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I agree. Also, I suspect that if a deployed app is rarely accessed, then there is some spin up time to load a slug. Both customers noticed this effect that the first page load usually seemed slow to them. Same thing on AppEngine (a 'loading request' can take a while).

Bottom line is that people dream that their web app will attract millions of users, and they want to plan for outstanding success. While I am sure that Heroku must have customers with large user bases, the sweet spot seems to be for moderately sized web portals that you sometimes need to scale up on demand.

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That would be a despicable thing for Heroku to do: you're paying them for capacity by the dyno-hour, but they don't keep all of them resident while they're paid for?

App Engine is the opposite: you're paying for the usage, so they spin up/down as much capacity as necessary to satisfy the volume you're willing to pay for.

You might be right that Heroku always keeps all of your dynos "spinning." If they do spin them down for the two less expensive shared cluster options, that seems OK, at least for my understanding of their service options. My customers used (for a while) the cheaper shared cluster options.

If you are paying more for the dedicated cluster options, then I agree with you that they should not be spun down.

Certainly, it is OK for them to spin down the free option dynos if they don't get HTTP requests for some reasonable time period.

That's exactly what they do: spin down inactive free app. Anything which is paid for will never be spun down