Providers / Heroku
Heroku
The original git-push platform, now without a free tier.
www.heroku.com · Prices checked 2026-08-01
- Type
- App platform
- Starting cost
- ≈$7/mo
- Free tier
- No
- Ease of use
- 4/5
Heroku invented the git-push deploy and still offers one of the most polished app platforms. Dynos bill by the second up to a monthly cap, and a deep add-on marketplace covers databases, caches, and more — each with its own bill.
Good to know
- There is no free tier.
- Compute is expensive for what you get: Standard-1X costs $25/month for 512 MB of RAM.
- Databases and other add-ons bill separately and can dominate the total.
App platform
Heroku
- Best for
- Teams that already know Heroku and value its mature workflow over price.
- How deploys work
- git push heroku main; buildpacks detect the stack and the platform handles the rest.
- The tradeoff
- You pay a platform premium — comparable raw compute costs a third as much elsewhere.
Why pick it
- The most battle-tested git-push workflow — buildpacks handle nearly any stack.
- A deep add-on marketplace: databases, caches, monitoring, all one command away.
- Dyno prices are flat monthly caps, so compute costs are predictable.
- Review apps deploy every pull request automatically.
Why look elsewhere
- No free tier at all.
- Expensive for what you get: $25/month buys 512 MB of RAM.
- Add-ons each carry their own bill and can quietly dominate the total.
- The platform has changed little in years — no edge network, no scale-to-zero on standard dynos.
Our ratings
What developers say
First-person reports from the past three years, drawn from public discussions and independent write-ups. These are individual experiences, not our ratings; open the original source for its workload and full context. Critical reports include a follow-up check so you can see whether the problem was fixed, partly addressed, remains current, or has no public resolution.
What people like 10 sources
Long-term users say Heroku has hosted personal projects for years without issues and remains robust, easy, and excellent with Rails or Django plus Postgres.
Advice on hosting platformsUsers say Heroku still does its job well and remains their best option for small projects because setup is fast and operational overhead is low.
Heroku's place in 2025's cloud ecosystemDevelopers call Heroku very solid for backends and full-stack applications and recommend it for quickly testing ideas without Docker expertise.
Been a while since I used Heroku — how is it faring with Vercel out?A user calls Heroku fantastic and says its ease of use is top-notch, while noting the price may be excessive for a small bot.
New to Heroku — is it worth it?Rails developers repeatedly recommend staying on Heroku until scale makes its price unjustifiable, praising its simplicity and review-app workflow.
Best way to deploy a Rails app in 2024Experienced users call Heroku strong for small startups and compliance-heavy teams because it avoids building HA clusters and managing service integrations.
Is Heroku still a recommendable platform?Long-term users praise add-on simplicity and recommend Heroku for straightforward applications.
Should I stay with Heroku?A customer argues migration is pointless before outgrowing Heroku because its mature, stable platform and integrations let the team focus on shipping revenue-producing features.
Moving Off Heroku, SlowlyAn eight-year enterprise user explains that Heroku's value is shielding application developers from cloud-native infrastructure complexity.
.NET Support on HerokuCurrent users call Heroku effortless, reliable, easy to understand, and a great service for solo developers using ordinary web stacks.
Ask HN: Are you still using Heroku?Critical reports and follow-ups 10 sources
A departing customer says obsolete documentation, hard build limits, manual buildpack upkeep, and years of stagnation made the platform noncompetitive.
Goodbye Heroku, we're breaking upThe author says a platform once recommended for effortless deploys has stagnated and is no longer the default startup choice.
Why Heroku is Dead (Do This Instead)Former customers criticize expensive plans, free-tier removal, stagnation, and the perceived lack of a future roadmap.
Heroku is officially in maintenance mode?A seed-stage team reports an extended outage, stalled deploys, and hours without useful updates forced a hands-on evaluation of seven alternatives.
Recent outage was the last straw — what I tried nextCustomers report multi-hour app and dashboard outages, failed deploys, inaccessible logs, and inadequate status communication.
Can't access Heroku; my app is downUsers describe Heroku as slow and expensive versus a low-cost Hetzner VM and seek a controlled deployment path.
Looking for Heroku alternativesCustomers call a six-hour DNS outage worrying and criticize Heroku for taking over an hour to acknowledge it publicly.
Anyone else affected by the six-hour Heroku EU outage?Users complain about slow, frequently repeated authentication and broken add-on redirects, linking the degraded experience to Salesforce integration.
Why is Heroku authentication such a bad experience?A customer urges immediate off-platform backups during the outage and says the incident finally triggered a long-delayed self-hosting migration.
While Heroku is down, at least back up your dataUsers report US-region apps down while Heroku's status page stayed green, along with unexplained memory spikes and sluggishness before crashes.
Heroku outageApp platform
Heroku
What you'd realistically pay
| Project stage | Estimate | Based on |
|---|---|---|
| Just starting | ≈$7/mo | Basic — One Basic dyno (512 MB), capped at $7/month; a database add-on costs extra. |
| Steady traffic | ≈$25/mo | Standard-1X — Adds horizontal scaling and zero-downtime deploys; database still extra. |
| Growing | ≈$50/mo | Standard dynos + add-ons — Two Standard-1X dynos; realistic totals depend heavily on add-ons. |
Published prices
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Basic dyno | $7/mo | 512 MB RAM, one dyno per process type, $7/month maximum. |
| Standard-1X dyno | $25/mo | 512 MB RAM, horizontal scaling, $25/month maximum. |
- Dynos are prorated to the second up to the monthly maximum.
- Postgres, Redis, and every other add-on bill separately (prices not yet in our checked dataset).
Deploy workflow
| Deploy from Git push Connect a repository and every push deploys automatically. | Yes git push heroku main is the original deploy story; GitHub integration too. |
|---|---|
| Preview deploys Each branch or pull request gets its own temporary URL. | Yes Review Apps create a running app per pull request. |
| Official CLI A maintained command-line tool for deploys and management. | Yes The heroku CLI covers deploys, logs, scaling, and add-ons. |
| Instant rollbacks Revert to a previous deploy without rebuilding. | Yes heroku releases:rollback reverts to any previous release instantly. |
Platform
| Custom domains + HTTPS Bring your own domain with TLS certificates handled. | Yes Custom domains with automated certificate management on paid dynos. |
|---|---|
| Built-in CDN / edge network Static assets served from locations near your visitors. | No No built-in CDN — pair with Cloudflare or Fastly yourself. |
| Serverless functions Run backend code without managing a server process. | No Dynos are long-running processes; there is no function product. |
| Docker containers Deploy your own container image. | Yes Deploy container images through the Heroku container registry. |
| SSH / shell access Open a shell on the machine running your app. | Partial heroku run bash gives a one-off shell in a fresh dyno, not the live one. |
| EU hosting region Run the app itself in a European data center. | Yes Common Runtime offers a Europe region at the same prices. |
Runtime & operations
| Automatic scaling Capacity grows with traffic without manual resizing. | Partial Built-in autoscaling requires Performance-tier dynos; standard dynos scale manually. |
|---|---|
| Scale to zero Costs stop (or pause) when nobody is using the app. | Partial Eco dynos sleep after 30 idle minutes; Basic and Standard run continuously. |
| Scheduled jobs Run code on a schedule without an external trigger. | Yes Heroku Scheduler (free add-on) runs tasks on a schedule. |
| Managed database A database the provider runs, backs up, and updates. | Yes Heroku Postgres and Key-Value Store are fully managed add-ons. |
| Logs & metrics built in See what the app is doing without wiring up third parties. | Partial Log stream and basic metrics included; serious monitoring means add-ons. |
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