Heroku changing their pricing - impact on training material?

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Hello,

I have been receiving mails from Heroku about changes to their pricing plans. Postgres will not be for free anymore I believe to understand.

Can the Codecademy staff please assess the impact on what is mentioned about Heroku in the training material (and suggest an alternative free infrastructure for fullstack projects) ?

Thank you,
Johan (Belgium)

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PostgreSQL is free and open source rdms:

License info:

https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/

Edit ah, but I see what you’re saying:

Good question!

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Update: curriculum is looking into this now (including free alternatives).
Hopefully someone will post here with an update at some point.

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Not just Postgres; they are also removing the free dyno tier, so the “compute” resource to actually run your code will no longer be free, and free Redis is also being removed.

It’s still quite a good option, given that they’re still in a position of saying “{resource} will cost you ${USD} every month” - as opposed to AWS (which Heroku uses under the hood) and Azure, where the costs can be variable and aren’t quite as easy to quantify if you’re not already kind of familiar with the platform or what you want to run on it - but sadly I think their dropping the free tier means there’s a lack of “beginner friendly” cloud deployment platforms, unless there’s another like Heroku I’ve just never heard of. :frowning:

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Is there any update on this, Codecademy ?

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I suspect, given the amount of work that would be required to evaluate alternatives and commit to a rewrite/overhaul of impacted material, that this will not be any time soon.

In the interim, other platforms such as Replit are stepping up to try and tempt free Heroku users to their ecosystem.

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For anyone that is looking for a possible alternative in the short term, anyone that has a Google account can activate a three-month free trial of Google Cloud, where you can host and deploy apps/projects. You don’t have to worry about deactivating at the three-month mark either - your projects/apps will simply stop working until you reactivate your account with billing this time.

A possible solution for going beyond the three months

What is interesting is that you can actually configure your apps/projects to operate within the “free quotas” of Google so that, no matter what, you will rarely ever be charged with anything. You can take the three month period to figure out how to ensure your apps/projects are configured to never exceed the free quotas.

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Been charged by Heroku and to remove my card I have to pay $5 to transfer my dynos to eco. What a terrible service from both codecademy and Heroku

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Did you try Google Cloud or another alternative?

I would contact CS and open a ticket. That way this issue is logged (again) and maybe some action can be taken on it.
Complaining here—while understandable—doesn’t accomplish anything. I’m sorry.

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Yeah Im waiting on a response from Heroku but contacted my bank and if worse comes to worse im gonna get a new card. It’s a real shame it’s nearly been 12 months since Heroku updated their use charges and CC is yet to reflect this in their content.

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It’s been since August 2022 when I posted above about Curriculum looking into this. :arrow_up:

You should contact CS and open a ticket.
You’re most likely not the only person this has happened to. They need to update their content as this has been a known issue

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If you click on “Roadmap” below, you will see “Updates to Heroku Content” Fall 2023.

I hope that helps

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