I'm not certain but I do not believe bluemix has a long-term free tier. It expires after a significant trial period from what I can tell. Is that not what people are upset at Heroku over?
Nope, Heroku had a free tier that wasn't a trial, all kinds of people were using it for toys and experiments, some of them evolved into Serious Business projects with real costs, but a lot of them just idled along using minimal resources, but then Heroku decided the free lunchers were no longer welcome and severely throttled the free tier so that most of them now had to pay $7/mo. This took effect earlier this month. This was right on the heels of discontinuing their old stack, and apps that were running on it weren't auto-migrated or anything, just killed. So there's a lot of disgruntled former Heroku users out there.
I'm not using it yet but Bluemix does appear to have a non-trial free tier, and it looks like they actually offer a fair bit more than Heroku did.
