started to learn hosted their hobby site there. I would say Heroku was lucky if 1 out of 1000 would upgrade to paid tier. It was definitely a money sink.

[@zdenomirga1546]

5 a 7u tu

[@danielniels22]

and school/college project

[@DarrenCorbett_FTW]

Easily the most helpful video I've ever seen on KZbin. Always good content, but this one is pure gold. Thank you

[@froxx93]

I just found out about Heroku 2 days ago and noticed they are removing their free tier. I'm deploying all of my frontends on Vercel anyway, but I needed a solution for hosting a Strapi instance which is not so easy on Vercel. So this video comes just in time. Thanks Theo, helpful as always!

[@TheIpicon]

man, I'm watching you for quite a while now. you're very authentic and interesting, I never skip one of your videos and I'm really grateful to get all this knowledge for free. I took my company an boost jumped it a couple of levels with the t3 stack! We're using next with trpc, prisma with planetscale on vercel. thank you! I don't remember when I enjoyed developing this much.

[@lucasjames8281]

This shill is not authentic

[@josemonge4604]

Great tips! Definitely considering Planetscale and Railway. Those had definitely pulled my interest for what I'm building.

[@joshix833]

Yep, planetscale is a great option lol

[@Hacking-NASSA-with-HTML]

RIP Heroku, we will miss you😥. Still we have a Netlify❤

[@rfryanfavour4369]

Not for backend

[@ccj2]

To put into perspective how far gone Heroku is, I used it for years to learn and to prototype ideas. After they dropped the free tier AND had a security incident in the same year, I did everything i could to migrate a current production app that I’m building to AWS. I don’t think I’m ever going back. End of an era tbh.

[@sk4dic]

Just yesterday I was talking with a friend about where to host databases/websites/etc. This helped a lot, thanks!

[@john_hawley]

will always be digital ocean fan. their blog content has saved my ass on more than 30 occasions - deploy an open source container management server for $5/mo and deploy container after container to f**k around with and learn, awesome.

[@quintencabo]

Exactly

[@lashlarue7924]

yup, it still works for me

[@marcalgomezlavall1255]

I really like how you explain things, I've spent 3 days trying to understand the differences between some of the companies you mention, and your opinionated point of view is really helpful

[@timothypark1037]

Started mainly with frontend development and recently dipping my toe into the backend using the MERN stack. I was so naive just trying to deploy my server and client files all into vercel. Came across Heroku but their free their plan was gone. Wasted something a little more cheaper and then came across your channel! Gotta try out railway :D thanks for this video!

[@curiously-cinnamon]

You, from the past, sounds like me, from the present. Right now I'm doing exactly that. I am trying to deploy my expressjs server and nextjs client files all into vercel. I don't know why that's naive. Can you help me?

[@Ansh77K]

​@@curiously-cinnamonI'm in same position as you, i tried hosting server side on vercel , my main objective was to host a websocket but turn out vercel doesn't provide service to host node socket io express server I switched to another free service which allows websocket hosting using node , but only problem is after few hours they turn off the server to save their cost (for free users I think).

[@workflowinmind]

This quickly became my favorite web dev channel (with web dev simplified)! I really love the pace, the tone, the insights! Thanks Theo

[@laliluleloMG]

Same hahaha web dev and Theo are amazing check his previous videos and join twitch if you can when its live

[@recursion.]

sure if you have all day to watch youtube but 12 minute video for really a 3 minute content is very lowly

[@creatorsremose]

Web Dev Simplified is just a hack who copycats the greats 3-4 weeks late. Also his tik-toky style cringes the juice out of me.

[@cowliqour1051]

10 seconds into the first video and already agree!

[@tabili3830]

Very underrated channel, it became my favorite channel in couple weeks. Thanks Theo! We appreciate you!

[@akira_asahi]

Thank you for the video. I am grateful for your time and contribution. Kind regards, Akira.

