Heroku's free tier was a beloved platform-as-a-service offering that allowed developers to deploy web applications, databases, and background workers at zero cost, making it the default choice for prototyping, learning, side projects, and open-source project hosting for over a decade. The free plan included free dynos (containers) that would sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, free PostgreSQL databases with up to 10,000 rows, and free Redis instances, providing a complete application hosting stack without any financial commitment. Heroku's free tier was instrumental in lowering the barrier to web development, enabling millions of developers to deploy their first applications.
Heroku's free tier was notable for its simplicity and developer experience, offering Git-based deployments where pushing code to a Heroku remote automatically built and deployed applications without any server configuration. The platform supported multiple languages including Ruby, Python, Node.js, Java, PHP, and Go through buildpacks, and provided add-ons for databases, caching, monitoring, logging, and email services. The free tier became synonymous with quick prototyping and hackathon projects, and many developers' first experience with cloud deployment was pushing a hobby project to Heroku at zero cost.
Salesforce-owned Heroku announced the elimination of free plans in August 2022, with free dynos, free Heroku Postgres, and free Heroku Data for Redis removed by November 28, 2022. The company cited extraordinary engineering effort required to manage fraud and abuse on free plans as the primary reason for discontinuation. Heroku introduced replacement Eco dynos at $5/month and Mini database plans starting at $5/month, but the removal of the free tier triggered a mass migration of hobby projects and learning environments to alternatives like Railway, Render, Fly.io, and Vercel, fundamentally changing the landscape of free application hosting.