Heroku removed its free tier in November 2022 and entered sustaining engineering mode in 2026. Compare free alternatives: Render, Railway, Fly.io, Coolify, Koyeb, DigitalOcean. Catalogue dates August to November 2026.
Heroku — the PaaS that defined "free tier" for a generation of developers — removed all free offerings on November 28, 2022 following the Salesforce acquisition. The free dyno (550 hrs/month), free Postgres (10K rows), and free Redis (25 MB) all disappeared. Plans now start at $5/month.
The decline continued: major outages in June 2025, then in February 2026 Salesforce moved Heroku to "sustaining engineering" mode — no new features, no new Enterprise contracts. This is the third wave of migration interest, and the largest.
If you're looking for a Heroku replacement with a generous free tier and similar git-push deployment experience, here are the best alternatives — all with the pricing data we hold in our index.
Free Tier Removed
Heroku stopped offering free dynos, hobby-dev Heroku Postgres and hobby-dev Heroku Data for Redis on 2022-11-28, as announced on 2022-08-25. Source ↗
Before: Free dyno: 550 hours/month (1,000 with credit card), free Postgres: 10K rows, free Redis: 25 MB. Dynos slept after 30 min inactivity After: No free tier. Eco dynos cost $5 a month for 1,000 dyno hours, the cheapest Heroku Postgres plan is $5 a month, and Key-Value Store Mini costs at most $3 a month.
Hobby plan, $0 a month plus compute. Free web services (512 MB RAM, 0.1 CPU) spin down after 15 minutes without traffic, with 750 free instance hours per workspace a month. One free Postgres database (256 MB RAM, 1 GB storage, 30-day expiry) and one free Key Value instance (25 MB, not continuously persisted to disk) per workspace. 5 GB bandwidth/month included then $0.15/GB; without a payment method on file, Render suspends Free services for the rest of the month instead. 500 build minutes/month. Up to 25 services, unlimited projects with 2 environments each. Pro is $25 a month plus compute.
Render's docs say not to use Free instances for production applications. (From render.com/docs/free, read 2026-10-05.)
Free web services cannot send outbound traffic on ports 25, 465, or 587, commonly used for SMTP. (From render.com/docs/free, read 2026-10-05.)
A free Postgres database expires 30 days after creation and becomes inaccessible. You then have a 14-day grace period to upgrade to a paid plan before Render deletes it with all its data. (From render.com/docs/free, read 2026-10-05.)
Free Postgres databases have no backups of any kind. (From render.com/docs/free, read 2026-10-05.)
A free web service loses any changes to its local filesystem, such as uploaded images or a SQLite database, every time it redeploys, restarts or spins down, and it cannot attach a persistent disk. (From render.com/docs/free, read 2026-10-05.)
If a workspace uses all 750 free instance hours in a month, Render suspends all of its free web services until the start of the next month. (From render.com/docs/free, read 2026-10-12.)
Render Sandboxes runs isolated microVMs for agents and untrusted code. It is available on every plan including Hobby, billed at $0.12 per active CPU hour plus $0.038 per hour for memory for the default size. (From render.com/pricing, read 2026-10-29.)
A Hobby workspace allows 100 concurrent sandboxes by default. There is no maximum session length on any plan, including Hobby. (From render.com/pricing, read 2026-11-07.)
Render Sandboxes is in public beta. During the beta, sandboxes have no public URL and no private network to other Render services. (From render.com/docs/sandboxes, read 2026-10-29.)
Render offers Free instances only for static sites, web services, Postgres and Key Value. Background workers and cron jobs need a paid compute plan. (From render.com/docs/free, read 2026-11-05.)
