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. Verified pricing.

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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 verified pricing data from our index.

Free Tier Removed

Heroku removed all free dynos, free Heroku Postgres, and free Heroku Data for Redis. The iconic PaaS that defined 'free tier' for a generation eliminated free offerings entirely after Salesforce acquisition 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. Mini plan starts at $5/month (Eco dynos $5/month for 1,000 shared hours). Postgres starts at $5/month

Top Alternatives

Render Hobby caution discovered 2026-09-02 restructured

Free web services (512 MB RAM, less than 1 CPU), free PostgreSQL (256 MB RAM, 30-day expiry), free Redis (25 MB). 5 GB bandwidth/month included then $0.15/GB, 500 build minutes/month. Up to 25 services, 2 environments per project. Auto-deploy from Git

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Cloudflare Workers Free stable

Edge compute with 100K requests/day, 10ms CPU time per invocation. KV: 1 GB storage, 100K reads/day, 1K writes/day. D1: 5 GB storage, 5M rows read/day, 100K rows written/day. R2: 10 GB-month storage, 1M Class A ops/month, 10M Class B ops/month. Durable Objects: 100K requests/day. Queues: 10K operations/day. Vectorize: 30M queried vector dimensions/month, 5M stored. Includes cron triggers, WebSockets, and service bindings. Dynamic Workers (beta, paid plan): spawn new Workers at runtime with AI-generated code via V8 isolates. Students: upgrade to 10M requests/month free for 12 months via Workers for Students program (.edu email required)

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Railway Free stable

Free plan: $0/month with one-time $5 credit (30-day trial), 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM per service, 0.5 GB volume storage, 1 project, 3 services max ($1/month minimum after trial). Hobby plan: $5/month with $5 resource credit included, 48 vCPU, 48 GB RAM, 5 GB volume storage, up to 5 replicas at 8 vCPU/8 GB RAM each

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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

$200 credit for 60 days for new accounts. Basic Droplets from $4/mo (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD — 20% price cut Jan 2026). Per-second billing (min 60s or $0.01). App Platform: 3 free static sites (1 GiB outbound/mo each). Functions: 25,000 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 integration

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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/mo minIncluded 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 $200 credit (60 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 60 days.

Quick Comparison

Tool Free Tier Details Stability
Render Hobby Free web services (512 MB RAM, less than 1 CPU), free PostgreSQL (256 MB RAM, 30-day expiry), free Redis (25 MB). 5 GB b... caution
discovered 2026-09-02 restructured
Cloudflare Workers Free Edge compute with 100K requests/day, 10ms CPU time per invocation. KV: 1 GB storage, 100K reads/day, 1K writes/day. D1: ... stable
Railway Free Free plan: $0/month with one-time $5 credit (30-day trial), 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM per service, 0.5 GB volume storage, 1 pro... 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 $200 credit for 60 days for new accounts. Basic Droplets from $4/mo (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD — 20% price cut Jan 2... —
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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