So, it's a price issue? My confusion / out-of-the-loop is thus: I hear that Heroku has gone downhill, is no longer recommended etc, yet I've noticed no degradation personally. Works well, is stable, has all the benefits I initially liked it for.

I mean their prices have never been great, but the sadness is because they should have WON - Heroku should have been the standard for deploying and managing hosting instances and databases and stuff on any cloud.