Exactly. It all depends on your needs and — to be honest — the quality of your sysops engineering. You may not only need dedicated sysops, but you may incur higher incidental costs with lost productivity when your solution inevitably goes down (or just from extra dev load when things are harder to use).
That said, at least in 2016 Heroku was way overpriced for high volume sites. My startup of 10 engineers w/ 1M monthly active users saved 300k+/yr switching off heroku. But we had Jerry. Jerry was a beast and did most of the migration work in a month, with some dead-simple AWS scaling. His solution lacked many of the features of Heroku, but it massively reduced costs for developers running full test stacks which, in turn increased internal productivity. And did I mention it was dead simple? It's hard to overstate how valuable this was for the rest of us, who could easily grok the inner workings and know the consequences of our decisions.
Perhaps this stack will open that opportunity to less equipped startups, but I've found few open source "drop-in replacements" to be truly drop-in. And I've never found k3 to be dead simple.
That said, at least in 2016 Heroku was way overpriced for high volume sites. My startup of 10 engineers w/ 1M monthly active users saved 300k+/yr switching off heroku. But we had Jerry. Jerry was a beast and did most of the migration work in a month, with some dead-simple AWS scaling. His solution lacked many of the features of Heroku, but it massively reduced costs for developers running full test stacks which, in turn increased internal productivity. And did I mention it was dead simple? It's hard to overstate how valuable this was for the rest of us, who could easily grok the inner workings and know the consequences of our decisions.
Perhaps this stack will open that opportunity to less equipped startups, but I've found few open source "drop-in replacements" to be truly drop-in. And I've never found k3 to be dead simple.