Judoscale on Tour: An Ode To Heroku

A detailed assessment of Heroku using a 'friction model' framework that evaluates hosting platforms across four dimensions: shipping friction, debugging friction, infrastructure friction, and organizational friction. Heroku earns high marks for low-friction deployments (git push heroku, review apps, pipelines), solid infrastructure abstractions (env vars, SSL, domains), and reasonable debugging tooling. It loses points for opaque dyno metrics, poor customer support response times, and notably high pricing compared to competitors. The post also flags declining developer trust due to Heroku's shift to a 'Sustaining Engineering' model and lack of transparent communication. This is the first post in a series where Judoscale migrates its production app to various PaaS alternatives to compare real-world experience.