I agree. And I know this is unpopular, but I think none of these companies should be expected to have a free tier. A low-cost tier? Certainly. Perhaps even a free trial with a credit card? Great.
But our team, who has used Heroku for over a decade, got bit multiple times by Heroku having a free tier.
Why were we impacted by other apps? Because Heroku’s load balancers are shared amongst all their apps. That includes all the sketchy apps running on the platform.
If Heroku could somehow isolate us from everyone else? Great - and they offered that for awhile with a reasonably-priced Add-On supported by them called SSL Endpoint. It cost about $15/month and put us into a pool that was shared with other folks willing to spend that much per month to run their app.
I understand that’s not great for a hobby project. But for those of us trying to run a large product on Heroku and not have to spend multiple extra thousands of dollars every month for a Heroku Private Space, this was a great way of pooling: put a small fee in place for one pool of resources. Not many malware writers or other misbehaving app creators will probably want to spend that much per month.
But they axed that a few years ago. Only a couple months after when we were thrown back into the load balancer pool with all the other free apps, one of the IPs was marked as spam and we had to figure out a kind of janky solution.
Additionally, Heroku seemingly spent a ton of resources on free tier support, malware fighting, etc. I hope to see more features on Heroku since they’ve dropped that support… but I haven’t seen much evidence of that in roughly six months since they did that. But we’ll see.