Edge compute with 100K requests/day, 10ms CPU time per invocation, 5 cron triggers/account. KV: 1 GB storage, 100K reads/day, 1K writes/day. D1: 5 GB storage, 5M rows read/day, 100K rows written/day. R2 (Standard storage): 10 GB-month/month, 1M Class A ops/month, 10M Class B ops/month. Durable Objects (SQLite-backed only): 100K requests/day. Queues: 10K operations/day. Vectorize: 30M queried vector dimensions/month, 5M stored vector dimensions. Dynamic Workers are paid only. US students 18+ with a verified .edu billing email: Workers Paid (10M requests/month), $5/mo fee waived for 12 months. Workers Paid has a minimum charge of $5 per month per account. It includes 10 million requests and 30 million CPU milliseconds monthly. Each additional million requests costs $0.30. Each additional million CPU milliseconds costs $0.02. Duration is not charged.
On the Free plan an account's Workers get 100,000 requests a day, shared with Pages Functions and reset at midnight UTC. Past that, a route set to fail closed returns Cloudflare's error 1027, and a route set to fail open skips the Worker as if none were configured. (From developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits, read 2026-10-06.)
On the Free plan a request may use 10 ms of CPU time; one that uses more fails with error 1102. Time spent waiting on fetch calls, KV reads or database queries does not count. (From developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/limits, read 2026-10-06.)
Cloudflare's terms prohibit processing or collecting credit card information on any site using its free services. (From cloudflare.com/terms, read 2026-10-06.)
Cloudflare's subscription agreement's list of restrictions does not include commercial use. The only restriction specific to free services bars processing or collecting credit card information on the site. (From cloudflare.com/terms, read 2026-10-29.)
Cloudflare's subscription agreement bars signing up for the services on behalf of a third party unless Cloudflare permits it in writing. (From cloudflare.com/terms, read 2026-10-29.)
Until December 1, 2026, Workers Logs on the Free plan allows 200,000 log events written per day with 3-day retention; from that date it allows 0.5 GB of log and trace ingestion per day for the whole account with seven-day retention. The Paid plan includes 20 million log events per month, then $0.60 per additional million, with 7-day retention. (From developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing, read 2026-10-17.)
From December 1, 2026, all Cloudflare logs and traces use the same pricing model. These share one account-level ingestion and storage allowance: Workers Logs, Workers Traces, Cloudflare Traces, Containers logs, R2 Data Access Logs, AI Gateway logs and Issues. Free includes 0.5 GB of ingestion per day and seven-day retention; ingestion stops at the daily limit and resumes at 00:00 UTC. Paid includes 50 GB of ingestion and 10 GB-month of storage per billing cycle, then $0.25 per GB of ingestion and $0.10 per GB-month of storage. (From developers.cloudflare.com/observability/pricing, read 2026-10-17.)
Free $0 per month. Start with a 30-day free trial with $5 credits, then $1 of free credit per month. Up to 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB RAM per service. 0.5 GB of volume storage. 2 replicas during the free trial, then 1. Projects: 5 during trial, then 1
After the 30-day trial, the Free plan allows 1 project, 3 services per project and no custom domains. Cron jobs are available during the trial only. (From railway.com/pricing, read 2026-10-12.)
Railway's trial, with a one-time $5 credit, needs no credit card. (From railway.com/pricing, read 2026-10-22.)
After 30 days passes or $5 is spent, the free trial reverts to the Free plan, which provides $1 of free credit per month. The credit does not roll over month to month. (From docs.railway.com/pricing/free-trial, read 2026-11-03.)
Run `ssh railway.new` to get a free Linux VM with no account or credit card. The VM has 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, and a preview URL. Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and the Railway Agent are preinstalled. Railway identifies you by your SSH key. Each VM can be used for 60 minutes. You can get 3 VMs per IP address per day. (From docs.railway.com/pricing/free-trial, read 2026-11-02.)
Open the claim link from the welcome message and sign up within 24 hours to keep the VM. The VM, files, and URL move into your account. Unclaimed VMs are deleted with their files. Railway caps free VMs at high demand. (From docs.railway.com/pricing/free-trial, read 2026-11-02.)
