herokuthe platform-as-a-service division of Salesforce, has confirmed that it will put an end to its free plans after having been offering them for about a decade. As of November 28, the company will stop offering them, so users who decide to continue working with the platform will have no choice but to use one of their payment plans.
Also as of November 28, their free database and container data services will be removed. Before, on October 26, will delete inactive accounts and associated storage to accounts that have not been used for more than a year. Its managers have confirmed that they will announce a program for students at the next Dreamforce conference in September, but there is no more information about it yet.
Heroku allows developers to develop, run, and scale apps in multiple programming languages. Among them Java, PHP, Scala and Go. Salesforce bought the company in 2010 for $212 million, and rolled out Node.js and Heroku support for Facebook. The latter is a package developed to simplify the process of deploying Facebook apps on the Heroku infrastructure. According to those responsible, so far it has been used for the development of 13 million apps.
The removal of these free plans doesn’t just affect hobbyists, as these plans are often used for testing apps before final rollout. Mostly, they are used by independent developers and small companies, who will now have to bear additional development costs if they want to continue using the platform. Their Dynos plan starts at $7/month per user, Heroku Data for Redis starts at $16/month, and Heroku Postgres starts at $9/month. These are the prices of the basic plans of different Heroku products.
Bob Wise, Vice President of Salesforce and Head of Heroku, has pointed out that the abuse of the existing free services for Heroku Dynos, Heroku Postgres and Heroku Data for Redis is to blame for the elimination of the free plans of this Salesforce division. And he recalls that his product, engineering and security teams «are investing an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of free Heroku product plans. We will continue to offer low-cost solutions for computing and data resources«.
