Domain redirects are useful for portfolio apps if you'd like to have some coherency in your urls, and maybe you're not trying to showcase that your app is on Heroku's free tier at that moment. That's legitimate, it's also a use case where 12 hours/day is likely sufficient. However users breaking TOS and keeping those apps awake 24/7 so recruiters don't have to wait ~30s for them to load is probably a problem Heroku's trying to solve.
well amazon's free tier allows you to have a smallish machine up 24/7 (for a year), seems to me heroku is going to push away a lot of smallish side projects that might have evolved into actual usage.
Is there anyone outside of a total beginner or a newly created company who hasn't had an AWS account for over a year now? I don't even use mine a lot (mostly S3) but signed up very early on just to check it out, as with most things, so I wonder how relevant Amazon's free tier even is now.
you might have an AWS account but not necessarily to run a web app, cause you're in the "meh, I'd rather do git push heroku now than learn to setup elastic beanstalk/opsworks+docker/ec2+deis".
The latter becomes more attractive now, and once you have learned to use AWS's X tech to run $SILLY_SERVICE you might end up using it for $SERIOUS_SERVICE.
I am in charge of a high volume, medium sized deis setup, and have been actively using deis since 0.2.0, but I don't have that kind of setup for my personal blog. It's overkill. Heroku is easier and allows me to get one with development, so I use Heroku.
It's not so much a "meh, I'd rather do git push heroku now than learn to setup elastic beanstalk/opsworks+docker/ec2+deis" than it is a "I just want to develop a quick idea without wasting time on ops".
https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/billing
edit: I read TFL, no more free tier with a cron job hitting it hourly to keep it awake 24/7. Can't say I'm surprised.