This is a great idea. I looked at the auto scaling repositories on GitHub: 1) There wasn't a good solution for Rails 3 yet. 2) The GitHub repos were typically forks of existing repos (like for CollectiveIdea's Delayed Jobs) and therefore would not always be up to date. I wouldn't be too worried about Heroku implementing this (though I hope they do) because there isn't a direct incentive for them to save you money by auto scaling. I'm definitely going to try this out.