You, our customers, have given us great feedback that in some places our pricing isn’t aligned with the value we provide, and in other places our pricing is just confusing.

We want to be more transparent about how we’re thinking about pricing, so today we’re announcing our pricing philosophy, as well as the first of a series of changes: moving away from storage based pricing on our database offering.

Platform Value and Pricing Philosophy

You have told us loud and clear that the value you get from the platform is saved time and opportunity cost, shorter deployment cycles, increased agility, simplified ongoing maintenance and operations, and saved head count.

You’ve also made it clear that you don’t see much added value in the commodity components of compute, storage, and network.

Our pricing philosophy moving forward will be to price for the things that provide value, and to make compute, storage, and network effectively free (like long distance) as much as we can.

There are places where we aren’t doing a good job of this today, so we are going to make a series of changes to bring our pricing more inline with this philosophy.

Database Pricing Changes

The worst offender currently is our database pricing, so we’re going to start our changes here.

There is tremendous value in having a relational database at your fingertips that requires no administration and is always seamlessly hooked up to your app. Yet, in trying to differentiate the levels of service, we priced based on storage.

This runs counter to our belief that storage should be free, so we are altering our pricing to focus on productivity and performance, and to effectively give storage away.

Shared Database
Starting today, we are eliminating the $50 Crane plan, and allowing up to 20GB of data in our $15 Koi plan. This makes Koi a very affordable offering with great storage and high (but variable) performance.

All Crane customers will be migrated to Koi immediately (the transition is seamless and won’t require any downtime), and will get greatly increased limits and a lower cost.

Dedicated Database
For predictable performance or larger databases, we offer dedicated database plans. Starting today, we will allow up to 2TB of data across all dedicated plans.

To view the updated pricing, please visit our pricing page.

Note that these limits are for database data only – there is no filesystem on Heroku.

More to Come

This is the first in a series of changes we hope will bring our pricing more inline with the value our customers get from the platform. Stay tuned!