[@Gelo2000origami]

So glad he didn't mention firebase

[@semyaza555]

Firebase gets a lot more of undeserved hate.

[@kennedychidi7012]

😄😄😄👌 Men you're on point

[@silvio2402]

Why? I don’t currently use Firebase, but I’ve played with it before and found it quite nice. Legit just wondering why you believe that Firebase isn’t good? Thanks

[@rogerlima8961]

@@silvio2402 I'm not too, I'm in supabase, but I've already listened Theo saying about the price for the service is too expensive.

[@silvio2402]

@@rogerlima8961 Oh, got it. But I think the free tier is already pretty powerful. I thought this was more going in the direction of mere hate towards Google.

[@leoMC4384]

Great content, man. I'm already using Vercel for my APIs and MongoDB (free tier) for my databases. But still I need a free SQL hosting. Thank you very much. 👏👏👏

[@lutfiikbalmajid]

for sql i am using planetscale

[@MrVargasesteban]

Thanks Theo! This is the best explanation of the landscape that I've seen.

[@luasluckas]

Wow! Thanks man, really helpful content!

[@AntoniGawlikowski]

It IS very helpful - thanks so much!

[@npc-drew]

500 MB RAM + 8 vCPU: Heroku = $7 Railway = $165 1 GB RAM + 1 vCPU: DigitalOcean = $6 Railway = $30 The above is true supposing you use 100% of the resources constantly for the entire month. While for most people, that won't be the case, I rather pay $5-10 a month max than saving that same money and pray my service don't grow cause it can get out of hands. The 8 vCPU come handy in Heroku for high traffic services, in my tests, Heroku was able to handle 10-15x more traffic than DigitalOcean. The clear limitation is the low RAM memory as you have to run a light service, or one that uses a lot of third parties APIs.

[@benpleysier]

Tried Railway for the first time today. Created a Node/Express/SQLite project, created a repository, and Railway did the rest. Database costs are nihil because of SQLite. Very impressed by how easy it was to set up. Only downfall for me is the location of the server - west coast USA to Down Under.. Hope this will improve in the coming year.

[@LukeFrisken]

Fly has a region in Sydney, maybe a good alternative

[@radagon6919]

Does it support cookie storage tho?

[@benpleysier]

@@radagon6919 cookie storage is part of the browser and has nothing to do with the server.

[@peter8261]

Yeah dude, teaching myself web dev became much more fun when I learned about netlify. You can throw html css and js into a folder, drag and drop it, and then point a domain to your project and then boom--you have your own website.

[@WolfKelley1]

The video I was looking for. Thanks!

[@chamsseddin4449]

Thank you so much, you help me to solve a lot of time in learning php i think if i am learn it i can host my app in heroku but now i will continue with python and js which i already know it, thank you for the second time (and i am sorry if you don't understand some thing because my english is bad)

[@IvanRandomDude]

Just learn AWS. And if you learn it well it can help you a lot with your career. Nobody will ask you if you know Railway or Render in any serious company. But if you know AWS that's a huge plus.

[@chickensoupisme]

Thank you for always giving us so much delicious info. 🤤

[@crustydev5561]

I have a feeling that some of these free tiers won't last too long in this economy

[@abcdefg91111]

@@mikeonthebox they have? damnit!

[@lambgoat2421]

You can still install Dokku yourself

[@patricknelson]

Cloud Run (GCP) is _for sure_ my particular “go to” for running a Docker Image. It’s a real stand out in terms of ease of use, at least for me. I’d put that under “easy” or “medium.” Just for that, GCP ranks high on my docker hosting list.

