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Heroku Free Tier

Discontinued

Historical free Heroku plan replaced by paid dyno and data options

discontinued Nov 2022freemiumverified Jun 22, 2026

Historical free Heroku dyno/Postgres/Redis plan. Heroku ended free product plans in 2022; current docs and pricing route users to paid Eco dynos plus paid dyno, Postgres, Redis, and app-platform options.

Heroku Free Tier was the default zero-cost deployment path for countless prototypes, student projects, demos, bots, and small web apps. Its importance is historical: “push to Heroku” became a simple deployment habit long before today’s serverless and cloud-platform alternatives were as accessible.

Heroku’s own 2022 announcement phased out free dynos, free Heroku Postgres, and free Heroku Data for Redis. The current Heroku pricing and Eco dyno documentation describe paid successor paths, so the page should not imply that a comparable no-cost Heroku plan still exists.

Readers looking for a replacement should compare paid Heroku Eco or Basic-style plans against modern free or low-cost alternatives such as Render, Fly.io, Railway, Vercel, Netlify, and cloud-provider free credits. Keep this page focused on migration context, cost expectations, and why the old free-tier workflow no longer applies.

Pricing

Was: free dynos/Postgres/Redis; successor paths are paid Eco dynos and current Heroku paid dyno/data plans.

Platforms

Was: Heroku PaaS free plans; current Heroku remains active as a paid cloud application platform.

Why it died

discontinued November 28, 2022

Heroku’s free product plans were phased out in 2022. Heroku’s own “Next Chapter” announcement said free dynos, free Heroku Postgres, and free Heroku Data for Redis would be discontinued, and current Heroku documentation/pricing routes hobby and production users to paid Eco dynos and paid data/app platform plans. Keep this page as a historical free-tier and migration guide, not as a live free-plan recommendation.

use instead: Netlify, Railway, Fly.io

Categories

Tags

Use Cases

Netlify logo

Netlify

Web platform for modern development

Jamstack-focused cloud platform specializing in deploying static sites, serverless functions, and modern web applications with Git-based CI/CD. Features instant rollbacks, deploy previews for every PR, split testing, edge functions, form handling, identity/auth, and a global CDN with automatic HTTPS. Native support for Next.js, Nuxt, Gatsby, Hugo, Astro, and all major static site generators. Free $0 forever plan plus Personal and Pro credit-based tiers for growing traffic and team workflows.

freemium
Railway logo

Railway

Infrastructure, instantly

Modern cloud platform for deploying full-stack apps, databases, and workers with instant provisioning and usage-based pricing. Deploy from GitHub or CLI with zero config for Node.js, Python, Go, Rust, and Docker. Built-in PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB with auto backups. Features private networking, environment management, cron jobs, TCP proxying, and real-time logs. Popular with indie hackers and startups for fast MVPs with a generous free trial including $5 monthly credits.

freemium
Fly.io logo

Fly.io

Run your app close to users

Global application hosting platform that runs full-stack apps, databases, and services close to users in 30+ regions using lightweight Firecracker micro-VMs. Deploy Docker containers or use built-in builders for Rails, Laravel, Django, Node.js, and Go. Features persistent volumes, private networking, auto-scaling, PostgreSQL/Redis managed databases, and a powerful CLI. Ideal for latency-sensitive apps needing multi-region presence. Generous free allowance with pay-as-you-go pricing.

freemium

Related Tools

computed discovery: shared active categories · kept separate from editor-verified Alternatives

KTransformers parent kvcache-ai logo

KTransformers

Heterogeneous CPU-GPU inference and SFT for large MoE models

Open-source framework for running and fine-tuning large Mixture-of-Experts models with heterogeneous CPU-GPU execution, optimized kernels, limited VRAM and SGLang or LLaMA-Factory integrations.

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vLLM Production Stack parent vLLM logo

vLLM Production Stack

Official Kubernetes and Helm reference stack built on the vLLM inference engine

Official vLLM reference implementation for scaling the existing inference engine on Kubernetes with Helm, request routing, KV-cache offload, autoscaling and Prometheus/Grafana observability.

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Dynamo logo

NVIDIA Dynamo

Distributed inference orchestration above vLLM, SGLang and TensorRT-LLM

Open-source, datacenter-scale orchestration layer that coordinates vLLM, SGLang and TensorRT-LLM across nodes with disaggregated serving, KV-aware routing, multi-tier cache management and automatic scaling.

Open Source
GPUStack logo

GPUStack

Open-source GPU control plane for scalable AI model serving

Open-source GPU cluster manager that configures vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM or custom engines, serves models through compatible APIs, and provisions SSH-accessible GPU instances across on-premises, Kubernetes and cloud environments.

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Mooncake logo

Mooncake

Disaggregated KV cache storage and transfer for LLM serving

Open-source infrastructure for disaggregated LLM serving that pools KV caches across prefill and decode workers, with high-performance transfer, distributed storage and integrations for vLLM and SGLang.

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LMCache logo

LMCache

Reusable KV cache infrastructure for scalable LLM inference

Open-source KV cache management layer that persists, offloads and reuses model key-value caches across requests and serving engines to reduce repeated prefill work and improve inference throughput.

Open Source

FAQ

What is Heroku Free Tier?

Historical free Heroku dyno/Postgres/Redis plan. Heroku ended free product plans in 2022; current docs and pricing route users to paid Eco dynos plus paid dyno, Postgres, Redis, and app-platform options.

Is Heroku Free Tier free?

Heroku Free Tier offers a free tier alongside paid plans. Was: free dynos/Postgres/Redis; successor paths are paid Eco dynos and current Heroku paid dyno/data plans.

Is Heroku Free Tier still available?

No — Heroku Free Tier was discontinued on November 28, 2022. Heroku’s free product plans were phased out in 2022. Heroku’s own “Next Chapter” announcement said free dynos, free Heroku Postgres, and free Heroku Data for Redis would be discontinued, and current Heroku documentation/pricing routes hobby and production users to paid Eco dynos and paid data/app platform plans. Keep this page as a historical free-tier and migration guide, not as a live free-plan recommendation. Consider Netlify, Railway, Fly.io instead.

What are the best Heroku Free Tier alternatives?

The top editor-verified Heroku Free Tier alternatives are Netlify, Railway, Fly.io.