Liveblog: What happened with Heroku

Liveblog:

What happened with Heroku

Sat, May 9, 2015 at 4:28 PM by Dave Winer ☮.

What happened with Heroku

Here are a couple of analogies, one from computers, the other from real life that are analogous to the pricing change Heroku announced on Friday.
S3 from Amazon
- When I design a system, I very much take into consideration what various things cost. For example, when I put a server in Amazon's cloud, I know that I can access S3 storage for free. The same application, running in Rackspace would run up a huge bill storing stuff in S3. Clearly you're more likely to put an S3-heavy app in Amazon's cloud. Unless money is no object, and in this stuff that's never the case.
- So imagine if after a couple of years of deploying apps this way, you get a friendly email from Amazon saying, "Great news! We just lowered the price of accessing S3 storage, and there's also this slight change, if you've been freeloading we're sorry but we now have to charge you for accessing S3 storage even if you're running in our cloud. You have 45 days to get off before we start charging."
From the real world
- You move to Queens even though you work in Manhattan, because you can buy a nicer house there for less money. You can afford to do this because the subway fare from Queens to Manhattan is the same as it is within Manhattan. The city designed it this way to encourage people to spread out to the boroughs.
- Then one day the city announces, "Great news! We're lowering the base fare for subway travel, but have to charge by the mile now, we're sure you understand. You freeloaders in Queens have 45 days to relocate back to Manhattan. We apologize for any inconvenience."
- Gulp. I have a mortgage. I don't want to sell. I like my neighborhood.
- The subway has been here for almost 150 years, and they've never changed this basic feature of subway pricing. If they did, the people would revolt.
We architect our applications according to these economics, and a major change in pricing is something not to take very lightly. If a vendor does this, you have to figure it's not being run by engineers, because they would understand how this would shake your confidence in the vendor.
Amazon has been very consistently lowering their prices since the inception of AWS. If there ever was a pricing change like this at Amazon, it would cause a lot of angst. Not to say Amazon hasn't done things to shake our confidence. When they shut off Wikileaks that was noted by this developer, and others. There are unspecified lines that if you cross them, Amazon will shut you down. That means they are not totally neutral, and can only be trusted so far.
Heroku lost me with this change. I had architected around their pricing. Even with the systems I had deployed to date, the price would have been ridiculous, totally not competitive. I guess they figured my business wasn't worth anything. So I can't consider their product worth anything either.
As I understood the deal with Heroku, you got your hosting for free while you were developing. When you hit gold, when your service goes viral, they expect you'll continue to host with them (it's the easiest thing to do, after all), and because they've earned your loyalty. I very much looked forward to the day when I would pay them for service. I thought I understood what they were doing. Clearly they were thinking something else.
The big lesson here is that movement should be easy. If it were then these changes would be worth a shoulder-shrug. It was not as easy as it should be. In part that's because Heroku's product is still unique (in a good way). If they were to get competition, and I hope they do, I hope the competition is: Easier, has more features, performs better, and is priced competitively. Lock-in should not be a reason to stay with a vendor.
Luckily (actually by design) I'm developing on a platform, Node.js, that's available everywhere. The way I'm deploying it now, it would be easy to move to another service if I ever need to. I hope I've learned this lesson! :-)