Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

Reminds me of my current customer. We (another freelancer and me) built an application that replaced an Excel sheet, which was the foundation of the business until then. So the usual so far.

We have a policy that our customers are responsible for all their business-related input, but we make the decisions about the technical implementation. Every technical decision that the customer wants to make basically costs extra.

In this case we built a rather simple multi-tenancy B2B app using Laravel, with one database per tenant. They planned to start with a single customer/tenant, scaling up to maybe a few dozen within the next years, with less than a hundred concurrent users over the first five years. There were some processes with a little load, but they were few, running less that a minute each and already built up to run asynchronous.

We planned a single Hetzner instance and to scale up as soon as we would see it reaching its limits. So less than 100 €/month.

The customer told us that they have a cooperation with their local hosting provider (with "special conditions!") and that they wanted to use them instead.

My colleague did all the setup, because he is more experienced in that, but instead of our usual five-minute-setup in Forge (one of the advantages of the Laravel ecosystem), it took several weeks with the hosting provider, where my colleague had to invest almost full time just for the deployment. The hosting provider "consulted" out customer to invest in a more complex setup with a load balancer in front, to be able to scale right away. They also took very long for each step, like providing IP addresses or to handle the SSL certificates.

We are very proud of our very fast development process and having to work with that hosting provider cost us about one third of our first development phase for the initial product.

It's been around two years since then. While the software still works as intended, the customer could not grow as expected. They are still running with only one single tenant (basically themselves) and the system barely had to handle more than two concurrent users. The customer recently accidentally mentioned that they pay almost 1000€/month for the hosting alone. But it scales!

Just saw Nate Berkopec who does a lot of rails performance stuff posting about the same idea yesterday saying Heroku is 25-50x price for performance which is so insane. They clearly have zero interest in competing on price.

It's a shame they don't just license all their software stack at a reasonable price with a similar model like Sidekiq and let you sort out actually decent hardware. It's insane to consider Heroku if anything has gotten more expensive and worse compared to a decade ago yet in comparison similar priced server hardware has gotten WAY better of a decade. $50 for a dyno with 1 GB of ram in 2025 is robbery. It's even worse considering running a standard rails app hasn't changed dramatically from a resources perspective and if anything has become more efficient. It's comical to consider how many developers are shipping apps on Heroku for hundreds of dollars a month on machines with worse performance/resources than the macbook they are developing it on.

It's the standard playback that damn near everything in society is going for though just jacking prices and targeting the wealthiest least price sensitive percentiles instead of making good products at fair prices for the masses.

The Real Insight: Staging Became a Free Commodity

Not free, it became a productivity boost.

You now have a $35k annual budget for the maintenance, other overhead, and lost productivity. What do you spend it on?

The team also took on responsibility for server monitoring, security updates, and handling any infrastructure issues themselves

For a place that’s paying devs $150k a year that might math out. It absolutely does not for places paying devs $250k+ a year.

One of the great frustrations of my mid career is how often people tried to bargain for more speed by throwing developers at my already late project when what would have actually helped almost immediately was more hardware and tooling. But that didn’t build my boss’ or his bosses’ empires. Don’t give me a $150k employee to train, give me $30k in servers.

Absolutely no surprise at all when devs were complicit with Cloud migrations because now you could ask forgiveness instead of permission for more hardware.

Single server is very cheap for hobbyist.

Just something to consider if you are in a professional environment before switching your entire infra: maintenance cost is expensive. I strongly suggest to throw man-days in your cost calculation.

To prevent security vulnerabilities, the team will need to write some playbooks to auto-update regularly your machine, hoping for no breaking changes. Or instead write a pipeline for immutable OS images updates. And it often mean testing on an additional canary VM first.

Scaling up the VM from a compute point of view is not that straightforward as well, and will require depending of the provider either downtime or to migrate the entire deployments to a new instance.

Scaling from a disk size point of view, you will need to play with filesystems.

And depending on the setup you are using, you might have to manage lets encrypt, authentication and authorization, secrets vaults, etc (here at least Disco manages the SSL certs for you)

It’s all fine and dandy, but I wonder why so little discussion around this (mainly high-level comments “DBs are hard”?

disco provides a "good enough" Postgres addon.

This addon is a great way to quickly setup a database when Postgres is not mission critical to your system. If you need any non-basic features, like replication, automatic failover, monitoring, automatic backups and restore, etc. you should consider using a managed Postgres provider, such as Neon or Supabase.

How come automatic backups is considered an “advanced” feature?

Also I can’t think of a single application since 2012 that I have worked on that did not have a secondary/follower instance deployed. Also suggesting Neon and friends is fine, but I wonder what is your average latency, Hetzner does not have direct connection to the DCs these databases are hosted.