[@TheQ8800]

Have you heard of Altogic it's kinda like Firebase actually a direct competitor would love to hear about your opinions on it

[@chawaphiri1196]

The intro is hilarious. That's enough for a subscription

[@marekbee]

I recently discovered self-hosted Caprover. I love it. Especially for my small hobby projects. I have ~$10 2-core and 4 GB VPS and I can have multiple databases, projects on this one instance

[@thvozdovic]

Make sure you configure cache, otherwise your server can freeze randomly like mine did

[@beedhanbhuwai]

coolify is also really cool alternative to caprover

[@NathanielBabalola]

Is this per month ? I'm looking for a free tier Linux server

[@konyein]

@@thvozdovic how do you do that?

[@jordixboy]

In kimsufi you get a dedicated machine for 5 bucks.

[@victorbatista6269]

Excelente vídeo 😋

[@guygolan3685]

Which do you recommend for hosting a message queue service?

[@TheNeonRaven]

We use a CentOS server set up on Digital Ocean. Was a bit of work to get set up perfectly, but now we can deploy pretty much any type of application in a couple clicks, fed through an Nginx reverse proxy.

[@russellg3775]

an excellent guide, thank you

[@mfkfawas5157]

Thanks for the short videos.

[@AnnCatsanndra]

Thanks again for this. My old webhost just hit me with a price hike so I'm looking to switch things up.

[@Muescha]

Last time I tested Railway I missed the option from Heroku to just shutdown a project and let it sleep while I am not using/developing it. But I don't found this. Only chance to stop consuming the free hours was to delete all the instances 😢and then I need to redeploy and then I start with a empty database. I miss this pause option at RailWay

[@KevinSheppard]

Any tips for simplifying the process of logging in to multiple services just to manage the different components of your app?

[@WomboBraker]

This is very useful. Good preach!

[@yoty66]

Great video ! I would love it if you will make one for serverless computing . I have been using vercel (easy ) and Aws (hard)

[@ganeshacharya234]

8:33 is a gem of a comment. Awesome overview.

[@Passtillios]

Very straightforward and easy to follow thank you!

[@nebulousnomad]

Please talk about the different _x_ Driven Development's in next stream; what their differences are and when you should use which 🙏. All these different processes like TDD, BDD, CDD, DDD, FDD, more like crippling OCD lmao. What's most common in fast moving startups?

[@Remeroska]

Isn't cloudflare pages as easy as netlify for deploying websites?

[@malinovayagalya4635]

Where can I deploy my MERN project? I am having problems when i want to unwrap this with vercel.

[@ajaysh73]

Can you do a video on Azure with a local agent for next js?

[@playmaker2404]

u know the best thing about ur video is that with problems u are providing solution and alternatives to them also

[@iancallaghan9987]

Great, thanks Theo

[@ownagejuice1394]

does RAILWAY support Spring Boot deployment for REST API backend?

[@snbk97]

Qovery is a good alternative, await for a review by you !! :D

[@loggyaltsen8191]

Am trying to host a website on heroku couldnt deploy it because of static files directory not found. Would it be easier to host Django web on railway

[@bogo7262]

can i pause my railway mySQL instance so i'ts only up during development? for my hobby project so that the free tier doesn't hit the limit of 500h/month

[@vitor.vanacor]

Yes

[@clipartinc]

Why didn't you mention Linode or Digital Ocean as an option?

[@fullmaster9333]

Thanks 🙏 man. I just got a notification by Heroku. It was so sudden. They didn't made the limitations stricter, they just killed their free tier as a concept. 🤮

[@ancientelevator9]

When you say host a website, I assume this means frontend and backend? and then the DB is there or somewhere else? I suppose I am just not very experienced with multi-cloud setups. Every site I have built has been fully within a single cloud. What about like VPCs and all that? These DBs are just exposed publicly (Only secured by the password)? A full demo deployment would be pretty cool (Frontend + Backend + DB)

[@vladislavkorecky618]

Great video!

[@epic-game-play]

Hello, great video, on netlify is possible have website in wordpress?

[@jin4368]

what you guys think of next js, with rest api and frontend hosted on cloud run? Worrying about ssg/ssr.

