Heroku removed its free tier in November 2022 and entered sustaining engineering mode in 2026. Compare free alternatives: Render, Railway, Fly.io, Coolify, Koyeb, Deno Deploy, DigitalOcean. Catalogue dates July to September 2026.

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Heroku Alternatives

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.

Top Alternatives

Render Hobby caution 2026-04-23 restructured

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.

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Cloudflare Workers Free stable

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.

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Railway Free stable

Free $0 per month. Start with a 30-day free trial with $5 credits, then $1 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

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🔗 $20 in Railway credits (disclosure)
Fly.io Legacy Free

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.

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Deno Deploy Free caution discovered 2026-08-28 reduced

Edge runtime — 1M requests/month, 20 GiB egress, 10 hr active CPU/month, 150 GiB-hr memory time, 1 GiB KV storage, 1M KV read units/month, 500K KV write units/month

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DigitalOcean Credits caution 2026-04-07 reduced

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

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Coolify Free OSS stable

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.

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Free Tier Comparison

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.

Platform Free Compute Free Database Git Deploy Docker Cold Starts Paid From
Heroku (discontinued) 550 hrs/mo dyno10K rows Postgres✅❌ 30 min sleep$5/mo
Render Free web service (512 MB)256 MB Postgres (30-day expiry)✅✅ Yes (free tier)$7/mo
Railway $5 trial credit, then $1 of free credit a monthIncluded in credit✅✅ NoUsage-based
Fly.io Trial (7 days)Included—✅ NoUsage-based
Coolify Unlimited (self-hosted)280+ one-click services✅✅ No$5/mo (cloud)
Koyeb DB only (no free compute)1 GB Postgres✅❌ Pro from $29/mo$29/mo
DigitalOcean $5 credit (90 days)Not in free tier✅✅ No$5/mo
Deno Deploy 1M req/mo, 10 hrs CPU1 GiB KV storage✅— No (V8 isolates)$20/mo

✅ = 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.

Quick Comparison

Tool Free Tier Details Stability
Render Hobby Hobby plan, $0 a month plus compute. Free web services (512 MB RAM, 0.1 CPU) spin down after 15 minutes without traffic,... caution
2026-04-23 restructured
Cloudflare Workers Free Edge compute with 100K requests/day, 10ms CPU time per invocation, 5 cron triggers/account. KV: 1 GB storage, 100K reads... stable
Railway Free Free $0 per month. Start with a 30-day free trial with $5 credits, then $1 per month. Up to 1 vCPU / 0.5 GB RAM per serv... stable
Fly.io Legacy Free Pay-as-you-go only — no free tier for new accounts (since Oct 2024). Legacy accounts (Hobby/Launch/Scale plans) retain: ... —
Deno Deploy Free Edge runtime — 1M requests/month, 20 GiB egress, 10 hr active CPU/month, 150 GiB-hr memory time, 1 GiB KV storage, 1M KV... caution
discovered 2026-08-28 reduced
DigitalOcean Credits New accounts get a $5 signup credit, applied automatically to the first team and expiring 90 days after signup; a paymen... caution
2026-04-07 reduced
Coolify Free OSS Free OSS (Apache 2.0). Self-hostable PaaS (Vercel/Heroku alternative). Deploy static sites, databases, full-stack apps, ... stable

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