I don't need another dyno. I'm already running way more than this app requires. (with addons, etc..) I think the service would be more fair if the time threshold for being set to idle was governed by the amount you are paying.
You are paying for 0 web dynos. They happen to be giving you one for free, but the free one comes with limitations.
Yes, you are paying for a bunch of other services; but, well, those services aren't the actual web dyno that processes the actual request.
Perhaps they could phrase their offerings better, but my impression was that the 1 free dyno with idling is intended for development and testing, not for production use. Once you actually need to use it in production, you need to pay for a dyno.
Yes, that was my impression also, especially since there's no limit on the number of free dynos you can have (for different projects). I was actually surprised to learn that when I looked into setting up a separate staging server for my current project -- I'd thought the free dyno was one to a customer. Nope. The staging dyno is free; I just have to wait a few seconds for it to spin up if I haven't been working with it for a while.
So now I have 3 dynos (2 production, one staging) for $35/month, I can scale up or down at will, deployment is dirt simple, and I don't have to do the sysadmin crap myself.
It's an extreme bargain, IMO.
Now if the project takes off to the point where I need dozens of dynos all the time, that will be different, but ideally in that case I could hire a sysadmin. :-)
I think it's much fairer that you can choose what you pay for. If you don't want it to idle, pay $35 and get a dyno. I wouldn't want to have to pay $100+ (or some other amount) before it stops idling.
