Some days back there was an announcement from the Deta team saying that they were shutting down their services. They have given about 45 days to recover the apps and move elsewhere. This came to me as sad news because I had stuff on Deta and was operating a few APIs and websites. I have now started migrating my apps to my servers. I had over 20 services running on Deta. Some were my projects and a few were production applications. Read more about Sunset here.
Deta started as a project to give a personalized cloud computer for everyone. Later Deta explored many things. Deta was a free hosting and serverless computing service for developers. When they started, they wanted to sell it by saying that it will always be free. I used to wonder how they could give something for free. Initially, it was very good and later they did another massive upgrade and released something called Horizon. I did not like that product or maybe I should say that I didn't understand that product. I stayed with Deta Builder and I was running my apps there.
Free serverless alternatives
I'm sure there will always be another serverless provider because that is slowly becoming the future and also a cost-effective solution. I had to make some coding changes to bring those apps from Deta to my servers. Deta offered not just serverless features but also a database, some storage space, etc. I used the database services heavily. For some of my queuing stuff I used Deta databases along with their SDK in the apps.
I knew this would happen someday because free services won't last forever. The project had some funding and sponsors I believe but not sure what happened to those sponsors. Looks like they are coming up with a new feature called Deta Surf. We have to wait and see what it is about.
There are a few serverless alternatives available but the painful thing is the convert the app according to their needs and it can be a pain in the ass. I have decided to make changes to my apps in such a way that I can host them on my VMs itself instead of using these free services. This can cost me a little extra every month but I think that's okay.
I remember the same feeling people had when Heroko became a paid product. It was very friendly and it was convenient for the users but they wanted to make it premium and many people bought the services from them and many people decided to move on to other service providers.
Lambda can be a good alternative
If people are running apps that are mostly serverless, lambda is a good alternative. This is also available for free for one year and if we know how to use it well, it can also be a cost-effective solution. I think there are also other equally competent serverless service providers available in the market to explore and if we even dig further, we might as well get some proper Deta alternatives that can be used. But I'm going to be using these free services only for my POC stuff. I'm going to get my server for other needs.
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