A Founder Story on Heroku Pricing Pain
When we first started building products, we were already aware of newer deployment approaches like Kuberns, but like many founders, we still began with Heroku because it felt familiar and widely accepted.
Not because it was cheap, and not because it removed all complexity, but because it gave us a predictable way to get applications into production without running servers ourselves. As founders, that mattered. Shipping mattered more than anything else. What we did not fully understand at the time was how closely pricing pain and deployment pain are connected.
Pricing Never Hurts on Day One
Our first Heroku bill looked fine.
The application was small. Traffic was manageable. The pricing felt reasonable. At…
A Founder Story on Heroku Pricing Pain
When we first started building products, we were already aware of newer deployment approaches like Kuberns, but like many founders, we still began with Heroku because it felt familiar and widely accepted.
Not because it was cheap, and not because it removed all complexity, but because it gave us a predictable way to get applications into production without running servers ourselves. As founders, that mattered. Shipping mattered more than anything else. What we did not fully understand at the time was how closely pricing pain and deployment pain are connected.
Pricing Never Hurts on Day One
Our first Heroku bill looked fine.
The application was small. Traffic was manageable. The pricing felt reasonable. At that stage, deployment was still something we actively managed. We sized dynos, configured add-ons, and accepted that some setup was part of running production software.
Nothing felt broken.
The problem started when deployment stopped being a one-time decision and became a recurring one.
When Deployment Decisions Become Cost Decisions
Every deployment change had a pricing consequence.
Adding a worker meant another dyno. Adjusting performance meant resizing resources. Background jobs, cron tasks, databases, logging, monitoring, everything came with its own line item.
The platform did not feel expensive because of one big charge. It felt expensive because every deployment decision quietly turned into a billing decision.
At that point, pricing was no longer about usage alone. It was about how the platform forced us to think about deployment.
The Hidden Cost Was Not the Bill
What hurt more than the invoice was the mental overhead.
Before every release, we were thinking about:
- 1. Will this change require more dynos?
- 2. Do we need another worker process?
- 3. Should we resize resources?
- 4. What will this do to next month’s bill?
Deployment slowed down because it demanded attention. Not because the app was large, but because the platform made deployment something we had to actively manage.
That was the real cost.
Realizing the Problem Was the Deployment Model
For a while, we blamed pricing. But the deeper issue was not Heroku’s pricing tiers. It was the deployment model itself.
The platform required us to define how the application should run, how it should scale, and how resources should be allocated. Pricing pain was simply the symptom of owning those decisions.
As founders, we did not want cheaper knobs. We wanted fewer knobs.
Rethinking Deployment Entirely
This experience forced us to ask a different question.
Why are developers still required to configure deployment at all? If platforms can detect runtimes, build applications, provision infrastructure, and monitor systems automatically, why are founders still making deployment and resource decisions manually?
That question led us to look more seriously at modern deployment models. Platforms like Kuberns stood out because deployment was treated as something the platform owns, not something founders continuously manage.
If you are at a similar stage, this ultimate guide to Heroku alternatives does a good job of laying out how different platforms approach this problem.
Discovering a Different Deployment Model
What stood out immediately was the philosophy. Deployment was not treated as something developers needed to prepare or tune. You connect your code and deploy. The platform handles detection, builds, infrastructure provisioning, deployment, and runtime management automatically.
This is where tools like Kuberns felt fundamentally different. Deployment did not turn into a recurring decision-making process later.
There were no deployment choices to revisit every month. No configuration changes that quietly increased costs. Deployment did not become something founders needed to think about between product decisions.
Why Pricing Feels Different When Deployment Is Hands-Off
When deployment is handled by the platform, pricing feels different. Costs are tied to actual application behavior, not to how many deployment decisions were made. There is no constant trade-off between shipping features and worrying about resource changes.
The pricing stress fades, not because the platform is magically cheap, but because deployment is no longer something you manage actively. This is the effect we noticed most clearly after moving away from configuration-driven platforms and toward systems like Kuberns.
What This Taught Us as Founders
Looking back, Heroku did not fail us as a product. It reflects an older expectation, that developers and founders should stay involved in deployment decisions forever. That expectation no longer matches how modern teams want to work.
Founders want to ship. They want deployment to work. And they want pricing to remain predictable without becoming infrastructure experts.
The Real Lesson
Heroku pricing pain taught us something important. If deployment requires constant decisions, pricing will always feel stressful. If deployment is handled for you, pricing becomes just another operational detail, not a blocker.
The future of deployment is not about cheaper platforms. It is about platforms that remove deployment as a founder concern entirely.