Member-only story
Say Goodbye to Heroku Free Tier — Here Are 4 Alternatives
An in-depth guide, including comparisons
28 November 2022 is a sad day for developers. If you haven’t heard, Salesforce (Heroku’s parent organization) is phasing out its free tier plan on this date.
For many years, Heroku has been the de facto standard platform as a service (PaaS). So many students and developers deployed their first web application on Heroku. Anecdotally, Heroku has been pivotal for my career.
TL;DR. If you’re looking for Heroku free tier alternatives, check out free-for.dev/#/?id=paas. I migrated my Cron jobs to Northflank and Heroku Dynos to Koyeb.
A Lot Has Happened
For context, a lot has happened in the year 2022 for Heroku. The two most notable events are:
- On April 2022, Heroku had a security breach (incident) where CI and Review App secrets were compromised. GitHub Actions integrations on Heroku were down for a couple of months. Comms from Heroku were objectively bad. I experienced this firsthand when I had to resort to using a GitHub CI Action for my app deployments.
- On August 2022, Heroku announced the removal of their free product plans.
If you have been watching the internet, you would see people expressing concerns about how Heroku is losing its magic. Ever since the security breach incident, I have seen more talks about Heroku alternatives taking place.
Though things started to look bad, whatever Heroku had to offer was still great, and I decided to stick with it. Until now, that is.
Heroku Alternatives
For the past couple of weeks, I have been moving my demos and tiny projects out of Heroku.
If you’re still looking for Heroku free tier alternatives, check out free-for.dev (GitHub).
While there are a bunch of blog posts and recommendations scattered on the internet now, free-for.dev provides the best coverage. The list comes with a brief description of what each Heroku alternative does.
