I think Heroku just got a dead zone in pricing. It's too expensive for a single developer (for comfort at least), but any 'proper' company, even with only a couple of full-time developers, can afford the overhead to set things up in AWS.
Disagree on a small company having time to setup AWS. I work in a 2 man team, and that would be about the last thing on our priority list. We spend ~$500/month on Heroku and while that’s a lot more than it would be elsewhere, it’s also non-issue. Heroku’s main problems are:
1. There are now comparable competitors that are cheaper.
2. They seem to have stopped maintaining it properly which is gradually leading a loss of trust.
My data point in contrast to your suggestion is a company with more than a dozen developers, and a loose idea of "let's migrate from Heroku to AWS without planning much or actually educating our developers on how to use AWS to be as productive as they were in Heroku"; more than a year later, there was definitely some success to speak of, but there was a lot of realization that some of our systems were just fine on Heroku, and that we didn't have the DevOps talent to help us manage AWS better than Heroku was already helping us.
