Heroku Pricing in May 2026

Heroku's pricing follows tiered structure: Eco at $5/month for hobby projects, Basic at $7/dyno/month, Standard 1X at $25/dyno/month, Standard 2X at $50/dyno/month, Performance at $250-500/dyno/month, Postgres add-ons at $9-2,000+/month. Real-world Heroku bills for typical full-stack apps land at $50-500/month for early-stage; mid-stage products with multiple dynos + databases hit $1K-10K/month.

The Free Tier offer was removed in 2022 — Heroku now requires paid subscription. The strategic decision: Heroku has lost significant mindshare since the 2022 free-tier removal — most modern teams now choose alternatives. Render is the most direct alternative with similar PaaS scope and stronger pricing. Railway competes with similar git-push-to-deploy simplicity. Fly.io targets edge container deployment globally. DigitalOcean App Platform offers similar PaaS scope with DigitalOcean IaaS backing. AWS Fargate, GCP Cloud Run, and Azure Container Apps target managed containers at lower level. Vercel dominates frontend-first deployment, particularly for Next.js. Netlify handles framework-agnostic frontend hosting. For specifically Heroku-replacement experience with broader cloud-portability, Coolify, Dokku, and Caprover target self-hosted PaaS. For specifically Postgres-as-a-service (Heroku Postgres replacement), Neon, Supabase, Render Postgres, and PlanetScale compete. For specifically Redis (Heroku Redis replacement), Upstash, Redis Cloud, and Redis on Railway/Render compete. For teams with significant Heroku investment and Heroku-specific operational maturity, staying remains viable. For new projects, alternatives almost always win on developer experience, pricing, or specific platform fit.