The problem wasn&#x27;t that they used Heroku.<p>It&#x27;s that they didn&#x27;t exercise the sort of thrift possible with a website that has no users, and I&#x27;d wager that they didn&#x27;t really know how to since they were a tenderfoot. I made similar mistakes as a beginner, paying too much for too little for things I didn&#x27;t know I didn&#x27;t need.<p>Heroku saves a lot of time for the 1-2 dynos ($25-50&#x2F;mo) you need to vet your idea. With free Cloudflare SSL termination and a $5&#x2F;mo t2.micro Postgres database, what else do you need?<p>For comparison, my somewhat popular forum with 257 online users at the moment and 300k req&#x2F;day runs on 2 dynos. $50&#x2F;mo for the application servers + a deploy&#x2F;config solution is nothing.