Is Heroku free? What replaced the free tier, and the cheapest plan now

No. Heroku's Removal of Heroku Free Product Plans FAQ lists the “Removal of free dynos, free Heroku Postgres and free Heroku Key-Value Store plans starting November 28, 2022,” and Heroku's pricing page, read on November 5, 2026, lists no free dyno. The cheapest is Eco, at $5 a month.

Heroku's Eco plan is a flat $5 a month for 1,000 dyno hours, shared by every Eco dyno on your account, per its Eco Dyno Hours article, last updated April 18, 2026. An Eco web dyno that gets no web traffic for 30 minutes sleeps, and the next visit wakes it “after a short delay.” Heroku's Basic dyno, at $7 a month, is “Always on.” A database adds at least $5 a month on Heroku, for Heroku Postgres Essential-0. Students in the GitHub Student Developer Pack can get “platform credits worth $13 per month for 24 months,” with a card on file.

As of November 5, 2026, 11:28 to 11:37 JST (02:28 to 02:37 UTC). Heroku's pricing page, its help articles, and its student offer show no date of their own, so each fact from them is from the version read that day. Each Dev Center article's “Last updated” date is in the Sources at the end of this page. Prices are Heroku's, in US dollars. Heroku can change them, so check its pages before you deploy.

This page covers Heroku's own plans: what ended in 2022, what the cheapest plans cost now, the student offer, and what to use for free instead. For an app that must run for free, Is Render free for production? and Railway's free plan and trial go through those hosts, and Is Fly.io free? covers Fly.io's trial and its discontinued free plans.

The short answer

• Free tier: none. Heroku removed free dynos, free Heroku Postgres, and free Heroku Key-Value Store on November 28, 2022.
• The cheapest app: Heroku's Eco plan, $5 a month for 1,000 dyno hours shared by all your Eco dynos. A web dyno sleeps after 30 minutes without traffic.
• Always on: Heroku's Basic dyno, $7 a month, billed by the second at about $0.01 an hour.
• A database: Heroku Postgres Essential-0, $5 a month for 1 GB. Heroku Key-Value Store Mini costs $3 a month.
• Students: Heroku gives $13 a month in platform credits for 24 months to students in the GitHub Student Developer Pack who are 18 or older. A card is still required.
• A card: Heroku requires one to create an app, before you pay for anything.

What ended on November 28, 2022, and why tutorials still say free

Heroku announced the change on August 25, 2022, in Heroku's Next Chapter, a post last updated June 3, 2024. The reason it gave: “Our product, engineering, and security teams are spending an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans.” The post set 2 dates. From October 26, 2022, Heroku began “deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year.” From November 28, 2022, it planned “to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data services.”

Heroku's FAQ says what happened to the free resources:

• Free dynos “will be converted to eco dynos scaled down to 0.” They run again only after you subscribe to Eco or move to another paid plan.
• Free databases on personal accounts were deleted. The plans removed were “free dynos, hobby-dev Heroku Postgres, dev Heroku Postgres, and hobby-dev Heroku Key-Value Store plans.”
• Hobby became Basic. The paid plans stayed, “except for the renaming of Hobby dynos and Hobby-Dev databases to Basic.”

So a tutorial or an AI answer written before late 2022 can still tell you to deploy on a free dyno, or to add the hobby-dev Postgres plan. Both are among the removed plans. Heroku's smallest Postgres plan today is provisioned as heroku-postgresql:essential-0, per its Postgres plans docs. Heroku's own older help pages haven't all caught up: its Low-Cost Plans FAQ still describes a “Mini Heroku Postgres Plan: 10,000 rows of storage for $5/month,” while the pricing page lists the $5 plan as Essential-0, with 1 GB of disk and “No row limitations.”

Heroku Eco vs Basic: what each costs

Both dynos have 0.5 GB of RAM and run 1 dyno per process type. The differences, from Heroku's pricing page, Eco Dyno Hours, and Usage & Billing:

Eco is charged whether you use it or not. Heroku's billing docs say “You are charged for this plan for each month that you are subscribed, whether you used any Eco dynos that month or not,” and if you subscribe after the first day, Heroku still charges “the full $5 for that month.” Sleeping web dynos use no hours, but “Apps that only use an Eco worker dyno don't sleep, because they don't respond to web requests,” so a worker runs the pool down around the clock.

The pool covers 1 Eco dyno awake for a whole 31-day month, which is 744 hours, by this page's arithmetic from Heroku's 1,000. 2 dynos awake around the clock would use it up in about 21 days. Heroku emails you at 80% of the hours and again at 100%, when “any apps using Eco dynos won't be accessible for the remainder of the month.” Heroku's way out is the Basic dyno, which it lists in that article at “$0.01/hr.”

Above Basic, Heroku's Standard-1X dyno costs $25 a month and adds horizontal scaling, preboot, zero-downtime deploys, and app metrics.

Case by case: what Heroku gives you for free

The table applies Heroku's pricing page, Dev Center, help articles, and student offer, as read on November 5, 2026, to what people ask when they move an app or a site to Heroku. A row reads Yes where Heroku's pages allow it, No where they rule it out or put a price on it, and “Heroku doesn't say” where they don't settle the case.