[@aleksandermirowsky7988]

I tried this, it works okay if you set it to always keep a "warm" instance to avoid cold starts. If you always have to deal with cold starts, however, it takes way to long to spin up your container. It's a viable solution, if you have about 200k requests per mount with a minimum number of instances set to 1, you will be spending about 20 USD per month. Since the point of this video is finding free solutions, I assume spending 20 USD/month is not the goal, so I don't think it would fit as a viable alternative.

[@sanesanyo]

@@aleksandermirowsky7988 I don't think cold start is that big of an issue as you make it to be. As far your container is not oversized, the cold starts are pretty quick. I am using Cloud run currently for my Nextjs app. Rest you are right about. It is not free so you will have pay for container resources.

[@aleksandermirowsky7988]

@@sanesanyo I was under the impression that container size did not affect startup times. Quoting Cloud Run docs: "Because of Cloud Run's container image streaming technology, the size of your container image does not affect cold start or request processing time. The container image size also does not count towards the available memory of your container." Admittedly, I haven't attempted this in a while (more than one year) and both NextJS and Cloud Run have received updates/upgrades since, so I guess it could have improved. I will test it out again, thanks for the tip!

[@sanesanyo]

@@aleksandermirowsky7988 Well you could be right but that has been my experience with cloud run. Smaller images start faster. Once they start, the response times are rather similar. But in one case I just deployed an API using fastapi serving a ml model so the comparison is not fair. Nonetheless I don't think cold start is that big an issue at the start. Once you reach scale, cold start wont be a problem. Let me know how it goes for you :).

[@eluented]

thank you for the intel chief very helpful time to rebuild my apis which will die soon!

[@dastanozgeldi]

video on storage options for t3?

[@CoryTheSimmons]

It's Render for me. Their monorepo stuff combined with Docker support is something no one else is even coming close to. Combined with Preview Deployments that clone prod to those envs is :chef_kiss:

[@Firzj]

ty for this video, i've just recently discovered heroku and deployed 2 pet projects there, but few days later they decided to remove free plans lol. Time to find a new place to settle, i guess 😅

[@anazi]

Thank you very much man.. I am looking for a place to deploy nodejs express to host API

[@quelchx]

Been using Railway for small projects for almost 2 months now and it's great.

[@Hunt92]

I dont get the trail period thing

[@micaelvieira6724]

I've used it for database hosting and it was painfully slow to query. I find supabase much better

[@max-c14]

@@Hunt92 you get 500 free hours or $5 worth of compute

[@quelchx]

@@micaelvieira6724 I haven't used it for larger applications -- but saying that your query speeds might not be because of Railway, but rather because of your the code your using to communicate with it. If you have a working example I can test to see how slow this is send me a link.

[@riccardotoniolo9604]

@@max-c14 how much is the cost to have a full month? (500h cover only ~20 days)

[@techwithgd]

4 years back I used Heroku, in final year college project. It was awesome to use as beginner.

[@tollesch_tieries]

Hello! If I want to make a web app for free, can I just use both free website hosting and free database hosting? Would it work as one app? Thank you!

[@samvanderstoop179]

Would a dynamic Flask webapp that uses a db fall in one of these catagories? Im not familiar with the term docker image..

[@SandraWantsCoke]

yes

[@samvanderstoop179]

@@SandraWantsCoke Which one?

[@buddy.abc123]

Frontend guys really need to stop fearing databases, websockets etc... Just saying

[@Ctrl_Alt_Elite]

They just sound scary, okay?! 😂

[@Gelo2000origami]

I was really scared and didn't really *get* backend until I learned about express, and later on next.js. Then also understood it in other languages

[@userfuckeri]

i afraid not databases but bad databases design ;D It's brings so much pain

[@metatronicx]

Thank you dude

[@JayRondon]

Started using railway for myswl backend, its amazing. However I dont like the 500 hour limit, this means you only have 21 days (from what i understand) while its live. Wish there was something like railway but with unlimited run time.

