My experience is that anything outside of the standard process for deploying apps is actively frowned upon by everyone except startups that need to move extremely quickly to create PoCs. So unless this platform is much much cheaper than the public clouds it seems like a limited market.
The Heroku platform has recently gone downhill. There’s a ton of downtime, minimal improvements, no communication via their status page, and incredibly bad support. They once shut off GitHub deploys for months with no explanation, because of a security incident they seemingly couldn’t fix… we had no way to deploy!
Heroku was amazing, but it’s dying rapidly. Render isn’t a huge departure from Heroku, but it’s solid and the team is very responsive.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/14/heroku-ceo-bob-wise-depart...
The crux of the issue was that he told me that he philosophically didn’t believe Heroku should put up status notifications about downtime or performance issues until AFTER they fully understood the problem and had a fix. (My theory was actually that no engineers worked there and they didn’t have on-call rotation anymore)