We are at the end of November and with it, the final hour of all of my Heroku free dynos. When I first heard that Heroku was slashing their free tier back in August, I remember feeling a bit of a bittersweet nostalgia. Like many other folks in software, Heroku had been my gateway into doing more web development.

I first found out about Heroku in high school. I was a junior stuck in an elective course called computer graphics which covered just about everything except its namesake. One of the class’s modules was on web development and briefly mentioned something called Ruby on Rails, a funny name that piqued my interest at the time. One thing led to another, and I soon found myself working through a Rails hello world tutorial after school. At the very end, the instructions described deploying the site to this thing called Heroku.

“What in tarnation is a Heroku?”

I went to the website, made an account, and cautiously followed each step from the tutorial. Suddenly, the terminal spat out a bunch of colorful logs, and I was told that the site was deployed on something or another dot herokuapp dot com. I pointed Firefox to the enigmatic URL, waited a bit, and then there it was: my shifty beginner project, on the Internet. My eyes glimmered and the gears in my head started turning. I remember immediately adapting the tutorial project into PhamBash, a clone of Bash but with a uniquely inane focus on memorializing quotes from my high school’s eccentric chemistry teacher. Right as it deployed, I tweeted the link at him from an anonymous account. The next day in class, he had the site displayed on the projector, shown up at the front of the room for all to see. He surveyed the 15 students present in the room before stopping to look at me, the kid seated at the middle table, grinning sheepishly.

“You make this?”

“Yeah.”

Awkward silence. Then a smile.

“Okay guy let’s start class.”

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After playing around in Rails, I quickly found out about Django and soon became inspired to make more apps. During this time, Heroku would become my testing ground for all things web.

I remember my next project which was a Facebook Messenger bot that responded to messages by babbling using a Markov chain generated from text written by yours truly. I had foolishly chosen to use Django to build the bot, overkill for a server that was basically just responding to webhook requests. Eventually, I did manage to get it all working locally (with ngrok tunneling so FB could hit my server).

Then I came to the part where I had to deploy it. I remember having some trouble getting the build to work on Heroku and being generally mystified by the Heroku Django guide introducing yet another server, gunicorn (which was also a blackbox for me since it does not run on Windows). I did figure it all out eventually though: I had been using the wrong buildpack (whoops).

Later, when I started learning about Docker, Heroku was where I went to experiment with it. My first Docker-based dyno was a small site to commemorate birthdays for anime characters by letting users submit doodles on their birthdays. While the site itself had a short life and was nothing terribly grand (especially given the amount of phallic creations my friends submitted to it), building it got me more used to working with Docker. I learned a lot of new things, like multi-stage Docker builds and the pain of watching Docker get into fistfights with VMWare before WSL2 existed.

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Of course, Heroku’s free tier was not without many grievances. Cold start always annoyed me to no end, and many a time I would find myself on the dashboard with my trigger finger on the delete button, mulling over which one of my 5 dynos to sack so I could deploy my next project.

Despite these limitations, free users still always find their way around. For example, one trick for cold start was to just never let the app fall asleep. I remember I had trained a ResNet-18 classifier to tell the difference between pictures of Shamiko and Momo from Machikado Mazoku. I built a web application around it and wanted to show off the app to others but knew no one would be patient enough to sit and wait through the cold start. To combat this, I subscribed the endpoint to Kaffeine, a service that periodically pings Heroku endpoints to keep them awake. After that, my app never fell asleep, and the only hassle I got was getting a monthly email from Heroku, telling me that my free dyno hours were running out at the end of the month.

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As I write this, I remember the free dynos I still have running in my account. One of them is Stapler-kun, my faithful Discord bot, born out of fatigue from a friend who would always declare social plans in our Discord server before following up with the message “someone pin that”. I used to pin them for him. Now the bot does it for me.

I had hosted Stapler-kun as a worker on Heroku with a free Postgres database to persist which messages had been pinned. I remember getting giddy when I first got it working. A personal little robot to do my bidding. Built by me. All hosted for free.

Now Stapler has a new home. Or perhaps, I should say, a new body. I ended up building out Stapler-kun v2, switching it from a discord.py bot to a Discord Interactions app running on a free Cloudflare worker. I had a lot of fun with the port and even got the motivation to add more functionality to the bot while rebuilding it, yet I still feel uneasy. From one free tier to another. What happens when this all too, ceases to be?

Gripes aside though, I had a lot of fun with Heroku’s free tier throughout these years. It gave me a risk-free chance to practice web dev, and it fuelled many of my good, bad, and plain crazy ideas. Now that the hour is nigh, I suppose it is time to put a close to reminiscing and for the Heroku free tier to depart once and for all. To all the things I learned with you and all the adolescent fun you provided: Thank you and goodbye, Heroku free tier.