[@manogaransa2814]

I am getting "unable to get local issuer certificate" While giving heroin login. Can you help on this

[@AsadOnline-sz3os]

How to deploy spring boot? Previously using heruko

[@maloxi1472]

Cloud9 IDE used to be a great free alternative for hobbyist projects... until it got absorbed by AWS and buried deep under the mountain of their paid services. It was instrumental in my learning about web dev but also Linux in general, setting up servers like Nginx/Caddy/Apache, deploying to Heroku (interestingly enough)… even though I had a potato laptop that could barely stay on for 2hrs at a time and was so slow that it was a miracle it could run a Firefox browser at all 😅As long as my potato could communicate with my c9 workspace, only it had to be snappy and stable. That was almost 10 years ago ! Fun times 😊

[@randerins]

OMG...I'm pretty sure I've heard of Cloud9 sometime during my very early projects. And I'm almost sure it was related to a Rails app.

[@samuelebarbiera1075]

So there isn't an option to have buckets,db and ssr sites hosting? Render is almost there but it has only static hosting.. :/

[@Sam-wl4vo]

your videos are great and hit the nerve of the time

[@CodingWithJerry-fn4cv]

which one would be the cheapest for dynamic Nextjs app

[@whatskookin6429]

Definitely i'm having the best experience with Railway, every week those guys improve soooo many things on the platform

[@testblh]

I completely understand your pain!🙂

[@praveenremix6421]

i use for image cloudinary and for database clevercloud both free tier

[@user-yj3ee2bj3i]

What works for dynamic website like wordpress? I am designing my own theme

[@sonoda7723]

good video, props to you

[@vladimir_dev]

Where does hosting a fullstack MERN project with running a NodeJS server fall into (with MongoDB Atlas in the cloud)?

[@MrAmgadHasan]

probably aws/gcp/azure and the like

[@chetanram797]

Render, cyclic, railway.

[@bjornbrandt6943]

Thanks, saves me some money and yeah Heroku was nice as long as it lasted. PS! Wher was this video 5 months ago :D

[@taiwodamilola8636]

Whats the easiest one to host a node api app ???

[@12crenshaw]

I have 100$ in azure. Is it worth the time to learn platform? Why its not considered here for hosting? I feel like Microsoft is getting pretty nice for open source with WSL2 and github and openAI. I'm actually more hyped for them than Amazon or even Google.

[@redpower1989]

great video

[@DarkSolidity]

What about Linode for deploying rails apps?

[@anazi]

Whar about hosting nodejs express ?

[@krishtechie]

awsome bro thak you

[@kristoffergonzaga5143]

What app is that you are using for note writing?

[@micaelvieira6724]

pretty sure its Excalidraw

[@krazymeanie]

Excalidraw and its on the web

[@kristoffergonzaga5143]

Thank you so much!

[@jayshah1976]

where can I host spring boot API?

[@ajalanbrown2200]

I wonder if railway will handle docker compose

[@zeppelin0110]

I wish Theo had also commented on Dokku

[@BigDongEmperor]

Firebase was pretty easy to set up a website on with a custom domain, probably harder than Vercel though

[@dave0811]

How can I deploy a Docker container in railway?

[@joshix833]

The planetscale recommendation aged reall well

[@erikslorenz]

Been using cloud run for awhile. Now that Azure Container Apps are a thing I'm using that a lot since most other stuff we do is Azure.

[@Szakul1]

has anyone tried to deploy angular app to railway because I get constant error while deploying?

[@i.i]

Have you seen oracle cloud service free tier !!! This should be on top

[@Frostbytedigital]

As a 2 year free tier oracle customer I'm shocked this isn't a hugely up voted comment. I run multiple personal sites on one free tier compute instance. As an aws engineer daytoday who could deploy there easily if I wanted.