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Comment on Heroku to discontinue free product plans and delete inactive accounts

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I learned web development through "Ruby on Rails Tutorial" by Michael Hartl. The book is a project-based tutorial where you create a Twitter clone complete with a basic authentication system.

The book had you host your app on the free version of Heroku. I imagine this book has taught a lot of people, and influenced a lot of people to use Heroku.

Not anymore I guess.

That tutorial belongs in the Tech and Zero-DRM Publishing Halls of Fame for

  - free to read digital content
  - paid paper books
  - paid video upsell
  - multiple six figures of revenue
  - frequent updates 
Shockingly, few have tried to repeat this feat, despite Hartl providing a low-fee SaaS for this purpose.

I should note that this book is still excellent.

We've been using it to teach new Rails developers at our workplace, where we have a "hire the best engineer available" policy even if they have no Rails experience. You can just skip the Heroku bits.

Of course, knowing Hartl, he'll also soon update the book accordingly.

And, it's a shame that Heroku is no longer an option for brand new developers who won't know that painless deploy-to-web. I know there are alternatives but I'm not familiar with them.

Render seems to be carrying the torch at this point. I haven’t used much of it, but it seems like a very capable replacement.

That seems like all it is, though? I have moved some stuff off of Heroku to Fly, and the new features/capabilities you get are pretty cool. It's hard to be excited about moving anything to Render, which is just the same thing as Heroku.

https://render.com/render-vs-heroku-comparison

Private networking, service discovery, built in static sites with a CDN, persistent disks, HTTP/3, cron jobs, health checks and more -- hardly 'just same thing as Heroku'.

Render was quite expensive when I used it though.

It's how learned Rails.

Interviewed, was given a take home project to complete, and went straight to borders and bought the book. Went through the book in a couple days then completed the project and ended up getting the job.

I also went through that book many years ago. It was great to start with no experience and make an app that could be working online at no cost!

Possibly related, I don’t think the book itself is free anymore (at least, if I’m reading railstutorial.com correctly).

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