How do I create a scheduled task with Heroku's free site?

Question

I’m using Rails 4.2.7. I want to host my app with Heroku so I first decided to create the free hobby account to see how everything works. I would like to create a task that runs every day and so was reading about Heroku’s scheduler app. However, when I try and add the add-on I get the error

$ heroku addons:create scheduler:standard
Creating scheduler:standard on ⬢ myproject... !
 ▸    Please verify your account to install this add-on plan (please enter a credit card) For more information, see https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/billing Verify now at
 ▸    https://heroku.com/verify

I’m not ready to shell out any money yet. How do I create a scheduled task or is Heroku not a good hosting service for this, and if not, where else should I go?

Answer 1

You must verify your account to use add-ons (some exceptions are there, like Heroku Postgres and Heroku Connect add-ons).

You don't need to spend any money to verify your account. You need to have a valid credit card. Heroku will try to verify the credit card and on successful verification, your account will be verified. You can read more information about accepted credit cards and detailed verification procedure here.

Quoting from the link mentioned above,

Heroku needs to be able to reliably identify and contact our users in the event of an issue. We have found that having a credit card on file provides the most reliable way of obtaining verified contact information. Account verification also helps us with abuse prevention.

You must verify your account if you, or collaborators of your app, want to:

• Add any add-on to the app, even if the add-on is free. The only exceptions to this are the free plans for the Heroku Postgres and Heroku Connect add-ons, which can be added without verification.

If you do not have a credit or debit card (or do not have one that we are able to accept), you can still use the parts of Heroku that do not require account validation.

So currently, no other option is available to verify your account except using your credit card.

I use openshift online (1X CPU-512MB memory-1GB storage, 3 free gear) from RedHat but recently, they stopped new registration as they are building Openshift Online (NEXT GEN). You can apply for developer preview and use it for 30 days but the waitlist is too long. During Developer Preview period, OpenShift Online (Next Gen) is free (2 GiB memory, 4 CPU cores, and 2 x 1 GiB persistent volumes, 1 project).