Credits for Students and Power of Us program for Non-profits

[capeterson]

Heroku is looking to roll out credits program for students and a new discount and donation program for non-profits.

Heroku will be offering credits to enrolled students via Github’s Student Offer. A valid credit card will be required to receive credit, and students will be able to access many additional free plans from the Heroku Elements Marketplace.

For our nonprofit customers, Heroku is partnering with our nonprofit team to join the Power of Us program. We will be announcing more details at a later date.

[js802025]

will this allow students to keep their free dynos?

[juhahinkula]

I hope programming teachers are also included in this plan.

[Andser99]

As long as a credit card is required, this is useless and dangerous. I already got into multiple disputes during my study years when we had to choose a platform to deploy to and the misleading terms of this platform caught me. Previously, I considered upgrading to a paid dyno after I tested my projects on a free dyno and also done so, but since now it is impossible, I will fall back to self-hosting for small projects.

[JaehunSim]

It's ok to require credit card registered, but I hope students can limit how much cash to be spent (like 10$ less / month).

[cliffweng]

Please also include "pay-as-you-go" dynos that charge based on waking hours. I am a coach and I cannot afford to pay "per dyno"

[afawcett]

At Dreamforce this week we presented this update.

[capeterson]

@cliffweng outside of the upcoming "eco" dyno plan which is a pre-purchase of a block of hours all other plans are already pro-rated to the second. If you scale up a hobby-basic dyno and then scale it down after a day your cost is roughly 25 cents.

This is existing behavior, but we've heard that it's not widely understood and are looking to update our pricing page to make it more clear.

@JaehunSim heroku prices listed are maximum costs per resource based on this pro-rated cost. The eco dynos are specifically design to make this kind of cost control easier with auto-sleeping and the ability to spread the 1k hours across multiple apps. Hope this helps somewhat.

[claraj]

I teach in a community college, so we welcome everyone including high school students, recent immigrants, unhoused people, financially disadvantaged people, and many of these students don't have credit cards.

Access to credit is not universal and often the most disadvantaged students are not able to have a credit card. I am glad to see free credit being offered, but requiring a credit card isn't an equitable approach, and we won't be able to use Heroku any more in classes if many of our students are blocked from accessing the student plan.

All the best, Clara

[vaernewijck]

Will students be able to renew this benefit annually? Or is this a one-time benefit?

[cordeiro]

Requiring a credit/debit card for students is really a major problem for international students. As a teacher, I cannot enforce any tool that creates recurrent costs for the students (like the credit card/banks fees) nor do I want to put the student at risk of having an unintentional cost that can become much, much large due to the exchange rates and foreign transaction fees.

Please give students an option that does not require using a credit card.

[ddfridley]

I volunteer for a nonprofit building open source software and we use heroku for our servers. In the past I have shown other volunteers how to deploy their own heroku servers and run the software there for testing. I would want to have to ask them to pay for an account in order to do this - they are volunteers. The benefit for heroku is people learning to deploy on heroku. - github.com/EnCiv - volunteers welcome.

[dahacouk]

Kendraio has had its Power of Us application approved by Saleforce.org so what do we do now if we want to have a non-profit tier on Heroku? Do we engage with you here? Cheers!

[dieskim]

We manage Heroku accounts for a couple of Non Profits, so from what I am seeing is that will be at least a "period" of these Non Profits having to pay for services until the Non Profit discount / plans roll out?

[dahacouk]

@dieskim I can only think of recommending to sign up for Power of Us now and communicate with Heroku via Salesforse.org or the other way around. And at some point all the dots will magically line up. 😉

[allefeld]

@cliffweng outside of the upcoming "eco" dyno plan which is a pre-purchase of a block of hours all other plans are already pro-rated to the second. If you scale up a hobby-basic dyno and then scale it down after a day your cost is roughly 25 cents.

This is existing behavior, but we've heard that it's not widely understood and are looking to update our pricing page to make it more clear.

That is a good way to keep costs down to what is actually consumed (and it was indeed not clear to me from the description).

However, it does make it necessary to scale up and down manually, possibly frequently. Perfect for me would be the combination of the "pro-rated to the second" behavior of the Hobby/Basic plan with the "sleeping" behavior of the Free/Eco tier. Is there any chance to make that an option?

See https://github.com/heroku/roadmap/issues/58#issuecomment-1270504767 for my use case.

[JaehunSim]

I just gave up using Heroku. I tried to register my two different credit cards, but failed. Indead, I tried submitting several times and it was so frustrating to see the failed messages (Not much informal). I hope Heroku team could solve the issue, but until then, I won't be using.

[francisli]

Any updates that you can share regarding Heroku and Power of Us non-profits?

[joaobarcia]

Any news on the progress of this program? We would be very interested in finding out more as well.

[martingluckman]

Any updates on the non-profit programs?

[francisli]

I was hoping that with Dreamforce 2023 now wrapping up, that we would have heard an update about Heroku and Power of Us non-profit pricing, but I can't seem to find any news... is there anything to share about this?

[kdveverka]

Status on this? We have an app via the Commons (SFDO program) for nonprofits that uses Heroku.