Heroku → Coolify
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
Heroku's cheapest production dyno plus a Postgres add-on starts near $50/month per app and rises steeply. Coolify on a $6–14 Hetzner or DigitalOcean VPS hosts a dozen containerised apps for the price of the box.
Moves cleanly
The application, if it is containerised or has a Dockerfile. Buildpacks are supported too via Nixpacks.
You rebuild
Add-ons. Every Heroku add-on is a separate service you now provision yourself — database, Redis, scheduler, logging.
What Heroku costs you today
Eco dynos are about $5/month for 1,000 shared hours; Basic $7 per dyno; Standard-1X $25 and Standard-2X $50; Performance dynos $250 and $500. Managed Postgres starts around $5 and reaches four figures. The free tier was removed in November 2022, which is when a large part of the community left. A modest production app with two Standard dynos and a mid-tier database lands near $150/month for what a $20 VPS could run. Figures checked 2026-08-05.
What actually holds you in
Low by design, which is genuinely to Heroku's credit. It popularised the twelve-factor app: configuration in the environment, stateless processes, logs to stdout — practices that make an application portable by construction. A Heroku app is usually one Dockerfile away from running anywhere. What holds you is the managed add-ons: Heroku Postgres, Redis and the marketplace services need migrating individually, and the database is the part with real downtime risk.
What you are moving to
Coolify installs on a plain VPS and gives you Git-push deployment, automatic TLS, databases, backups, preview environments and a dashboard that non-specialists can use. Apache-2.0 with around 60k stars, and its growth over the past two years has been the clearest signal in this category. On a $12 server it will comfortably run several applications with their databases — the same work Heroku would bill well over $100 for. You are trading a monthly invoice for a server you now own, and for many teams that is the correct trade rather than a compromise.
Free and open source. You pay only for the server. Paid cloud option available.
Coolify strengths
- Roughly a tenth of Heroku's cost for equivalent workloads
- Apache-2.0 with no enterprise carve-out
- Git-push deployment, automatic TLS, databases and backups included
- Interface good enough that non-specialists can use it
What you give up
- You own the server — patching, uptime and backups are yours
- Single-server by default; multi-node is more involved
- Younger than Dokku with a shorter production record
- No compliance certifications
The migration, step by step
- 1Provision a VPS and install Coolify with its one-line script
- 2Connect your Git repository; Coolify builds on push like Heroku does
- 3Migrate the database first with pg_dump and pg_restore, and verify it before moving traffic
- 4Recreate each add-on as a service — Coolify has one-click options for the common ones
- 5Move DNS last, after the app has served real traffic on the new host
The gotcha
Heroku manages the server so you never think about it. Coolify manages deployments — the server is now yours, including OS patches, disk space and backups. The saving is real and so is the new responsibility.
When to stay on Heroku
Nobody on the team wants to own a server, or you rely on Heroku's compliance posture.
More Layer 3 migrations
Figures verified 2026-08-05 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.