Heroku’s free plan is gone - free dynos, free Heroku Postgres under the old row limit, and free Heroku Redis were all shut down on November 28, 2022, after being announced in August that year, and they have not come back. What remains is a paid entry-level tier, priced low but not free, and a wider field of competitors that spent the years since building the same one-command-deploy experience Heroku popularized, several of them with an actual free tier of their own. This post covers what happened, what the current cheapest Heroku option actually gets you, and where a side project or a student portfolio can land in 2026 without a monthly bill that shows up as a surprise.
No competitor pricing is quoted here - it changes, and a stale number would be worse than none - but the shape of the current landscape and the honest alternatives are worth walking through plainly.
Table of contents
- What actually happened, in order
- What the cheapest Heroku plan gets you now
- The field that grew to fill the gap
- What a free or cheap tier is actually worth checking
- Where a genuine side project fits today
- Migrating off Heroku without starting over
- How this fits the rest of the stack
- FAQ
What actually happened, in order
Heroku announced in August 2022 that it was discontinuing its free product tiers, citing a need to focus on paid offerings after a security incident earlier that year involving compromised GitHub OAuth tokens. The free tier - free dynos that idled after inactivity, free Postgres databases capped under 10,000 rows, and free Redis - officially ended on November 28, 2022. Every hobby project, student portfolio and weekend prototype running on the free tier either moved to a paid plan or went offline that day.
Since Salesforce’s earlier acquisition of Heroku, the platform’s direction shifted toward existing enterprise customers rather than the hobbyist and early-stage audience that made it the default answer to where do I deploy this for most of the 2010s. That shift is why the free-tier removal reads, in retrospect, less like a one-off pricing change and more like the moment Heroku stopped competing for new small projects at all.
The scale of what disappeared overnight is easy to understate in hindsight. Free Heroku dynos and free Heroku Postgres were, for a large share of computer science courses and bootcamps through the 2010s, the first production deploy a lot of developers ever did - the removal did not just cost existing projects a home, it removed a common first step from the on-ramp into the industry.
What the cheapest Heroku plan gets you now
The old free Hobby dyno tier was replaced with a paid entry-level dyno, and Heroku’s lowest tier of managed Postgres was renamed and repositioned as well. Both still exist as products - Heroku did not remove the low end of its ladder, it removed the zero-cost rung on it - and the current pricing is on Heroku’s own pricing page rather than repeated here, since a number copied into a blog post goes stale the moment Heroku changes it.
What is worth knowing without a price attached: the entry tier still gets a genuine PaaS experience - git-push deploys, buildpacks for most common languages, an add-on marketplace - which is the actual product Heroku is selling, just without a free rung underneath it anymore.
For someone evaluating whether to stay, the honest question is not whether the entry tier is affordable in isolation, but whether the add-on marketplace and the operational polish are worth paying for versus assembling the same pieces - compute, a managed database, logs - on a platform priced closer to what each piece actually costs.
The field that grew to fill the gap
A wave of platforms built explicitly on the same git-push, buildpack-driven deploy experience Heroku popularized has grown since 2022, and 2026 roundups comparing them now run to eight or nine platforms deep. The common thread across nearly all of them: a hobbyist tier that is either genuinely free with real limits (build minutes, sleep-after-inactivity, low resource caps) or priced low enough to read as free-adjacent, plus a paid tier for anything that needs to stay up reliably.
None of this is unique to any one platform anymore - scale-to-zero, git-based deploys, and managed databases alongside the compute are close to table stakes across the field now, which is genuinely good news for anyone comparison-shopping: the Heroku-shaped deploy experience did not disappear when Heroku’s free tier did, it just spread across a dozen smaller platforms.
What a free or cheap tier is actually worth checking
- Does it sleep, and how long does waking it up take? A dyno or container that spins down after inactivity and takes several seconds to wake on the next request is fine for a portfolio, bad for anything demoed live.
- Is the database actually persistent, or does a free-tier database get deleted after a period of inactivity - the exact failure mode that caught people off guard when Heroku’s original free Postgres tier disappeared.
- What happens automatically at the limit - does the app just stop, or does it silently start charging.
