Comment by dehrmann

The problem is these small customers never drive enough sales to bother with—you're better off investing in a feature for a large customer. And by the time small customers get large enough to need things like complex permissioning, they've outgrown Heroku and will be onboarding anyway. Giving startups credits really might be the most effective way to handle rough edges for small shops.

As a startup, I'd probably bite the bullet of one-time setup pain for a database, blob store, load balancer, and service hosting at a major cloud provider because those systems will be rock-solid with well-understood APIs. Full disclosure: I work for a major cloud provider.