I don't care about lock in, and I just want something secure and easy to deploy an application. Pricing is important, but heroku gets expensive fast, and I'd eventually like something that I can manage myself once released and I can dedicate more time to.
As a small point of comparison, redis on Heroku is $200/month for a gig of memory. 1.55G (cache.t2.small) on elasticache is $24/month. For redis at least, the difference is an order of magnitude.
The t2.small will kick you in the pants in two spots, FWIW: compute and bandwidth. The first probably won't matter for a redis cluster, but the second could definitely hurt.
Amazon refuses to be pinned down on how small (it's "low to moderate" bandwidth on their instance matrix), but you will feel the pinch with extended usage.
If you've only got a gig of RAM available seems unlikely you could make any decent use of high bandwidth situations (or if you are, your cache is going to pretty much constantly evicted).
But still, you can hop on an m4.xlarge for only 150 a month. Get 14GB of available cache on 4 cores with high networking.
FWIW, redis is maybe an outlier here, but it's pretty stark. The prices are just so far out of reasonable range it feels like. Their postgres pricing seems more in line (assuming heroku's support is good, I have no experience with such).
Depends on market factors. Supply and demand and all that. AWS has created a situation where, from the consumer POV, they have infinite supply to meet whatever demand. Or maybe there is just so much slack in a data center system that it feels that way.
The real question is what does the cloud platform future look like when that slack goes away, but I think we're pretty far from that reality.
I think this looks great.