Heroku Free Tier
What Happened
Heroku launched in 2007 with a deceptively simple idea: push your code with 'git push heroku main' and it just runs. No servers, no DevOps, no YAML files to write. Its free tier became the default first-deploy experience for an entire generation of developers learning Rails, Node, Django, and Flask.
Salesforce acquired Heroku in 2010 for $212M. For a while, the magic remained. But internal priorities shifted to enterprise Heroku, and the free tier became a neglected stepchild — still running, still beloved, still the recommended starting point in thousands of tutorials, but barely maintained.
On August 25, 2022, Salesforce announced the end of free dynos, free Postgres, and free Redis — effective November 28, 2022. The reasons given were 'abuse of free resources' and the need to focus investment on commercial products. Hundreds of thousands of hobby projects, student apps, and side experiments were given three months to start paying or go dark.
The free tier's death marked the end of an era. Developers migrated en masse to Railway, Render, Fly.io, and Vercel — platforms explicitly built to recapture what Heroku used to be before Salesforce bought it. Heroku still exists, still processes billions of requests. But the thing that made it special — zero-cost experimentation for anyone learning to ship code — is gone.