Heroku for GitHub Students: what the offer gives

Heroku is free for students for 24 months, up to $13 a month. Its GitHub Student Developer Pack offer says that if you qualify for the pack and are 18 or older, you're eligible “to receive platform credits worth $13 per month for 24 months (for a total value of $312).” You apply in 3 steps: enroll in the GitHub Student Developer Pack and pick the Heroku offer, sign up for or log in to Heroku, then apply for the Heroku for GitHub Students offer.

• A card on file. “Yes, you will need a valid credit or debit card on file to redeem this offer.” Heroku charges the card for usage past the $13 credit in a month.
• What the credits pay for. “You can spend your credits on any Heroku product, including Heroku Dynos, Heroku Postgres, and Heroku Key-Value Store.” “Credits do not apply to paid third-party add-ons,” and the offer can't be applied to a Heroku Teams account.
• What $13 covers. Heroku's own example: the monthly credit “is enough to cover one month of the Eco Dynos plan,” plus a Mini Heroku Postgres database at $5 and a Mini Heroku Key-Value Store database at $3. The pricing page lists Heroku's $5 Postgres plan as Essential-0.
• No rollover. “Any unused credits will expire and do not roll over month to month.” Credits count from the first day of the month you're approved in, so Heroku recommends applying at the start of a month.
• When the 24 months end. “Any unused platform credits at the end of the program period will expire,” and “You will need to either spin down your resources or be charged for them.” You can't apply again: Heroku says previous participants of the program that began in October 2022 “cannot reapply.”

Heroku's page doesn't say how long approval takes, only that “Wait times can vary.” It doesn't say whether the credits can run a business app either.

Heroku Postgres and add-ons

Heroku has no free database. The smallest plans on Heroku's pricing page:

The Essential tier is Heroku's cheapest, with limits its Postgres plans docs, last updated October 15, 2026, list: no fork or follow, “Expected uptime of 99.5% each month,” “Unannounced maintenance and automatic Postgres version upgrades,” and “No Postgres logs.” The pricing page puts it as “Max downtime 4 hour per month.” The Essential plans include daily logical backups with Heroku PGBackups, which the docs list as “optional but free.”

Add-ons from other companies kept their own free plans. Heroku's FAQ says “third-party partner add-ons available in the Heroku Elements Marketplace are not affected” and “you can use whatever plans our third-party add-on providers offer.” Heroku's own Scheduler add-on is free too, but “your jobs must use paid dynos.” Adding any add-on, free or paid, needs a verified account with a card.

Do you need a credit card for Heroku?

Yes. Heroku's account verification article, last updated June 23, 2026, says “Having a payment method on file is the most reliable way of obtaining verified contact information.” You need a verified account to create apps, deploy code, use dynos, add any add-on, add a custom domain, or receive an app someone transfers to you. Verifying means Add Credit Card on the Billing tab of Account Settings, and Heroku places “a $1 USD temporary pre-authorization transaction” on the card, which isn't a charge.

Heroku's Additional Terms for Credit Card Customers, effective October 1, 2020, keep it that way: “You are required to maintain a valid credit card on your account at all times that you use the Heroku Services.” If you don't have a card, the article says you can still be a collaborator on apps that a verified account or a Heroku Enterprise account owns.

Can you use Heroku Eco for a business?

Heroku doesn't say you can't. The pricing page lists Eco as “Personal accounts only,” and the Eco article defines the word: “Personal apps are apps that aren't a part of a Heroku Team or Enterprise Team.” It's about the account, not what the app is for. Neither page, nor the terms for card customers, sets a personal-use or non-commercial rule, and those terms expect companies: “Any individual who accepts these Additional Terms on behalf of a company or other legal entity represents that (s)he has the authority to bind such entity.”

What Heroku does say about Eco is what it's for. Its Dyno Tiers article, last updated November 19, 2025, says Eco's flat fee “makes it possible to run many small apps and prototypes economically,” and calls Basic dynos “great for small projects.” For a business app, the limits decide it before the rules do: an Eco web dyno sleeps after 30 minutes without traffic, and when the account's 1,000 hours run out, every Eco app is down until the next month.

When you only need a page

If what you'd put on Heroku is a landing page, a portfolio, a sign-up form, or one HTML file a person or an AI wrote, Heroku still runs it on a dyno. Its front-end web docs, last updated September 3, 2026, say “A high-efficiency web server, running on Heroku dynos, delivers the resulting website.” On Heroku, that page costs $5 a month on Eco and sleeps after 30 minutes, or $7 a month on Basic.

Convika hosts that kind of page, and not an app server. It takes one .html or .htm file of up to 2 MB, or pasted code, and puts it on your subdomain.

• A form that keeps the entries. Click Add a form to my page, and Convika adds a form that stores each entry, emails it to you, and exports to CSV. Free shows 50 entries a month and keeps later ones for Pro.
• Visitor stats on Free. You get 90 days of visits, referrers, UTM campaigns, devices, countries, and button clicks.
• No dyno to wake. Convika serves each published page from storage on every request, so there's no server of yours to sleep.
• No card. The Free plan doesn't ask for one, and commercial use is allowed on every plan, per section 7 of the terms.