- Are build minutes or bandwidth metered separately, since a generous compute allowance paired with a tiny bandwidth cap is still a real constraint.
- Is there a real path to a paid tier on the same platform when the project outgrows free, or does hitting the limit mean a full migration.
Where a genuine side project fits today
For a project that is realistically a portfolio piece, a weekend build, or something shown to a handful of people rather than production traffic, a free tier with a sleep timer is a reasonable trade - nobody expects a demo link to respond in zero milliseconds on the first click after a week of silence. For anything with even modest, low real usage - a small SaaS with actual users, a tool other people depend on - a low-cost paid tier that does not sleep is worth the small monthly cost, because the alternative is an unreliable link that quietly damages trust in the project.
RunxBuild’s own entry point sits in that second category rather than the first: the Free plan runs at 0.1 vCPU and 512MB of RAM, with 15 free days included each month before billing kicks in at $1.80 for the remaining days - a small, predictable number rather than a sleep timer, which matters for a project someone might actually check on a schedule rather than only during a demo.
Migrating off Heroku without starting over
The actual migration work, regardless of destination platform, is usually smaller than it looks: export the database with a standard dump tool, move environment variables and config vars to the new platform’s equivalent, and point the deploy at the same repository instead of Heroku’s git remote. Buildpack-based apps - the common case for Heroku - tend to map cleanly onto any platform that deploys from a repository and detects the language automatically, since that detection logic solves the same problem buildpacks did.
The bigger risk in a rushed migration is usually the database, not the app - Postgres exports and imports cleanly between most managed providers, but doing it live without a maintenance window is where data loss actually happens. Heroku Replacement walks through the nine specific things Heroku did that a replacement needs to check, which is worth reading in full before picking a destination rather than after.
Add-ons are the other piece worth auditing before migrating rather than after: a scheduler, a mail-sending add-on, a log drain, each has an equivalent somewhere else, but none migrate automatically, and discovering a missing one in production is a worse time to find out than during planning.
How this fits the rest of the stack
The free tier is not coming back, and the honest response is picking a replacement deliberately rather than chasing whichever platform is free this month. A project that needs to actually stay reachable, not just exist for a demo, fits better on a small paid plan than a sleep-timer free tier - the RunxBuild hosting calculator prices the Free plan’s 15 included days and the $1.80 that follows alongside every other plan on the same ladder, so the jump from free to reliable is one visible number, not a surprise.
Useful related references:
- Heroku Replacement: The Nine Things Heroku Did for You, and How to Check a Replacement Does Them
- Free Python Hosting in 2026: The Honest List, The Real Limits, and The Hidden Bills
- Choosing a Railway Alternative: The Six Things Worth Comparing
- Services on RunxBuild
FAQ
Does Heroku still have a free tier in 2026?
No. Free dynos, free Heroku Postgres under the old row limit, and free Heroku Redis were all discontinued on November 28, 2022, and none have returned. Heroku’s current entry-level tier is paid, priced low but not free.
When did Heroku remove its free tier?
Heroku announced the change in August 2022 and the free tier officially ended on November 28, 2022. Every project running on a free dyno or free database either moved to a paid plan or went offline on that date.
What is the cheapest way to deploy a side project now that Heroku is not free?
A genuinely free tier from one of the platforms that grew to fill Heroku’s role after 2022, accepting a sleep-after-inactivity trade-off, or a low-cost paid plan that stays running. RunxBuild’s Free plan includes 15 days each month before billing starts at $1.80 for the rest of the month, which avoids the sleep-timer trade-off for a small, predictable cost.
Why did Heroku end its free plan?
Heroku stated it was discontinuing free product tiers to focus on its paid offering, following a 2022 security incident involving compromised GitHub OAuth tokens. The broader context was Salesforce’s ownership shifting the platform’s focus toward existing enterprise customers rather than hobbyist and early-stage projects.
How do I migrate a Heroku app to another platform?
Export the database with a standard dump tool, move environment variables to the new platform’s equivalent, and point a repository-based deploy at the same codebase instead of Heroku’s git remote. Most Heroku buildpack apps map cleanly onto any platform that auto-detects the language from the repository.