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Managed PaaS · by Salesforce

Heroku

The original git-push PaaS, now owned by Salesforce and in a 'sustaining engineering' phase since February 2026: stable dynos, Heroku Postgres and 150+ add-ons, few new features.

Visit heroku.com ↗ Alternatives Paid EU region
§1

Overview

Heroku popularized git push deploys: you push code, a buildpack detects the language and builds a slug, and dynos run it. Around that sit Heroku Postgres, Key-Value Store (Redis), pipelines with review apps for every pull request, one-click rollbacks, and more than 150 third-party add-ons for logging, email, search and the like.

There is no free tier. Eco dynos cost $5 a month for a shared pool of hours on personal accounts and sleep after 30 minutes without traffic; Basic dynos are $7 each and always on. Standard dynos ($25 and $50) add horizontal scaling and zero-downtime preboot, Performance dynos ($250 and up) add dedicated compute and autoscaling, and Private and Shield dynos run in isolated Private Spaces for regulated workloads.

On 6 February 2026 Heroku announced a move to a 'sustaining engineering' model focused on stability, security and support rather than new features, and stopped offering Enterprise Account contracts to new customers. Credit-card customers, new and existing, can still sign up with unchanged pricing. That makes Heroku a reasonable place to keep a working app, but a riskier choice for a new long-term project.

Common Runtime apps run in the US or EU; Private Spaces add ten regions including Frankfurt, Tokyo and Sydney.

§2

Pricing and plans

checked 28 Sept 2026
Plan Price What you get
Eco $5/mo Shared pool of dyno hours for personal accounts; dynos sleep after 30 minutes idle
Basic $7/mo per dyno 0.5 GB, always on, 10 process types
Standard-1X $25/mo per dyno 0.5 GB, horizontal scaling, preboot, metrics
Standard-2X $50/mo per dyno 1 GB
Performance-M $250/mo per dyno 2.5 GB dedicated, autoscaling
Private-S $125/mo per dyno Requires a Private Space; network isolation
Shield-S $150/mo per dyno HIPAA BAA and PCI capable; Private Space required

Dyno prices are per dyno per month, prorated by the second. Heroku Postgres, Key-Value Store and add-ons are billed separately; we did not confirm the current Essential Postgres plan prices on Heroku's pages, so they are left out. Private Spaces and Shield need a Heroku Enterprise or verified Teams account, and new Enterprise contracts are no longer sold (February 2026).

Source: www.heroku.com/pricing/ · prices as published, excluding tax.

§3

What it does

Buildpacks
Official support for major languages and 380+ open-source buildpacks for anything that runs on Linux.
Pipelines and review apps
Promote builds from staging to production and spin up a disposable app for every GitHub pull request.
Heroku Postgres
Managed Postgres 16 to 18 with continuous physical backups and free daily logical backups; higher tiers add followers, forks and rollback.
Add-ons marketplace
150+ third-party services provisioned and billed through Heroku.
Private Spaces and Shield
Network-isolated runtimes in ten regions; Shield dynos support HIPAA BAAs and PCI.
Fine-grained access control
Per-capability permissions (deploy, scale, view logs, manage billing) for all customers since August 2026.
§4

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Mature, well-documented workflow that many developers already know.
  • Large add-on ecosystem billed on one invoice.
  • Compliance options (HIPAA, PCI) through Shield.
  • Predictable per-dyno pricing.

Limitations

  • No free tier; the cheapest dynos (Eco) sleep after 30 minutes idle.
  • In sustaining-engineering mode since February 2026, with few new features planned.
  • New customers can no longer buy Enterprise Account contracts.
  • Only two regions (US, EU) outside Private Spaces.
  • Essential Postgres plans have no forks, followers or Postgres logs and 99.5% expected uptime.
§5

Who it suits

Good for

  • Existing Heroku apps that work and need no new platform features
  • Teams that rely on Heroku add-ons and pipelines
  • Small production apps paid by credit card

Look elsewhere if

  • New enterprise projects that need a long-term vendor roadmap
  • Free hobby hosting
§6

Pricing history

  • Heroku moves to sustaining engineering and stops selling Enterprise contracts

    Announced 6 Feb 2026: Heroku will focus on stability and security rather than new features, and Enterprise Account contracts are no longer offered to new customers. Credit-card pricing and billing are unchanged. Source ↗

§7

Alternatives to Heroku

Tool From Free option Stages
AWS Amplify Hosting Frontend hosting
Usage-based Paid
Clever Cloud European managed PaaS
€6/mo Trial
Cloudflare Workers (incl. Pages) Edge serverless platform
$5/mo Free tier
Google Cloud Run Serverless containers
Usage-based Free tier
Koyeb Serverless containers and GPUs
$29/mo Paid
Netlify Frontend and serverless platform
$9/mo Free tier

Heroku vs Render → All app hosting and paas →

§8

Questions

Does Heroku have a free tier?

No. The cheapest option is the $5/month Eco plan, whose dynos sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Is Heroku shutting down?

No shutdown has been announced. Since 6 February 2026 it runs in a sustaining engineering model with no new Enterprise contracts, while credit-card customers keep the same pricing and service.

What is the cheapest always-on Heroku dyno?

The Basic dyno at $7/month with 0.5 GB of RAM.

Which regions does Heroku support?

US and EU in the Common Runtime; Private Spaces add Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Montreal, Mumbai, Oregon, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Virginia.

Sources read for this page