Free includes 1 published page and 10,000 page views a month, with a small Convika bar at the bottom. Once your pages reach 10,000 page views in a month, editing and analytics pause, and 7 days later the pages stop until the month ends or you upgrade.

Where Heroku fits better: server code, a database, background workers, and anything bigger than one HTML page. Convika doesn't run your backend or host Postgres, so the API and its data stay on Heroku or another host.

Drop the .html file right below or paste its code to see your page on Convika before signing up. You get a private preview link that works for 3 minutes, with the page's scripts and forms off until you keep it with a free account. The same box is on the free HTML publishing tool.

Free alternatives to Heroku, compared

The other hosts' rows come from their pages on convika.com, whose sources were read between October 23 and November 5, 2026. Follow each link for the quotes and the sources.

For a site whose business use matters most, free hosting for a business site sets 4 hosts' terms side by side, and free HTML hosting compared covers 11 hosts for one HTML file. On AWS, Is AWS Amplify free? covers the credits a new account gets in place of a lasting free tier.

Frequently asked questions

Is Heroku still free?

No. Heroku removed free dynos, free Heroku Postgres, and free Heroku Key-Value Store plans on November 28, 2022, and its pricing page, read on November 5, 2026, lists no free dyno. Heroku's cheapest plan is Eco, $5 a month for 1,000 dyno hours, and an Eco web dyno sleeps after 30 minutes without traffic.

Is Heroku free for students?

Yes, for 24 months and within $13 a month. Heroku's GitHub Student Developer Pack offer gives students who are 18 or older platform credits worth $13 a month for 24 months, $312 in all. You need a credit or debit card on file, usage past the month's credit is charged to it, and unused credit doesn't roll over.

Does Heroku have a free Postgres database?

No. Heroku removed hobby-dev Heroku Postgres with its other free plans in 2022. Heroku's smallest Postgres plan, Essential-0, costs $5 a month for 1 GB of storage and 20 connections, with up to 4 hours of downtime a month.

How much does Heroku cost a month?

From $5 a month on Heroku's Eco plan, which covers 1,000 dyno hours shared by your Eco apps. An always-on Basic dyno costs $7 a month and a Postgres Essential-0 database $5, so a small app with both comes to $12 a month, by this page's sum of Heroku's list prices. Heroku bills Basic by the second, so a dyno you scale to zero stops costing.

Do Heroku Eco dynos sleep?

Yes. A Heroku Eco web dyno that gets no web traffic in a 30-minute period sleeps, and the next request wakes it after a short delay if your account has hours left. A sleeping dyno uses no hours. An app with only an Eco worker dyno doesn't sleep for lack of traffic, but it stops with every other Eco dyno when the month's Eco hours run out. Basic dynos don't sleep at all.

Do I need a credit card for Heroku?

Yes. Heroku asks for a card to verify your account before you can create apps, deploy code, use dynos, or add any add-on, and it holds a temporary $1 pre-authorization to check the card. The student offer needs a card too. Heroku lists no free trial you can start yourself: its 2022 post says to contact an account executive for one.

Why did Heroku remove the free tier?

Fraud and abuse, in Heroku's words: its teams were “spending an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans.” Heroku announced the change on August 25, 2022, began deleting accounts inactive for over a year on October 26, 2022, and ended the free plans on November 28, 2022.

What is a free alternative to Heroku?

Render, Railway, Cloudflare Workers, Vercel, and Netlify each run server code on a free plan, each with its own limit: Render's web services spin down after 15 minutes idle, Railway's Free plan gives $1 of credit each month, and Cloudflare Workers allows 100,000 requests a day. Fly.io has only a trial. For a single HTML page with a form, Convika's Free plan needs no server and no card.

Sources

Each source was read on November 5, 2026, between 11:28 and 11:37 JST (02:28 and 02:37 UTC). Dates in parentheses are the document's own.

• Heroku pricing (no date on the page; read 11:28)
• Removal of Heroku Free Product Plans FAQ (no date on the page; read 11:28) and Low-Cost Plans FAQ (no date on the page; read 11:36)
• Heroku's Next Chapter (published August 25, 2022, last updated June 3, 2024; read 11:28)
• Heroku Dev Center: Eco Dyno Hours (last updated April 18, 2026; read 11:28)
• Heroku Dev Center: Usage & Billing (last updated September 9, 2026; read 11:28)
• Heroku Dev Center: Technical Specifications by Dyno Size (last updated July 24, 2025; read 11:28) and Dyno Tiers (last updated November 19, 2025; read 11:30)
• Heroku Dev Center: Heroku Postgres plans (last updated October 15, 2026; read 11:28)
• Heroku Dev Center: Account Verification (last updated June 23, 2026; read 11:28)
• Heroku Dev Center: Deploying Front-End Web Apps (last updated September 3, 2026; read 11:32)
• Heroku for GitHub Students (no date on the page; read 11:29 and 11:37)
• Heroku Additional Terms for Credit Card Customers (effective October 1, 2020; read 11:31)