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Tell HN: Heroku completely removed app's Postgres db which was on free plan

5 points by Mystery-Machine ↗ HN
I received an email from Heroku that deployment of some of my apps has failed (because of release phase failure) so I went to check and saw that these apps no longer have db attached to them. They simply removed it and I lost all data.

I understand that they announced few months ago that they are discontinuing their free plan for PostgreSQL. However, I didn't expect them to completely remove my database.

Some of these apps are paid apps. I'm paying $14/mo for web and worker dynos. Heroku's Mini PostgreSQL tier costs $5/mo.

I'd at least hope that they would shut down the database, but allow me to download a backup of my data.

9 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 21.9 ms ] thread
mtmail
Heroku's email was clear about deletion I think "For non-Enterprise users, `hobby-dev` databases will be deleted in accordance with the Heroku Documentation starting November 28, 2022."

related "Remind HN: Heroku will delete all free dbs and shut down all free dynos Monday" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755651

ehaliewicz2
Too bad not every heroku customer received such an email. I did not.
ryanmccullagh
If Heroku was clear about timelines, I think it's unfair for you to be upset.

    1. You're not paying for the resource.
    2. They provided sufficient notification for you to plan
kavok
Just seems like bad practice for them to not scream test this first. Disable the databases for 48 hours, enable them for a week, then delete them. That would give people the same alerts as randomly deleting it but allow them to gracefully recover.
bluerooibos
Yeah, why not go with at least a soft deletion first? Allow people to transfer to a paid Dyno for up to a month after the change happens or something.
ehaliewicz2
They could have easily sent an email. As far as I'm aware, I would have only seen it if I logged into the dashboard, however, my app works completely fine and I have no need to do this unless it stops working, which it just did tonight, due to the database being deleted.
the__alchemist
#1: This sucks #2: As you pointed out, this was (From my perspective) reasonably-well communicated through emails and warning messages from the Heroku dashboard.

I think it would be nicer to issue a final warning in the form of shutting down the DB prior to deleting it; unfortunately, that's not what happened.

test35965
Going through this myself right now. I had a paid dyno, but my app is lean enough that I'd never upgraded to a paid postgres instance. I understand why they did this, but I still think it was handled poorly.

I just posted about it on reddit. I can't believe it's only two or three of us in this position.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Heroku/comments/zh7ilv/what_is_wron...

petercooper
I got caught by this with Redis. On an app that otherwise costs over $100/mo to run. It had a small Redis instance for caching. They could have just upgraded it to the $3/mo plan on our behalf, but no, instead they just deleted it one day and brought the app down for a few hours ;-) I know it's "my bad" but it still left a bad taste in my mouth when they could have upgraded it on my behalf anyway!