My biggest take away from trying to find a Heroku alternative is that Heroku is late to the game of charging for a basic app. Other service might be free, but seem to have some sort of catch--only static, or requires a certain infrastructure, or whatever else--and only Heroku had the unopinionated free tier. And while I haven't used their competitors, I'm skeptical they can match Heroku's interface, CLI, add-on ecosystem, documentation, and all the various tutorial and stack overflow questions about their platform.
So, I'm sticking with Heroku. Sure, it'll cost some (and supposedly they're bringing in cheaper tiers than current, too), but it's not a big difference from their competitors, is reasonably priced (from a competitive perspective), and allows me to continue using a tool I know inside along with all the accompanying ecosystem.
I guess after ten years I'll actually have to pay Heroku something for their service. That seems... fine to me. Complaining about that seems petty.
I’ve found Vercel to work well for my personal projects. It’s supports dynamic applications and static ones, custom domains, CI for deployment and has a useable CLI all available on its free tier.
Replit can host any language that it supports (unless I’m reading the verbiage incorrectly at [1]), and custom domains are in the free tier (and ssl I believe).
Throw Cloudflare in front to survive an HN hug as far as bandwidth concerns go for the Replit free tier and you should be looking good.
It was the security breach where all of my environment variables were stolen. And the amount of time it took and their level of transparency through it all.
So, I'm sticking with Heroku. Sure, it'll cost some (and supposedly they're bringing in cheaper tiers than current, too), but it's not a big difference from their competitors, is reasonably priced (from a competitive perspective), and allows me to continue using a tool I know inside along with all the accompanying ecosystem.
I guess after ten years I'll actually have to pay Heroku something for their service. That seems... fine to me. Complaining about that seems petty.