Heroku alternatives in 2026 (with real prices)
Updated 2026-10-29
Heroku doesn't charge for bandwidth, so a $7 Basic dyno is still $7.00/mo at 1M visits in our model. Move that app to Render and the same traffic is about $231.25, mostly bandwidth at $0.15/GB. The money case for leaving is memory, not traffic: Heroku's $7 buys 512 MB, and the next step is $25 for the same 512 MB on Standard-1X, while Fly.io runs 1 GB for $6.70.
Why people are leaving Heroku
- It stopped growing. On February 6, 2026 Heroku said it is moving to a "sustaining engineering model" focused on stability and security rather than new features, and stopped offering Enterprise Account contracts to new customers. Credit-card pricing and service did not change.
- RAM is expensive. Basic is $7 for 512 MB. Standard-1X is $25 (512 MB), Standard-2X is $50 (1 GB), and Performance-M is $250 (2.5 GB).
- Eco dynos sleep. $5 buys 1,000 dyno hours shared across the account, but an Eco web dyno sleeps after 30 minutes with no traffic, and Eco is for personal apps only.
What Heroku still does well: dynos are prorated to the second, there is no per-GB bill (bandwidth is soft limited at 2 TB per app per month), and Postgres Essential-0 is $5/mo.
Estimated monthly cost for a small server-rendered app or API
| Host | 10,000 visits | 100,000 visits | 1,000,000 visits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel | $20.00 | $26.50 | $120.00 |
| Netlify | $9.00 | $30.00 | $225.00 |
| Railway | $7.75 | $14.50 | $82.00 |
| Render | $8.50 | $28.75 | $231.25 |
| Fly.io | $3.99 | $6.69 | $33.69 |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | $5.00 | $7.00 | $34.00 |
| Cloudflare Pages / Workers | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Hostinger VPS | $11.99 | $11.99 | $11.99 |
| Cloudways | $11.00 | $11.00 | $11.00 |
| Coolify (self-host) | €11.99 + $0 | €11.99 + $0 | €11.99 + $0 |
| Dokploy | €11.99 + $0 | €11.99 + $0 | €11.99 + $0 |
| Hetzner Cloud | €6.49 + $0 | €6.49 + $0 | €6.49 + $0 |
| DigitalOcean Droplets | $6.00 | $6.00 | $9.97 |
| Heroku | $7.00 | $7.00 | $7.00 |
Assumptions: one small always-on service, 1.5 MB transferred and 2 dynamic requests per visit, no database. Heroku row is one Basic dyno. Use the calculator to change the workload or traffic.
The options
1. Fly.io
No platform fee. A shared-cpu-1x Machine is $3.69/mo with 512 MB or $6.70 with 1 GB, plus $0.02/GB egress in North America and Europe ($0.04/GB in South America and Asia Pacific). Catch: Managed Postgres starts at $38/mo on the Basic plan, so an app plus database costs more than Heroku's $7 dyno plus $5 Essential-0. Profile
2. Railway
Closest to the Heroku push-and-forget feel. Hobby is $5/mo including $5 of usage, billed per second: about $10 per GB of RAM and $20 per vCPU a month, plus $0.05/GB egress. Catch: the bill moves with usage, so a 1 GB service running all month is about $10 of memory before CPU. Profile · Railway vs Fly.io
3. Render
Same price shape as Heroku: a $7 web service with 512 MB, $25 for 1 CPU and 2 GB, Postgres from $6. Catch: the Hobby workspace includes 5 GB of bandwidth and then charges $0.15/GB, which is where Heroku was free. Profile · Render vs Railway
4. DigitalOcean App Platform
Containers from $5/mo (512 MiB, 50 GiB transfer), $10 for 1 GiB with 100 GiB, then $0.02/GiB. A development database is $7. Catch: the fixed $5 and $10 sizes run one container only; autoscaling starts on the $12 tier. Profile
5. Coolify on a Hetzner server
Coolify is free to self-host and gives you a Heroku-style dashboard with git deploys. Hetzner shared servers start at €6.49/mo excl. VAT. Catch: you own the server, the updates and the backups. Coolify vs Dokploy
6. Cloudflare Workers
Free up to 100,000 requests a day, then $5/mo for 10M, with no egress fees. Catch: it is not a container host. Code runs on the Workers runtime, so a typical Express or Rails app needs rewriting. Profile
Which one
Small app that has outgrown 512 MB: Fly.io, if you can live without a cheap managed database, or Railway if you want Heroku's workflow. Want flat prices and a $6 Postgres: Render, as long as traffic stays modest. Happy on a $7 Basic dyno with heavy traffic: Heroku is still cheap for that, so keep backups current and plan the move rather than rushing it.
Estimates only. Prices are in USD unless marked, exclude taxes, and were checked against the official pages on 2026-10-29. Railway's per-GB and per-vCPU monthly figures are its per-second rates times a 30-day month.
Sources
- https://www.heroku.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-29)
- https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/usage-and-billing (checked 2026-10-29)
- https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/eco-dyno-hours (checked 2026-10-29)
- https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/limits (checked 2026-10-29)
- https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/ (checked 2026-10-29)
- https://railway.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-29)
- https://render.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-29)
- https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/ (checked 2026-10-29)
- https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/app-platform (checked 2026-10-29)
- https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/ (checked 2026-10-29)
- https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/ (checked 2026-10-29)
- https://coolify.io/pricing/ (checked 2026-10-29)
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