Heroku's price is a persistent annoyance for every startup that uses it.
Rebuilding Heroku's stack is an attractive problem (evidenced by the graveyard of Heroku clones on Github). There's a clear KPI ($), Salesforce's pricing feels wrong out of principle, and engineering is all about efficiency!
Unfortunately, it's also an iceberg problem. And while infrastructure is not "hard" in the comp-sci sense, custom infra always creates work when your time would be better spent elsewhere.
What do you mean exactly? If it takes multiple engineers multiple months to build an alternative on kubernetes, then it sounds like Heroku is worth it to a lot of companies. These costs are very "known" when you start using Heroku too, it's not like Salesforce hides everything from you then jump scares you 18 months down the line.
SF's CRM is also known to be expensive, and yet it's extremely widely used. Something being expensive definitely doesn't always mean it's bad and you should cheap out to avoid it.
It's still a lot of work obviously.
