Cyclic, the modern alternative to Heroku. And oh, it has a free tier!

After 15 years of providing the developer community with a free-means of testing and deploying apps on the web, Heroku will finally cease its generous offering and push all users to their paid program. Its the end of an era full of Heroku-deployed tutorials, backends, and personal projects.

This came as surprising news to the community as many hobbyists, including small businesses have long-used Heroku to test their apps prior to deployment. One user in Y Combinators Hacker News forum noted that many of his companys apps relied on Herokus free-tier databases and Dynos, and that migrating to a paid plan will significantly increase costs.

This change will roughly double the cost of a basic app on pro dynos + DB + redis, from $25/m to $49/m [sic], driverdan wrote.

For reference, Heroku Dynos starts at $7 per month, Heroku Data for Redis starts at $15 per month and Heroku Postgres starts at $9 per month.

So what can you do to keep your costs at $0 and focus on the development-aspect of your projects? And why didnt the freemium model work out in the long run? Well look into all of that and more in this article.

Why Herokus freemium model didnt work out

Heroku is a PaaS (platform as a service) solution owned by Salesforce for building, deploying, and managing cloud services and applications. Its built on dynos, small virtualized Linux containers.

But heres the scaling problem: Dynos cost money to run even when theyre not being used.

To mitigate the costs with free accounts, Heroku will put any dyno that hasnt received traffic in 30-minutes to sleep. That means that upcoming users will have to wait much longer for the website to load, as the dyno that its running is still waking up

Heroku even tells you to scale-downapps that you dont use, and to ensure that one-off dynos are not run.

Then something amazing happened in 2014. the serverless movement just started, and it was as revolutinary as when Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone!

The main idea was to completely get rid of infrastructure management. You just need to write a small piece of code, upload it and the cloud provider will take care of the rest. Serverless compute (also known as Function as a Service) let you run code without provisioning or managing servers. This quote sums it up perfectly: The best code is the code you don't have to write.

Serverless is executed only in response to a given event or trigger. As a consequence, you only pay for resources that are actually being used.

You are charged based on the number of requests for your functions and the duration it takes for your code to execute.

This makes free-tier a much viable offering for cloud providers, as well see in the next section.

Why Cyclics free-tier is superior to Heroku

If youre just excited about serverless as I am, you have to check out Cyclic: the modern serverless platform.

I myself am using Cyclic to host my own personal projects:

• Schedul, made with Vue Platform for scheduling your DEV posts using Cyclics cron jobs.
• ithink, made with React Platform for sharing your thoughts publicly using Cyclics free AWS S3 storage.

And guess what, I havent paid a dime.

Cyclics free-tier is very generous, where consumption-based pricing lets you start free for all your projects:

• up to 3 full-fledged applications,
• no servers are put to sleep,
• 100,000 API requests,
• 1GB runtime memory,
• 1GB Storage on AWS DynamoDB,
• 1GB Object Storage on AWS S3,
• and unlimited blazing fast builds.

And thats not it, everyone also benefits from unlimited community support, straight from Cyclics Discord server.

So be sure to join Cylics Discord and make sure to mention that you came from this article.

How to get started with Cyclic

Every developer values a clear and comprehensible documentation for the products they use on the daily. And thats exactly what you can expect with Cyclic.

Theres a starter template that will surely suit any project you have:

Vanilla Nodejs

• The smallest possible node backend with no dependencies.
• Source:https://github.com/cyclic-software/starter-micro-api

Express API

• Minimal Express backend with just a few lines of code
• https://github.com/cyclic-software/starter-express-api

REST API

• Fully functional REST API
  • Create Read Update Delete, List
  • Backed by integrated DynamoDB
• https://github.com/cyclic-software/starter-rest-api

HTML Full Stack

• An express app serving a static html page with some cool css
• Source:https://github.com/cyclic-software/express-hello-world

React Frontend

• Vanilla React App. Created withnpx create-react-apptemplate.
• Source:https://github.com/cyclic-software/starter-react-app

Vue Frontend

• Vanilla Vue App. Created withnpx @vue/cli create starter-vue
• Source:https://github.com/cyclic-software/starter-vue

NextJS Full Stack

• A NextJS static site with a small Express API backend
• Source:https://github.com/cyclic-software/starter-nextjs

Svelte Frontend

• Vanilla Svelte App. Created withnpx degit sveltejs/template
• Source:https://github.com/cyclic-software/starter-svelte

Slack Bot

• Slack Bot starter built on Boltjs
• Source:https://github.com/cyclic-software/starter-slack-boltjs

S3 Storage

• Use Cyclic Storage backed by AWS S3
• Source:https://github.com/cyclic-software/starter-s3-storage

Conclusion

Personally, I strong believe that Cyclic's free-tier will become the next standard for hobbyists just looking to host their small projects, and businesses looking for a means to test their apps before deployment.

Cyclic is very well-documented, with a team of highly-motivated individuals aiming to shape the golden standard for serverless computing.

It won't hurt to give it a try. It's free, after all.

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