Hi all, 

I was wondering if there are any opinions on suitable alternatives to Heroku, given the recent changes to Heroku's free plan? 

Any opinions / recommendations are highly appreciated!

Thanks,
Max

Hi Max,
If you are a student, you are able to get $13 of free credits per month, which is sufficient for 1 free app with the new low cost paid planns that will replace the old free plans (https://blog.heroku.com/github-student-developer-program). Beyond that, setting up your own ubuntu server is a cheap (though not free) option. I personally use Hetzner cloud and their cheapest server costs around 4€ per month (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=us). Setting up a linux server is significantly more complicated than deploying to heroku but if you are technically savy it is doable (see docs https://otree.readthedocs.io/en/latest/server/ubuntu.html). However, a server set up like the docs describe will not offer an encrypted connection so you can only use it for testing or you will have to learn how to implement SSL encrypted connections.

Hi Jonas, 
Many thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, the student-option do not apply :) 

In addition to the own ubuntu server, I was wondering if someone has experience with services like fly.io or render?

Thank you!

Hi Max,

I haven't used it to run an experiment, but deploying seems quite easy on render if you push from github. I just followed yshimods instructions as described in https://www.otreehub.com/forum/189/. However, if using the free plan and clicking on the URL for the first time in a while, it will take a long time for the webpage to load. DigitalOcean also provides rather easy deployment, however, it is not free (but e.g. I received a 200$ credit which is valid for 60 days while signing up).

Maybe this helps!

Thank you, @lindk.

Render looks fine so far and I will let you if it also works well for conducting an experiment, if we choose to use it. Thanks for the hint!