Summary of Reddit Comments on Best Heroku Alternatives

Pros and Cons of Self-Hosting/Free Alternatives:

• Self-hosted solutions like GitLab, Prometheus, Supabase, and appflowy have paid tiers and bring both cost savings and added responsibilities.
• Open-source alternatives may only provide about 40% of what paid services offer.
• It can be cheaper not to use FOSS due to lack of 24/7 support and the need to hire someone to implement and support them.
• Support for self-hosted solutions is often inferior to commercial options, which is vital for critical applications like in banking.
• Some business-critical risks such as PCI compliance make outsourcing services like Shopify more cost-effective than self-hosting.
• LibreOffice isn't widely used in business environments due to limited functionality compared to industry-standard software.

Heroku Alternatives Recommended by Reddit Users:

• Render: Offers a free tier for hosting Ruby applications and is popular among Ruby developers.
• Fly.io: Fast deployment, with a student plan and eco dynos for efficient scaling.
• DigitalOcean: Used with Dokku for deployment of Rails apps and features plugins like Postgres and letsencrypt.
• Cloud 66: Provides a mature self-service tool for deployment, with flexibility and multi-region failover support.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Offers portability to other environments and good support.
• Coherence: Offers a similar developer experience to Heroku on AWS or GCP Accounts.
• Oracle Cloud Free Tier: Provides free VMs for server hosting, with options to avoid credit card information requirements.
• Other Mentioned Alternatives: Patr.cloud, Gluroo, Vercel, Planetscale, PythonAnywhere, Replit, Koyeb, Railway.

Additional Insight:

• Businesses often prefer paid services for reliability and support, though cost and support quality remain crucial factors.
• Balancing costs is essential when considering alternatives as they may have hidden expenses or offer inadequate support.
• Infrastructure complexity and support latency make multi-provider solutions and self-hosting less appealing for larger enterprises.
• Consolidating services onto a single platform like Slack can reduce overhead and optimize management.
• Management perception often values paid services more due to the expectation of better quality and easier accountability.

This summary provides a detailed overview of various Heroku alternatives based on Reddit users' experiences and recommendations, highlighting the pros and cons of different options available.