The same goes for people who write "obviously". If it's obvious, why write it? If the person doesn't already know, then you sound pretentious or the person feels like they missed out on something. It's pretty much lose-lose.
On a more related note, I'll probably check this out sometime. The dashboard looks nice.
And they're billed per minute or per second?
The time it takes to boot a worker mostly depends on your ruby application. The heavier it is, the longer it takes to boot up. Heroku spawns them fast, I think instantly because they are spawned from a compiled slug which is generated each time you push your app to Heroku.
The HireFire checkup interval takes at most 60 seconds, and less if more resources are available on HireFire's servers.
If you feel this is an important feature, please submit it to the forums. I'll definitely keep it in mind and see what the possibilities are for also handling Dyno's!
Would be nice to get an even more "plug-and-play" feel. Though, thankfully setting it up manually isn't hard at all, but it is indeed a nice touch to create an add-on for it.
I actually think it would be reasonable and justifiable for them to do it too, given that you are preventing a revenue aspect of their business model.
Heroku's pricing has always seemed VERY fair and generous to me - it costs them money to provide the service even at the free tier but rather than charging by cost lineally they charge based on value. If you need to start using Workers then you probably are deriving a larger degree of value and so it makes sense for them to charge for that.
Their model seems fair to me, and is what gives them the ability to offer the free tier.
I'm all for disrupting big businesses, and yes, Heroku is now part of SalesForce. But their pricing is what I call "nice guy" pricing and as a community we should be supporting that, not undermining it.
Let me put it this way. 1 Heroku Worker (roughly 80-100mb of ram) $36 a month. Now, what can you get for $36 a month? Go look at 6sync.com linode.com webbynode.com prgmr.com. You can easily fit 10 workers in any of them. With this I come to the conclusion you're paying 10 times more than with a quality VPS provider. Sure, you don't have to monitor these processes, and it scales up and down easily, but 10 times more expensive is reasonable? Please. :)
Let me tell you what I find reasonable: If you're charging me 10 times more for the same thing, I find it reasonable I shut down my resources when I don't need them so I only pay for what I actually use. Why else would you offer the ability to set the worker quantity via their API?
Or how about this: You park your car, you pay for a parking ticket that lasts until the next month. Reasonable? I think not.
You should also consider the fact that this could also potentially encourage more people to actually host on Heroku, rather than be scared off by ridiculous pricing at early stages. I'm also not trying to "disrupt" their business. If this would greatly affect their business then I'll be damned, and I think I'm not the only one. So don't count on it.
