Last week, Salesforce-owned Heroku announced that they’re eliminating free dynos, free Heroku Postgres, and free Heroku Data for Redis, effective November 28, 2022. After years of being the go-to “just push and deploy” platform for students, hobbyists, and early-stage projects, Heroku’s free tier is going away.
I’m not going to pretend this is surprising — the writing has been on the wall since Salesforce acquired Heroku in 2010, and the platform has felt increasingly neglected in recent years. But the impact on the developer ecosystem is real, and it’s worth examining what we’re losing and where we go from here.
What Heroku’s Free Tier Actually Meant#
For an entire generation of developers, Heroku was the first place they deployed something to the internet. The experience was magical — git push heroku main and your app was live. No SSH, no server configuration, no nginx config files, no Docker, no Kubernetes. Just code to URL in seconds.
I’ve recommended Heroku’s free tier countless times over the years — to bootcamp students deploying their first Express app, to developers prototyping APIs for hackathons, to hobbyists running small Discord bots. The free dyno with its 30-minute sleep timer wasn’t powerful, but it was enough to learn, experiment, and ship.
The educational impact is hard to overstate. Platforms like freeCodeCamp, The Odin Project, and countless university courses built their deployment tutorials around Heroku. Every full-stack bootcamp graduate in the last decade probably has a Heroku app in their portfolio. That entire ecosystem now needs to update its curriculum.
Why This Happened#
Heroku cites the need to focus on “mission-critical” customer needs and reducing fraud/abuse on the platform. The abuse angle is legitimate — free tiers inevitably attract crypto miners, spam operations, and bot armies. Heroku reportedly spent significant resources combating abuse of free resources, and the security incident earlier this year (where OAuth tokens were stolen from their GitHub integration) likely accelerated the decision to simplify the platform.
But let’s be honest about the bigger picture: Heroku stopped innovating years ago. The platform hasn’t had a meaningful new feature in ages. The container runtime is dated. Native support for newer runtimes and frameworks lags behind competitors. The dashboard feels like it’s from 2015. While competitors like Vercel, Railway, Fly.io, and Render have been shipping features at a frenetic pace, Heroku has been coasting on brand recognition and inertia.
Salesforce has never seemed to know what to do with Heroku. It’s not a CRM, it’s not enterprise software, and the developer-first philosophy that made Heroku special doesn’t align naturally with Salesforce’s enterprise sales model. The death of the free tier feels like another step toward Heroku becoming a purely enterprise platform — functional, but not the place where developers want to be.
The Alternatives Landscape#
The good news is that 2022 has far more PaaS options than when Heroku was the only game in town. Here’s where I see developers migrating:
Railway — The closest spiritual successor to Heroku’s developer experience. Git-push deploys, automatic database provisioning, a generous free tier (for now). The DX is excellent and they’re iterating fast.
Render — A solid Heroku alternative with free static sites and web services (with sleep, like Heroku’s old free dyno). Managed databases, auto-deploy from Git, and a clean interface.
Fly.io — More powerful but slightly more complex. Runs Docker containers on edge infrastructure worldwide. Their free allowance is generous, and the performance is excellent. Good for developers ready to graduate from the simplest PaaS.
Vercel / Netlify — If your project is a frontend app or serverless functions, these remain the best options with generous free tiers. Not a full Heroku replacement, but covers many common use cases.
Deta — Free cloud for personal projects, with a focus on developer experience. Less mature but worth watching.
For database hosting specifically, Supabase (PostgreSQL), PlanetScale (MySQL), and MongoDB Atlas all offer free tiers that are more generous than what Heroku Postgres provided.
What This Means for the Industry#
Heroku’s retreat from the free tier reflects a broader tension in the cloud platform market. Free tiers are expensive to operate and attract abuse, but they’re also the top of the funnel for developer adoption. Every major cloud provider — AWS, GCP, Azure — offers free tiers specifically because getting developers hooked early pays off over their career.
The companies replacing Heroku in the free tier space are VC-funded startups burning capital to acquire users. Railway, Render, and Fly.io are all venture-backed, and their free tiers are subsidized by investor money. The cynical view is that we’ll see the same pattern repeat — generous free tiers that shrink or disappear once the companies need to show profitability.
The sustainable alternative might be that deployment becomes so commoditized that free tiers are just table stakes, the way free email became table stakes for Google and Microsoft. But we’re not there yet.
My Take#
The Heroku free tier was a public good for the developer community, and its loss is genuinely sad. But I’d argue the bigger loss happened years ago, when Heroku stopped being the innovative platform that it was in its early days.
If you’re a developer with projects on Heroku’s free tier, start migrating now. Don’t wait until November. Railway and Render are the smoothest transitions if you want a similar experience. If you’re comfortable with containers, Fly.io gives you more power and flexibility.
For educators and bootcamp operators: update your deployment tutorials. This is an opportunity to teach students about the broader cloud ecosystem rather than defaulting to one platform. Show them Railway for simplicity, Docker for understanding what’s happening underneath, and maybe even a basic VPS setup so they understand what PaaS platforms abstract away.
The era of git push heroku as the universal first deployment experience is ending. What replaces it will probably be better — there are more options, more competition, and better technology. But there was something special about that simplicity, and I hope at least one of the new players can preserve it.