Is Heroku free? What it actually costs in 2026

What the free tier actually includes

• —No free dynos — the plan does not exist
• —No free Postgres or Redis tier
• —Eco dynos at $5/month still sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity
• —Eco is personal accounts only

Where the wall is

There is no wall because there is no free tier — which makes Heroku the clearest case study on this site. It was the default place to put a side project for a decade, and the removal is why a generation of developers now reaches for Railway, Render, Fly.io or a $5 VPS instead. The Eco plan is worth reading carefully: at $5 a month it still sleeps after 30 minutes, so you are paying for a behaviour the free tier also had.

After that: Eco dynos are $5 a month and are limited to personal accounts. Basic dynos, which do not sleep, cost more, and a production application with a database lands well above that once Postgres is added.

Can you self-host Heroku? Yes

This is the category where self-hosting genuinely won. Dokku is Heroku's architecture on your own VPS and runs comfortably on a $6 box; CapRover adds a web UI; Coolify has become the most popular answer for people who want the Heroku experience without the Heroku bill. All three deploy from a git push, which was the thing people actually missed.

What it actually takes to run one yourself

Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.

When paying is still the right call

Stay if the team has no operational capacity and the bill is small — $150/month buys back attention you may not have to spare, and that is a legitimate trade. Stay for compliance: Heroku Shield carries HIPAA and PCI certification that self-hosting cannot replicate cheaply. Stay if you are inside the Salesforce estate where the integration matters. And stay if you are pre-product-market-fit, because time spent operating servers at that stage is time spent on the wrong thing.

What you are locked into

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.

If you would rather not pay: Coolify