Railway Sandboxes are available on every plan. Usage draws from the plan's included credit. Free plan limits are 10 sandboxes per environment, 2 vCPU and 2 GB each, and an idle timeout of at most 5 minutes. (From docs.railway.com/sandboxes, read 2026-11-03.)
SMTP is only available on Railway's Pro plan and above. SMTP is disabled on the Free, Trial, and Hobby plans. Those plans must use transactional email services with HTTPS APIs. (From docs.railway.com/networking/outbound-networking, read 2026-11-07.)
Railway's Hobby plan has a $5 monthly minimum, including $5 of usage credits. If usage is $5 or less per billing period, no extra charge applies. If usage exceeds $5, Railway charges the total usage. Included usage resets each billing cycle and does not accumulate. (From railway.com/pricing, read 2026-11-10.)
The Limited Trial for trial accounts not verified through GitHub has restricted outbound network access and only a limited set of ports. Verification is an automated process at railway.com/verify. Railway does not respond to requests for verification. The Hobby plan unlocks the full experience. (From docs.railway.com/pricing/free-trial, read 2026-11-07.)
Railway deletes stateful volumes created by Trial accounts 30 days after the expiration of the trial credits. An upgrade retains the data. (From docs.railway.com/pricing/free-trial, read 2026-11-07.)
Pay-as-you-go only — no free tier for new accounts (since Oct 2024). Legacy accounts (Hobby/Launch/Scale plans) retain: 3 shared-cpu-1x VMs (256 MB RAM), 3 GB volume storage, 100 GB transfer/month. Volume snapshots: first 10 GB free, then $0.08/GB/month.
Fly.io's trial needs no credit card; after the trial, a credit card is needed to keep using billable resources. (From docs.fly.io/about/pricing, read 2026-10-22.)
Fly.io's free trial lasts 2 hours of machine runtime or 7 days, whichever comes first. Trial machines stop automatically after 5 minutes of running. The trial allows 10 machines, 20 GB of volume storage, and up to 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of memory per machine. Dedicated IPv4 addresses and performance-optimized vCPUs are not included. (From docs.fly.io/about/free-trial, read 2026-11-03.)
If you use up the trial's resources, or do not add a payment method within 7 days, your apps stop running and you cannot launch new machines, attach volumes or deploy changes until billing is set up. Adding a card ends the free trial and starts billing. (From docs.fly.io/about/free-trial, read 2026-11-03.)
Fly.io offers Sprites, its Linux VMs for AI agents, with a one-time $30 trial credit. (From fly.io/sprites, read 2026-11-03.)
New accounts get a $5 signup credit, applied automatically to the first team and expiring 90 days after signup; a payment method is required before creating resources. Basic Droplets from $4/mo (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD). Per-second billing (min 60s or $0.01). App Platform: 3 free static sites (1 GiB outbound/mo each). Functions: 90,000 GiB-seconds/mo free. Spaces: 250 GB + 1 TB transfer for $5/mo. Managed databases start at $15/mo (not free). No perpetual free compute tier
Free OSS (Apache 2.0). Self-hostable PaaS (Vercel/Heroku alternative). Deploy static sites, databases, full-stack apps, 280+ one-click services. Auto SSL, Git integrationThe page we cite for Coolify states in words that it is free, which confirms the price — the limits stated here come from our own record rather than from that page.
How each alternative's free tier compares to what Heroku offered. Heroku's free dyno included 550 hours/month with automatic sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity.
Deno is joining Cloudflare. Deno said on 2026-10-09 that Deno Deploy will keep running for six months and then shut down; it gave no exact date. Deno will help paying customers move to Cloudflare Workers. (From deno.com/blog/cloudflare, read 2026-10-12.)
Deno Deploy's Free plan has restricted limits until the organization links a credit card to verify itself. (From docs.deno.com/deploy/changelog, read 2026-10-22.)
✅ = supported ❌ = not available — = not applicable. Railway's $5/mo is a resource credit shared across all services. Coolify is free when self-hosted on your own server. DigitalOcean credit expires after 90 days.
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