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Goodbye Heroku Postgres. Hello, Railway
I’m leaving Heroku Postgres for now. Here’s why
A little less than a year ago, I built Burplist, a free search engine for craft beer in Singapore. With the goal to keep my infrastructure cost as low as possible, I started off with Heroku Postgres free tier.
With a row limit of 10,000 and a storage capacity of 1 GB, I thought that it would last me for at least a year — it didn’t.
Despite having a garbage collector service that runs every week to remove staled rows, Heroku Postgres’s free tier simply wasn’t enough. I started looking for alternatives.
TL;DR: I’ve migrated my side projects’ PostgreSQL to Railway because of its pricing and ease of migration.
Heroku Postgres Alternatives
After some Googling, I came across a couple of PaaS similar to Heroku, each with its own Postgres offerings:
One stood out
I chose Railway because it makes the most economical sense for my use case. Below are some of the things that I like about Railway:
- Incredibly generous pricing, where you would only start paying for resources usage after $10. In my case, this is a lot cheaper than using Heroku.
- They have a Discord community where you can easily get help from.
- Rather slick and intuitive UI. On top of that, you can view and make SQL queries directly via the dashboard. Though, I would argue that using a database tool like TablePlus or pgAdmin would be much more convenient.
railway- The dashboard also provides CPU, memory, and network metrics on your database usage; which is something that is unavailable on Heroku’s free tier.
