Thanks for the reminder! Could've lost a bunch of photos :) Also, it's interesting how little effort Heroku put into helping you upgrade. There's no one-click options, and instead it's a forest of choices and menus to jump through.
By the way, one hack to not upgrading your app? Move your DBs to a single shared instance on Amazon, and then point Heroku apps to that one instance. Meanwhile, in Heroku just remove the Postgres addon. As long as it doesn't see a free instance, it doesn't complain.
Looked into it a few seconds more and realized they've got a new "mini" plan, which is basically a free Dev plan, but costing 1 cent a month. I suppose this is a deliberate attempt to kill all the non-maintained projects, rather than a way to make money.
Where are you reading 1 cent/month? The cheapest way I can see to run a small app+db project on Heroku now is to use an Eco dyno at $5/month with a Mini Postgres instance at $5/month, for a total of $10/month.
If you don't want your project to sleep, you probably want a Basic dyno ($7/month) instead of an Eco dyno.
As of now, https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql says $0.01/month and their CLI as of Wednesday also said that. Of course, this feels like a weird workaround until December 1 since they also say that's when they're going to saying charging for it.
Just found this too. The brand-new Eco plan costs $5/mo, shared over all projects up to 1000 dyno hours, and then it seems each database on the Micro plan is $0.01 per month. That comes out to $5.05 per month for me I believe for my 5 portfolio projects? Maybe there's hope for Heroku yet.
I just upgraded with basically one click after I clicked on the alert banner warning me I had to. In my case from a pg free to pg "mini" (I was already on a cheapest-but-non-free dyno, which will change it's name but still be the same otherwise).
After you've upgraded, did your data get auto-migrated? It is my understanding from Heroku docs that data move is a separate process from the upgrade of the plan itself, and if you don't force a copy, you'll lose all your data anyway.
Hm, I'm not sure that article applies. That is the process for moving your data from one postgres instance to another, say because you are actually upgrading the postgres version.
But I'm not sure that process applies to changing plans, even under ordinary circumstances, if you are leaving pg version the same.
The wording when I upgraded to 'mini' gave me the impression that I didn't have to do anything else, my existing database would just change it's plan to 'mini' tomorrow, but be the same database.
But I don't exactly trust heroku to get it right anymore, alas. (Which is a bigger problem than the elimination of free plans -- the whole reason I was eager to use heroku, including for paid plans, is because I always did trust them to get it right.)
This is actually just a "hobby" project, that also can be restarted from an empty database if needed (it's http://rubyland.news), so... I guess we'll see what happens tomorrow? I believe my database will persist, just with a new plan.
Yeah, whatever button I pushed to upgrade, it did the opposite. It created a new instance of PG and applied the new plan to it. Meanwhile I had to manually copy the data and shut down the old plan/db.
Update: found it while playing with a new project! There's "upgrade instructions" which guide you through the manual process, and there's an option to "upgrade plan" which just reassigns the existing db. Very intuitive!
p.s. Fun fact, if you spin out a new Heroku app (today, Nov 27th), it defaults to free stuff, and makes you upgrade manually, as opposed to just defaulting all the new stuff to cheap paid plans.
i find heroku support is still pretty good, if you have/want to take the time to message them and ask exactly what to do to do what you want, but it's annoying that it's necessary for standard things that have just become confusing, or to work around documentation failures.
Comments
Thanks for the reminder! Could've lost a bunch of photos :) Also, it's interesting how little effort Heroku put into helping you upgrade. There's no one-click options, and instead it's a forest of choices and menus to jump through.
By the way, one hack to not upgrading your app? Move your DBs to a single shared instance on Amazon, and then point Heroku apps to that one instance. Meanwhile, in Heroku just remove the Postgres addon. As long as it doesn't see a free instance, it doesn't complain.
Looked into it a few seconds more and realized they've got a new "mini" plan, which is basically a free Dev plan, but costing 1 cent a month. I suppose this is a deliberate attempt to kill all the non-maintained projects, rather than a way to make money.
I’d say to kill more abuse rather than non-maintained projects
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/massive-crypt...
Where are you reading 1 cent/month? The cheapest way I can see to run a small app+db project on Heroku now is to use an Eco dyno at $5/month with a Mini Postgres instance at $5/month, for a total of $10/month.
If you don't want your project to sleep, you probably want a Basic dyno ($7/month) instead of an Eco dyno.
Am I missing something?
Edit: I meant to add a link to the pricing page.
https://www.heroku.com/pricing
As of now, https://elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql says $0.01/month and their CLI as of Wednesday also said that. Of course, this feels like a weird workaround until December 1 since they also say that's when they're going to saying charging for it.
Just found this too. The brand-new Eco plan costs $5/mo, shared over all projects up to 1000 dyno hours, and then it seems each database on the Micro plan is $0.01 per month. That comes out to $5.05 per month for me I believe for my 5 portfolio projects? Maybe there's hope for Heroku yet.
I can't find anything about the Micro plan. Is this documented anywhere?
I just upgraded with basically one click after I clicked on the alert banner warning me I had to. In my case from a pg free to pg "mini" (I was already on a cheapest-but-non-free dyno, which will change it's name but still be the same otherwise).
After you've upgraded, did your data get auto-migrated? It is my understanding from Heroku docs that data move is a separate process from the upgrade of the plan itself, and if you don't force a copy, you'll lose all your data anyway.
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/upgrading-heroku-postg...
It seems like data migration should've been at least a prompt when you upgrade an add-on, but it isn't, at least not for me.
Hm, I'm not sure that article applies. That is the process for moving your data from one postgres instance to another, say because you are actually upgrading the postgres version.
But I'm not sure that process applies to changing plans, even under ordinary circumstances, if you are leaving pg version the same.
The wording when I upgraded to 'mini' gave me the impression that I didn't have to do anything else, my existing database would just change it's plan to 'mini' tomorrow, but be the same database.
But I don't exactly trust heroku to get it right anymore, alas. (Which is a bigger problem than the elimination of free plans -- the whole reason I was eager to use heroku, including for paid plans, is because I always did trust them to get it right.)
This is actually just a "hobby" project, that also can be restarted from an empty database if needed (it's http://rubyland.news), so... I guess we'll see what happens tomorrow? I believe my database will persist, just with a new plan.
Yeah, whatever button I pushed to upgrade, it did the opposite. It created a new instance of PG and applied the new plan to it. Meanwhile I had to manually copy the data and shut down the old plan/db.
Update: found it while playing with a new project! There's "upgrade instructions" which guide you through the manual process, and there's an option to "upgrade plan" which just reassigns the existing db. Very intuitive!
p.s. Fun fact, if you spin out a new Heroku app (today, Nov 27th), it defaults to free stuff, and makes you upgrade manually, as opposed to just defaulting all the new stuff to cheap paid plans.
wow that is super annoying.
i find heroku support is still pretty good, if you have/want to take the time to message them and ask exactly what to do to do what you want, but it's annoying that it's necessary for standard things that have just become confusing, or to work around documentation failures.