The Best Alternatives to Heroku's Free Tier (R.I.P.)
As a way to manage fraud and abuse of free resources, Heroku recently announced that they are removing their free tier for Heroku Dynos, Heroku Postgres, and Heroku Redis.
Starting October 26, 2022, inactive Heroku accounts will be deleted.
Starting November 28, 2022, all affected Heroku products will be deleted.
What Heroku products are affected?
The following products will be removed from the free plan:
freeDynoshobby-devHeroku Postgreshobby-devHeroku Data for Redis plans.
To avoid disruption or data loss, we must upgrade to paid plans.
Note that students can apply for platform credits through the Heroku for GitHub Students Program, which will provide you with
$13/month for 12 months. This can be applied to most Heroku products (check out the Heroku for GitHub Students Program FAQ).
What are the new low-cost Heroku plans?
In lieu of the discontinued free plans, Heroku is offering some new, low-cost plans, which provides essentially the same features as the original free plans for a low cost.
| Plan | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|
| Eco Dynos | $5 for 1000 compute hours/month |
Dynos sleep after 30 minutes |
| Basic (formerly Hobby) Dynos | ~$0.01 per hour, up to $7/month |
For small production apps (no scaling) |
| Mini Postgres | ~$0.007 per hour, $5/month |
10,000 rows of storage |
| Basic (formerly Hobby-Basic) Postgres | ~$0.013 per hour, up to $9/month |
10 GB of storage |
| Mini Heroku Data for Redis | ~$0.004 per hour, $3/month |
25 MB of storage |
What are some alternatives to Heroku’s free plan?
- Fly.io
- Can Replace: Dynos, Postgres, Redis
- Free Tier: 2 apps, 2,340 hours per month of 256MB RAM VMs, 1GB of persistent volumes, 160GB per month of outbound data transfer, 10 free SSL certificates, Docker (Fly pricing)
- Databases: Postgres, Redis, no MySQL database (but can be deployed as Docker container)
- Migrate from Heroku to Fly
- Render
- Can Replace: Dynos, Postgres, Redis
- Free Tier: 100 GB/month bandwidth, background workers, web services (Node, Python, Go, Rust, Ruby, and Elixir), Docker, cron jobs (Render pricing)
- Databases: Postgres, Redis, no MySQL database (but can be deployed as Docker container)
- Migrate from Heroku to Render
- Railway
- Can Replace: Dynos, Postgres, Redis
- Free Tier: 100 GB outbound network bandwidth, 512 MB RAM, 1 GB Disk, $5 or 500 hours of usage (Railway pricing)
- Databases: Postgres, Redis, MySQL, MongoDB
- Example migration from Heroku to Railway
- Supabase
- Can Replace: Dynos (Edge Functions), Postgres
- Free Tier: 2 free projects, 500MB database & 1GB file storage, 2GB bandwidth, 50MB file uploads, 500K Edge Function invocations (Supabase pricing)
- Database: Postgres
- Migrate from Heroku to Supabase
- Firebase
- Can Replace: Dynos (Edge Functions), Postgres (if willing to migrate away from NoSQL)
- Free Tier: unlimited free projects, 1 GB of storage, 10,000 users through their authentication service, 20,000 writes per day, 50,000 reads per day, 2,000,000 cloud function invocations (Firebase pricing)
- Database: NoSQL
What are some honorable mentions?
- Serverless Functions
- Static site hosts
- Can Replace: Dynos
- Netlify pricing
- Cloudflare Pages pricing
- GitHub Pages
- Virtual Private Servers (VPS)
- Can Replace: Dynos, Postgres, Redis
- DigitalOcean pricing
- Linode pricing
- Vultr pricing