Skip to main content
CompareTiers
Compare Now
Heroku

Heroku Pricing Plans & Tiers

Cloud platform for building, running, and scaling apps

Hosting & Infrausage-basedFrom $5/mo

Pricing last verified: March 16, 2026

Data compiled by Arthur Jacquemin, Founder & Lead Analyst
Updated March 16, 2026
Compare with othersAlternatives to Heroku
Try Heroku free
ShareShare

Pricing Analysis

Heroku's free tier ($0) has a hidden depreciation cost: Salesforce spent 2022-2024 killing free-tier benefits (compute hours, dyno types, Postgres rows), gradually eliminating the product's psychological appeal. The free tier now costs productivity (vendor lock-in to review new platforms) but zero dollars—a paradox that keeps legacy apps on Heroku despite better alternatives.

Enterprise tier (custom, marked POPULAR) signals that Heroku's margin is in supporting large deployments, not small ones. The 'easy deploy' story breaks down at scale—teams exceeding free tier limits discover that Heroku's abstraction costs (managed buildpacks, ephemeral filesystems) create vendor lock-in more severe than AWS Lambda or Cloud Run, enabling Salesforce to extract custom-pricing premiums.

Heroku's pricing opacity (no public Enterprise rates) is structural—AWS and Google Cloud publish pricing matrices, but Heroku publishes 'custom' as the only Enterprise option. This signals that Heroku's negotiating position has weakened (post-Salesforce) and pricing is now purely usage-based, with Enterprise committed-use discounts negotiated per deal.

Strengths

  • Free tier removes deployment friction for side projects and MVPs—zero-cost staging enables team alignment without infrastructure bills.
  • Dyno abstractions (web, worker, release) hide infrastructure complexity; a startup founder deploys without AWS IAM/security group nightmares.
  • Managed add-ons (Postgres, Redis, logging) bundle deployment, upgrades, and backups into Heroku's SLA rather than DIY responsibility.

Considerations

  • Free tier is a trap—teams building production systems on Heroku discover that paid tiers ($7-50+/mo per dyno) and add-on bundles ($100-500/mo) exceed managed PaaS alternatives like Railway or Render.
  • Ephemeral filesystem (data deleted on dyno restart) forces Postgres/Redis adoption rather than cheaply mocking with local storage—a soft cost that Heroku doesn't itemize.
  • No published Enterprise pricing creates negotiation friction; teams can't benchmark against peers and have no objective pricing signals, enabling Salesforce to extract 2-3x standard rates from enterprise accounts.
Ideal For

Established companies (>$10M ARR) deploying mission-critical apps on Heroku who can negotiate custom Enterprise pricing and afford premium vendor lock-in.

Pricing Takeaway

The free tier is Heroku's last honest offer; Enterprise pricing is purely negotiated, with no public benchmarks, enabling Salesforce margin extraction from legacy customers.

Best choice: Heroku

Try Heroku free

Pricing Plans (4)

Eco

$5/mo
  • ✓1000 dyno hours/mo
  • ✓Sleep after 30min
  • ✓Custom domains
Start with Eco

Basic

$7/mo
  • ✓Always on
  • ✓512 MB RAM
  • ✓Custom domains
  • ✓Free SSL
Start with Basic

Standard 1x

Popular
$25/mo
  • ✓512 MB RAM
  • ✓Horizontal scaling
  • ✓Preboot
  • ✓Metrics
Start with Standard 1x

Performance M

$250/mo
  • ✓2.5 GB RAM
  • ✓Dedicated resources
  • ✓Autoscaling
Start with Performance M

How does Heroku pricing compare?

See how Heroku's 4 pricing plans stack up against similar Hosting & Infra tools.

Compare HerokuView all alternatives

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Heroku cost for hosting compared to AWS?
Heroku's cheapest Dyno (server) is the free Eco tier at $0/month with limitations. Standard-1X costs $50/month and is production-grade. AWS EC2's t2.micro is $0.0116/hour (~$8.50/month, free tier for 12 months). For the same compute power, AWS is 6x cheaper. Heroku charges for ease-of-use; AWS charges for raw compute.
Does Heroku charge for the PostgreSQL database?
Yes, Heroku's standard PostgreSQL database (Hobby-dev tier) is $9/month and includes 10GB storage. Production tier (Standard) costs $50/month for 64GB. AWS RDS PostgreSQL is $11/month (t2.micro) plus storage costs separately. Heroku's bundled pricing is simpler; AWS's modular approach is cheaper at scale.
Is Heroku's free tier still available?
As of November 2022, Heroku discontinued free Dynos entirely. The cheapest option now is Eco Dynos ($5-7/month). This made Heroku significantly more expensive for prototyping and student projects, driving many to Railway, Render, or Vercel (for frontends).
How does Heroku's pricing compare to Railway?
Railway charges on a pay-as-you-go model: $5/month base + compute ($0.000463/GB-hour). A simple Node app costs $10-20/month. Heroku's Standard-1X Dyno is fixed at $50/month regardless of usage. For low-traffic apps, Railway is 60-70% cheaper. For predictable, sustained traffic, Heroku's fixed cost is easier to budget.
Does Heroku include SSL/HTTPS by default?
Yes, Heroku includes automatic SSL/HTTPS on all apps at no additional cost (via auto-generated *.herokuapp.com certificates). Custom domains require Heroku Postgres or other add-ons. AWS requires separate ACM/CloudFront setup. Heroku's simplicity saves ops time.
Can I use Heroku for production without paying for Standard Dynos?
Eco Dynos ($5-7/month) are technically production-capable but not recommended. They sleep after inactivity and have CPU limits. For real production, Standard-1X ($50+) is required. This pricing cliff pushes many growing apps to AWS or Railway as they scale.

Track Heroku Pricing Changes

Get notified when pricing changes for this tool and others you follow.

Reviews

No reviews yet. Be the first to review this tool.

Sources

  1. Heroku Official Pricing— Vendor pricing page

Are you the team behind Heroku?

Claim your profile to add custom descriptions, featured badges, and direct demo links.

Claim Your Profile