Heroku Alternatives

Heroku more or less invented the modern PaaS: git push, get a URL, scale with a slider. That workflow still holds up, and the add-on marketplace means a database or a log drain is one click away. It's the platform everything else on this page gets measured against. Note: Heroku discontinued its original free tier in November 2022, replacing it with Eco Dynos ($5/month). Update: In February 2026, Salesforce moved Heroku to a sustaining engineering model — the platform keeps running and getting security updates, but new feature development is paused. More on this in the FAQ below.

Heroku Pricing

No longer truly free. Eco dynos are $5/month, Basic dynos are $7/month, and Standard-1X starts at $25/month.

Fly.io runs your app in lightweight VMs close to your users: pick your regions, and their network routes each request to the nearest one. It's built by people who clearly care about infrastructure (the CLI and the engineering blog are both excellent), and you get far more control than Heroku ever gave you. That control is also the tradeoff.

Fly.io Pricing

Pay-as-you-go pricing is still available, with shared CPU machines starting at roughly $2-$4/month depending on size and region. The older free allowances are now mostly legacy; for new users, think trial/credits rather than a broad standing free tier.

Northflank is one of the closer modern matches to Heroku's "deploy an app and keep moving" model, but with a wider platform surface. It supports apps, databases, jobs, cron workloads, preview environments, buildpacks, Dockerfiles, and deployments on Northflank's cloud or your own cloud account. For teams that want more control than Heroku without dropping straight into raw Kubernetes, it is a serious option.

Northflank Pricing

Northflank has a free sandbox for testing, with 2 free services, 1 free database, and 2 free cron jobs. After that it moves to pay-as-you-go pricing, with compute billed by usage at roughly $0.01667 per vCPU hour and $0.00833 per GB hour.

Render is the platform most people mean when they say "Heroku successor": connect a repo, it builds and deploys on every push, and databases, cron jobs, and private networking are all part of the platform. The free instances make it a popular first stop, though treat those as hobby or preview environments rather than production capacity.

Render Pricing

Render dropped per-user pricing in April 2026: Hobby workspaces are free, Pro is $25/month flat with unlimited team members, and Scale is $499/month. The web services themselves still range from Free to Starter ($7/month) and Standard ($25/month).

Scalingo is one of the more Heroku-like platforms on this list, especially for teams that want a managed PaaS with buildpacks, add-ons, review apps, and a scheduler. It is hosted in Europe and bills by the minute, which makes it attractive for companies that care about predictable usage-based billing and EU hosting.

Scalingo Pricing

Scalingo offers a 30-day free trial and bills all services by the minute after that. Small containers start around €0.01/hour, the default medium container is around €0.02/hour, and scheduler jobs are billed like one-off containers.

Netlify is for frontends. If you're shipping a static site or a Jamstack app with some serverless functions behind it, the workflow is hard to beat: push to git and get an atomic deploy on a global CDN, with instant rollbacks. It is not the place to run your Rails or Phoenix app, and it doesn't pretend to be.

Netlify Pricing

Free tier available. Personal is $9/month, and Pro is $20/month flat — Netlify dropped per-seat pricing in early 2026, so one Pro subscription covers the whole team.

Aptible is the compliance play. If you're handling health data or selling into regulated industries and need HIPAA, SOC 2, or ISO 27001, they've built the platform (and the paperwork) around that from day one: you deploy Docker containers, they handle the audit trail. Nobody picks Aptible for a side project, and that's by design.

Aptible Pricing

Development starts with a $0 base fee plus resources. Production starts at $499/month plus resources, and Enterprise is custom.

AWS Lightsail

AWS Lightsail is Amazon's no-fuss version of cloud hosting, perfect for developers who want the power of AWS without the overwhelming complexity. It's great if you need to get up and running quickly, with predictable pricing and fewer moving parts. Whether you're spinning up a simple website, a small app, or hosting a WordPress blog, Lightsail gives you the basics without needing to dive deep into the full AWS ecosystem.

AWS Lightsail Pricing

Plans start at $5/month for common public-IPv4 Linux instances, with lower-priced IPv6-only bundles available in some cases. Higher-end bundles now go well beyond the older $160 ceiling.

Railway is roughly what you'd get if someone rebuilt Heroku today: super simple deploys, a slick dashboard, and none of the legacy. It's especially popular with side projects and small teams, and the deploy-from-repo flow will feel immediately familiar if you're coming from Heroku. Whether you’re deploying a Node.js app, a PostgreSQL database, or just need to get something running quickly, Railway's got you covered.

Railway Pricing

Railway now starts with a 30-day free trial with $5 credits. After that, the Free plan is constrained, Hobby has a $5 minimum usage with $5 monthly credits, and Pro starts at $20 minimum usage. That Pro price is per workspace with unlimited seats — not per user — which makes it one of the cheaper options for teams.

DigitalOcean's App Platform is a PaaS layer on top of the same infrastructure half the internet's side projects already run on. Point it at a GitHub repo and you get builds, SSL, and a CDN, with DO's famously predictable pricing. And if you outgrow it, dropping down to plain Droplets is an easy escape hatch.

DigitalOcean App Platform Pricing

Free tier available for static sites. Paid dynamic apps start at around $5/month.

Vercel is the company behind Next.js, and it shows: if you're deploying a Next.js app, nothing else comes close on developer experience. Every push gets a preview URL, production runs on their edge network, and the defaults are all sensible. The further you stray from the Next.js happy path, though, the less magical it gets.

Vercel Pricing

Hobby remains free for personal projects. Pro is $20 per user per month plus usage, and includes $20 of usage credit.

Coolify

Coolify is the self-hosted option on this list: an open source PaaS you run on your own server, typically a cheap VPS from Hetzner or DigitalOcean. You get git-push deploys, automatic SSL, and one-click databases (the parts of Heroku people actually miss) at VPS prices, and it has earned a big following with indie hackers and small teams because it nails those basics. The catch is right there in the word "self-hosted": you are the ops team now.

Coolify Pricing

Self-hosted Coolify is free forever — you just pay for your server (a capable VPS runs $5-20/month). Coolify Cloud, where they host the control panel for you, starts at $5/month for 2 connected servers, plus $3/month per additional server.

Google Cloud Run

Cloud Run is Google's serverless container platform: hand it a container (or just your source and let it build one), and it scales from zero to whatever traffic shows up, billing by the second only while requests are being served. There is more infrastructure to think about than with Heroku, but for spiky or low-traffic services the scale-to-zero economics are hard to beat.

Google Cloud Run Pricing

There's a permanent free tier (around 2 million requests a month, plus an allowance of CPU and memory time). After that it's pure usage-based billing: a small always-on service lands in the low tens of dollars per month, and spiky workloads can cost almost nothing.