Item: Heroku Platform
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The product we offer is a web-based, SaaS genealogy platform. The entire platform is hosted by Heroku, making it our most significant tech vendor by far. Because of Heroku's simple deployment model, we were able to set up the initial platform and are able to support it with a small technology team.

Pros and Cons

Heroku has a very simple deployment model, making it easy to get your application up-and-running with minimal effort. We can focus on our efforts the unique aspects of our application.
The robust add-on marketplace makes it easy to try out new approaches with minimal effort and investment -- and when we settle on a solution, we can easily scale it.
Heroku's support is quite good -- their staff is quite technical and willing to get into the weeds to diagnose even complicated problems.

Heroku can get pricey pretty quickly as you scale.
The quality of add-on vendors is increasingly variable as Heroku expands the marketplace.

Return on Investment

Without Heroku we could not have gotten our platform off the ground. The challenges of setting up all the aspects of the platform from scratch -- whether pushing our existing tech team or adding consultants -- would have stressed our budget in the early days.
When talking to investors, hosting on Heroku builds confidence that scaling the platform as our user base grows will not be a stumbling block for the business.
It is easy to find developers and devops people with significant Heroku experience to ensure that new team members can hit the ground running and add meaningful expertise to our team.

Usability

The overall usability through the web interface and the CLI is quite high. Most common tasks are easily accomplished, though more complicated, rarer situations require more research.

Support Rating

Heroku's technical support team is quite good and willing to get in the weeds to solve even complicated problems. There is also a large enough user base out in the world to get help easily from fellow users.

Alternatives Considered

Aptible and Google App Engine

For a different project, Aptible surpassed Heroku when it came to meeting HIPAA-related requirements, though it offers much less flexibility with add-on services (for obvious reasons). Google App Engine had a much more complicated deployment model and seemed unnecessarily complicated for our simple project. We were dissuaded from continuing just in the early set-up.

Other Software Used

Aptible

Likelihood to Recommend

Heroku is very well-suited to early stage and/or rapidly changing projects. It is great for getting moving quickly or changing direction quickly. In scenarios where there is already scale or well-defined requirements, it may be preferable to set things up directly on AWS or another cloud provider to avoid the additional costs of Heroku as the middleman.

Quick to Set Up and Experiment With

Overall Satisfaction with Heroku