The most important step when you start a project is to get it deployed somewhere, anywhere. Running your code in your local development environment is great, but getting your deployment workflow setup is the holy grail.

When I started a hobby project about a month ago, I searched and searched for Heroku alternatives. In the past, I knew Heroku had a tendency to be costly. Heroku can also lack flexibility in certain situations.

After what seemed like an exhaustive search, I gave up. There are alternatives to Heroku, but nothing caught my eye. I had used AWS Elastic Beanstalk for a product in the past, but the initial setup took hours I didn't want to spend.

Ultimately, here's what I wanted in a service

1. Automated deployment when merging to master
2. Automated deployment when the tests pass
3. One click setup of the database, Redis
4. Process monitoring for Sidekiq
5. Easy, simple cron
6. Easy, simple scaling

To this day, Heroku still checks all those boxes. Even more so, everything has improved since I last used Heroku.

I booted up my Heroku account and started looking around. To my surprise, there was a lot I could scale up for free.

What I got out of Heroku

1. A small PostgreSQL database
2. A small Redis instance
3. Cron
4. A single web dyno
5. A single Sidekiq dyno
6. Automated deployments integrated with CircleCI
7. Bonus: Free Mailgun
8. Bonus: Free Sentry

I did all of this with minimal configuration. I didn't write any YAML. I don't deploy via the terminal. I don't worry about processes being killed.

The only annoyance is dynos going to sleep. Since the product I'm building isn't in production yet, that's not a big deal.

However, what I do have is a complete deployment workflow and somewhere to ship my code automatically. Instead of worrying about DevOps, I can focus on building. That's worth a lot to me.