Salesforce-owned cloud platform Heroku has announced the end of its free plans.
General manager Bob Wise made the announcement in this blog post.
Wise said: “Our product, engineering, and security teams are spending an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans.”
“We will be phasing out our free plan for Heroku Dynos, free plan for Heroku Postgres, and free plan for Heroku Data for Redis®, as well as deleting inactive accounts”, he wrote.
Starting October 26, the company will start deleting accounts that have shown no activity for more than a year, while from November 28, “we plan to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data services”.
“The priority going forward is to support customers of all sizes who are betting projects, careers, and businesses on Heroku,” the company said.
Users of free plans need to upgrade to paid plans before these dates.
Heroku plans to announce plans to support students at the Dreamforce conference in September, and said it is working with its nonprofit team on an offer that will be made available during 2023.
Third party add-ons in the Heroku Elements Marketplace are not affected, even if the partner is offering the add-on as a free service.
Fraud is a challenge for platform-as-a-service providers; for example, Malwarebytes detected campaigns in 2019 that exploited GitHub, AWS, and Heroku.
Heroku suffered a cyber attack in April in which an unknown actor stole GitHub OAuth tokens and user passwords, leading to all user passwords being reset.
