Heroku stopped their free tier. What's next?

Last year, there was a post about moving to Heroku from firebase as firebase mandated credit card even for the free tier. Also, that post explained the issues in giving credit cards for freemium services.

Good bye Firebase and welcome Heroku for free server side execution

As far as I am concerned, the main usage of this free server-side execution mechanism is to host a YouTube API proxy that will be giving data about my YouTube videos. 

Why API proxy? My Jamstack Hugo-based personal website (https://joymononline.in) is showing the list of recent youtube videos in my channels. As part of building the site, it makes a call to this API proxy where the API keys and throttling details are hidden.

The YouTube-proxy-API is coded in Node.JS so it can ideally be hosted anywhere supporting the Node.JS execution environment. Normally Node.JS is one of the first technology any hosting platform will support. 

Problem

Heroku announced that they are ending the freemium tier and it will be converted to eco plan with a scale of 0. Meaning there will be no web process running and it respond with HTTP 503 Service Unavailable. So what is next after Heroku for free server-side code execution? 

Alternatives

If we google 'Heroku alternative for free hosting' we get a handful of options. Netlify, Back4app, and Vercel to name a few. They all come with reasonable limits that are way higher than simple needs.

Render.com

Instead of trying the above list, I thought of trying something else called Render.com. The experience was very smooth. The code in the repo worked without any changes after hosting to render.com. Below is the link

https://youtube-proxy-api.onrender.com/api/channels/UC78wYrq_keVaDV8STReHRxg/videos

My Awesome freemium serverless cloud list will be updated later with the features of render to compare with other services.

I am not part of render.com and not affiliated with them in any way. It is an independent post about the experience with render.com

This is just a basic experience. This doesn't mean all scenarios will be easy as hosting a simple API.

Freemium Mock Web APIs for testing - Beeceptor

Often when we develop we will end up in situations where we need to simulate the real scenario by mocking the dependencies. It may be databases, Web APIs, or container images. There was a separate post on mock container images that echo HTTP. 

Problem

There are scenarios where we may not be having the opportunity to run containers to expose the mock Web APIs. This post about handling such scenarios

Solutions

There are many solutions to address this.

Hosting Web API from our machine

We don't need to code from scratch. Just search in GitHub and we can get many. Simply clone and run.

Using internet-hosted mock Web APIs

This works if our development environment has access to the internet. There are paid as well as freemium services. One such freemium service is Beeceptor. 

Please note this post is not sponsored by Beeceptor also the author is not at all affiliated to the service. Their service saved some time today hence this post.

Some features are below

• The free tier gives 50 requests per day. 
• Integrated with Google and GitHub accounts. No need to remember one more password.
• Support delay even in the free tier.
• Support custom response headers and status codes.
• The HTTP responses can be configured quickly using the 'Mocking Rules' editor.

This is not a sophisticated mock Web API provider but it helps us to get quick mocks

Happy mocking...

Good bye Firebase and welcome Heroku for free server side execution

I was a big fan of Firebase¹ and recommended it to some of my friends as a good start-up technology. The main attraction is that it is(was) providing a true freemium model. The free tier doesn't require any credit card. Recently they changed their model and now all the tiers need a credit card to operate.²

The problem in giving credit cards for the free tier

There may be a simple question. Why can't we just give the credit card but use the free tier? There are problems with it.

DDoS

In case there are a lot of requests to the system, it will attract the money. If there is a limit by the provider to stop responding, it is fine. Otherwise, we will end up long time calling customer care.

Those requests may be legit or part of a DDoS³ attack. 

Accidental dev/testing cost

I was using ASP.Net for my personal portfolio site in the beginning. When I marketed my site to colleagues, one of my automation test friends simply run a load test against my portfolio site and took it down. It survived because the plan was a monthly fixed cost. At that time the SaaS model pricing was not common.

What is the alternative?

There are still freemium server side execution providers. We can migrate the workloads from Google firebase to them.¹

One of such provider is Heroku⁴. Another provider in my radar is Netlify⁵. 

Migration

Depends on the workload the migration efforts will vary. Starting from the language support to the data store capabilities there are changes. There are lot of comparisons available out in the internet⁶ to take decisions. At least for me it was easy I was using NodeJS and no data storage.  

If you are looking for a list I am maintaining one. 

Reference

• ¹ https://firebase.google.com/pricing 
• ² https://stackoverflow.com/a/62824105/181832
• ³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack
• ⁴ https://www.heroku.com/
• ⁵ https://www.netlify.com/pricing/
• ⁶ Comparisons
• https://gcpfirebase.com/firebase-vs-heroku/
• https://blog.back4app.com/firebase-vs-heroku/
• https://www.sfappworks.com/blogs/firebase-vs-heroku-difference

Awesome true freemium serverless clouds

What is the need for serverside code execution?

Nowadays JAMstack is getting popular. We can do almost all the application features in the browser application itself. JAMstack is a buzzword to represent browser applications that don't require a server to work. The application can be served from a CDN that stores application code in the form of static files. 

But there are many scenarios where we need to have some sort of interaction with a central location to access data or receive push notifications etc.

Serverless functions / FaaS

In such scenarios, Serverless functions can help us. Serverless functions or FaaS(Functions as a Service) is a cloud model where we can just host a function code without getting worried about servers and related configuration. Mostly pay per usage than a fixed monthly bill.

Freemium serverless functions

If we work for an enterprise or commercial application, we don't mainly care about free tiers. But if we are doing our personal projects we may research for any free service.

Fortunately, there are a lot of free options to run server-side code. Major cloud providers have free tiers but the problem is that we need to give them a credit card. The problem with the credit card is that we may get charged, in case of an attack such as DDoS is targeted to our function endpoint.

True freemium services

Firebase was my default choice as a true freemium serverless function provider. But recently they changed their model. They now require a credit card to avail of the freemium tier. 

This change caused the below GitHub project

https://github.com/joymon/awesome-freemium-serverless-clouds

The above link tries to aggregate all the true freemium service providers. Currently, it has only 3.

Have a look at the list and feel free to issue pull requests if there are other awesome freemium cloud providers.

Freemium - What is always free in clouds platforms

Background

There are any different pricing model in the software industry which doesn't require any money to be spend to use software. Trial, totally free, freemium, sand boxed trial account etc...They are different in their own way. Totally free and freemium are the models which really help us build something based on the offering. Freemium might not be a new word for a follower of this blog. There were posts which has freemium reference such as Serverless monitoring, online diagramming tools, tool box for open source more precisely developers who don't want to invest on tools.

Once again Freemium is a model where we can use systems in free but for advanced usage we need to pay. Event if we don't want advanced features the basic features are free for ever. Refer wiki for the Freemium

Freemium cloud features

Lets see what is there from Cloud providers in freemium tier. ie what is there always free which can help us to develop production prototypes and start own company without investing any money other than domain if we want.

Please note that, these are not the free account or free trial which we cannot depend on to put something into production.

https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/always-free-usage-limits#container_name
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/free/free-account-faq/
https://firebase.google.com/pricing/
https://aws.amazon.com/free/?awsf.Free%20Tier%20Types=categories%23alwaysfree
https://www.heroku.com/pricing

Since the cloud providers may add more services as freemium, only links are provided not another copy paste which needs more time to make it up to date.

Freemium doesn't necessarily guarantee that it its free for lifetime. The vendors have their rights to change the pricing.

More links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud-computing_comparison
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3179785/cloud-computing/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-cloud-which-free-tier-is-best.html
https://www.redpixie.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-cloud