The Friendliest.app started on Heroku (both app and db) like most of my projects. The db on Heroku was on the cusp of becoming prohibitively expensive for this project.

After looking at options and reading recommendations we settled on Render to host both the application and db. Render's pricing model seems to scale more linearly with the application instead of the large pricing/performance jumps experienced with Heroku.

Migration to Render was extremely easy and we were able to complete both the db and application moves within 24 hours.

The only thing we're really missing on Render is a CLI. With Heroku, we could manage everything from the command line in VSCode. With Render, you need to use the web shell they provide.

I'm transitioning to Render from heroku. The pricing scale matches my usage scale, yet it's just as easy to deploy. It's removed a lot of the devops that I don't like to deal with on setting up my own raw *nix box and makes deployment simple and easy!

Clustering I don't use clustering features at the moment but when i need to set up clustering of nodes and discoverability, render will enable that where Heroku would require that I use an external service like redis.

Restarts The restarts are annoying. I understand the reasoning, but I'd rather watch my service if its got a memory leak and work to fix it than to just assume that it has memory leaks and needs to restart.