Top all-time · #4363
Northflank
Company blog · northflank.com/blogprogrammingsystemsweb
Northflank is the company blog at northflank.com, writing about programming, systems and web. Since 2021, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 47 times, most often “Northflank – Simplifying application deployment to cloud platforms”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers mostly point to northflank.com as a Heroku alternative for deploying apps, services and cron jobs, often as a product pitch. The docs are the one part praised for being up-to-date and well structured.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The execution layer for a world where software builds and operates itself. Run AI agents and everything they generate.
Most-linked posts?
- Northflank – Simplifying application deployment to cloud platforms6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-02-01
- /4 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2021-12-17
- /docs/v1/api/introduction2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-10-12
What Hacker News says?
This looks very nice, we use KeyDB a lot. This looks like it could be a suitable alternative when there are more horizontal options. I just deployed it on Northflank with your public docker image and wrote a guide here: https://northflank.com/guides/deploy-dragonfly-on-northflank... - works great!
Comment linking /guides/deploy-dragonfly-on-northflank-with-docker
on “Dragonflydb – A modern replacement for Redis and Memcached”Submitted Northflank – Simplifying application deployment to cloud platforms as a story · 41 points
HN discussionhttps://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/run/deploy-to-a-r... Currently we support US Central, and Europe West. Which other region would you like to see added? With BYOC (Bring your own Cloud) you can deploy in GKE, EKS and soon AKS in your chosen region.
Comment linking /docs/v1/application/run/deploy-to-a-region
on “Removal of Heroku free product plans”Submitted Why we ditched Next.js and never looked back as a story · 28 points
HN discussionhttps://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/billing/project-t... > You can have one free project on your user account, and the resources you create within it will be limited. You will not be billed for any usage within a free project, but you must add a card to your account for verification first. not having to add credit card info before using the free tier is one of the main reasons for Heroku being so popular with…
Comment linking /docs/v1/application/billing/project-types
on “Removal of Heroku free product plans”Submitted Integrating Your Service with GitHub: GitHub Apps and OAuth as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI agree that the Heroku developer experience has been second to none. I'm a front-end & DX engineer at Northflank and we're working hard to evolve and create a next-gen iteration of the Heroku experience anchored around 12 Factor Applications in a Kubernetes/cloud native era. We're getting very close, come and see for yourself: https://northflank.com . Some key features: * As simple as `git push` to build & deploy s…
Comment linking /
on “Removal of Heroku free product plans”Submitted Adding themes to a React app using styled-components as a story · 6 points
HN discussionAlternatives - https://Railway.app - https://fly.io - https://render.com/ - https://northflank.com/
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on “Removal of Heroku free product plans”Submitted Northflank raises $22M to make Kubernetes work for your developers as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThe public roadmap is a good idea but highlights how stale the product has become. https://github.com/heroku/roadmap/issues Only now researching adding Cloud Native Build Packs and HTTP2. This will reaffirm for many the sense that Heroku is being dismantled from within. Feature sunsetting and removal of a free on-ramp doesn't help. If you're looking for a production alternative to Heroku checkout Northflank. https:/…
Comment linking /heroku-pricing-comparison-and-reduction
on “Removal of Heroku free product plans”Submitted GitHub now charges for self-hosted runners. Where do we go from here? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere is a lot to agree on in this article. Though teams should be able to choose whatever stack (languages, frameworks, databases, queues) they want. What’s important is there is a coherent way to deploy, build, operate, scale, observe these services, without relying on one or two team members. Getting a cluster setup and a few deployments is pretty simple, however scaling that cluster, setting up secure runtime (n…
Comment linking /
on “Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation”Submitted The risk in AI code-gen (running untrusted code without isolation) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion9 days ago, Northflank was having fun with Railway getting breached and urged their customers to migrate to them instead. https://northflank.com/blog/how-to-migrate-off-of-railway
Comment linking /blog/how-to-migrate-off-of-railway
on “Northflank Breached”Submitted Self-host GPT-OSS on 2xH100s as a story · 1 points
HN discussionModern PaaS is tough because there's a general expectation that users (and agents) are able to see and read back environment variables in their management UI or CLI - which means that you can't segregate credential values from the public web environment. See e.g. the visibility icons on https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/secure/inject-sec... And sure, you can encrypt at rest, and perhaps even enforce that on…
Comment linking /docs/v1/application/secure/inject-secrets
on “Northflank Breached”Submitted Seed fundraising advice from the POV of a VC as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI have moved a Rails and Go app to https://northflank.com . I have my Rails app running in their free project (limited to two services and 2 jobs) and my Go app in a paid project. I find the pricing to be very reasonable and considerably cheaper than Heroku. I was looking for somewhere I could run web services and cron jobs both in the same place. They have a Heroku importer, however I think you need to ask to have…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?”Submitted KubeCon Europe London 2025 – 27 open-source projects you should check out as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI'm a technical co-founder at Northflank https://northflank.com . A platform to deploy microservices, cron jobs and stateful databases from development to production. I started working on Northflank to make it more simple for developers either solo or in a team to manage and automate DevOps complexity away. We support CI for GitHub, Bitbucket & Gitlab (SaaS and self-hosted) with either Dockerfiles or Buildpacks. We…
Comment linking /docs/v1/api/introduction
on “Ask HN: Solo-preneurs, how do you DevOps to save time?”Submitted Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) – A Better Way to Use Your Cloud Credits as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe decline of Heroku is a shame, they were the first to really make cloud accessible to all. Over at Northflank ( https://northflank.com ), we're trying to continue that trend and great developer experience is our main priority. We address many of the same points you mention - simply `git push` to build and deploy (using Dockerfiles or Buildpacks), instant free DNS & TLS, one-click addons (Postgres, Mongo, Redis...…
Comment linking /changelog
on “I Miss Heroku's DevEx”Submitted GPUs, CPUs, Databases, and everything in-between as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSuperb VCS integration and really intuitive Dockerfile centric platform by https://northflank.com Worth trying it out yourself, they’re dirt cheap atm.
Comment linking /
on “Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)”One more, my personal favorite. https://northflank.com/ - The comprehensive developer platform to build and scale microservices, jobs and managed databases with a powerful UI, API & CLI.
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on “Heroku Free Alternatives”I highly recommend checking out Northflank. Their pricing is a lot friendlier. https://northflank.com/
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on “Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button”Yes I've heard this. Lack of product releases since 2019 and the significant reduction in headcount all point to that, still making $300m-500m ARR revenue so not something you should let die lightly... I'm working on Northflank, a production ready Heroku alternative over at https://northflank.com Builds, deploys, stateful workloads, advanced networking, crons, API and more.
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on “Ask HN: Is Heroku Being Sunset?”We added support for HTTP2, GRPC and streaming at Northflank recently. Could be a good choice for your team. Here is the changelog https://northflank.com/changelog/introducing-http-2-and-grpc...
Comment linking /changelog/introducing-http-2-and-grpc-support
on “Ask HN: Is Heroku Being Sunset?”I have recently implemented a fairly complex workflow editor [1] at Northflank ( https://northflank.com ) using react-flow and elkjs. They make for a very powerful and flexible combination, great for our needs. [1] https://i.imgur.com/gENveM4.png
Comment linking /
on “Awesome Node-Based UIs”
