Heroku Pricing: App Cost, Dyno Rates and Postgres Plans

Heroku's pricing page is unusually honest and unusually long. It lists somewhere north of forty dyno sizes across two runtimes, three Postgres families and a separate Key-Value store, each with its own monthly figure. What it does not do is tell you what your app will cost, because that depends on how many processes you run and which add-ons you attach. Every figure below was read off heroku.com on 30 August 2026.

How much does Heroku cost per month?

A Heroku bill is the sum of three things: dynos, the database, and add-ons. There is no platform fee on top and no per-seat charge on the standard plans, so the arithmetic is refreshingly simple once you know the line items. The entry point is $5 a month for an Eco dyno and $7 for Basic, and the first production-grade tier is Standard-1X at $25.

The important structural point is that Heroku charges per running process. A web dyno and a background worker are two dynos and two charges. This is the single biggest difference from the credit and bandwidth models used by the static hosts, and it is why a Heroku bill grows when you add a queue worker rather than when you add visitors.

Heroku dyno pricing, tier by tier

Heroku now runs two generations side by side. Cedar is the classic runtime with the familiar Standard and Performance names. Fir is the newer Kubernetes-based generation, priced by explicit CPU and memory rather than by tier name.

Two things jump out of that table. The first is the jump from $50 to $250 between Standard-2X and Performance-M, with nothing in between. If 1 GB of RAM is not quite enough, the next stop is five times the price. The second is that Standard-1X at $25 gives you the same 0.5 GB of memory as Basic at $7, so most of what you are buying at that step is production behavior rather than capacity.

Heroku also publishes isolated variants for regulated workloads. Private dynos run from $125 to $1,500 and Shield dynos, aimed at compliance-sensitive workloads, run from $150 to $1,800. On the Fir runtime, General Purpose sizes run $80 for 2 CPU and 4 GB up to $1,200 for 16 CPU and 64 GB, with separate Compute-optimized and Memory-optimized families.

How much is Heroku Postgres?

The database is usually the second largest line on the invoice and often the one that decides the plan.

The Essential tier is genuinely cheap and covers most small applications. The gap to worry about is Essential-2 at $20 to Standard-0 at $50, which is where you move from a shared database to a dedicated one with its own RAM. Teams usually make that jump for connection limits and followers rather than for storage.

The Heroku Key-Value Store, which is what you reach for when you want Redis-style caching or a queue backend, starts at $3 a month for Mini with 25 MB and runs through Premium 0 at $15 for 50 MB and Premium 5 at $200 for 1 GB.

Does Heroku have a free tier?

No. Heroku has no free dyno tier. Basic Support is free for every customer, but that is documentation and help resources rather than compute. The cheapest way to keep an application online is the $5 Eco dyno, and the cheapest way to keep a persistent database is Essential-0 at $5. The practical floor for a hobby app that needs to stay up is therefore about $10 a month.

This is the change that sent a large population of developers looking for somewhere else to deploy, and it is why "heroku alternative" is still a heavily searched phrase years later.

What does a real Heroku app cost?

Three worked examples, using Heroku's published rates and nothing else. These are our arithmetic from that rate card, not packages Heroku quotes.

A small production app

One Basic web dyno at $7, one Essential-1 Postgres at $9, one Mini Key-Value store at $3. That is $19 a month. It runs, it has a database and a cache, and it sleeps under no traffic. For a side project that needs to be real, this is hard to beat on effort.

A small business app with a worker

One Standard-1X web dyno at $25, one Standard-1X worker dyno at $25 for background jobs, Essential-2 Postgres at $20, Premium 0 Key-Value at $15. That is $85 a month. Notice that the second dyno doubled the compute line without serving a single extra request, because it exists to process queues.

A growing app on dedicated database

Two Standard-2X web dynos at $50 each is $100, one Standard-1X worker at $25, Standard-0 Postgres at $50, Premium 0 Key-Value at $15. That is $190 a month, and the next capacity step on the web tier costs $250 per dyno.

Heroku vs Netlify vs Vercel pricing

These three get compared constantly and they are priced on genuinely different principles, which makes the comparison more useful than most.

The rule of thumb that falls out of this: Heroku's bill tracks your architecture, the static hosts' bills track your audience. If you run one web process and serve a lot of traffic, Heroku looks cheap and the credit model does not. If you run a web dyno, two workers, a scheduler and a cache, Heroku is the expensive one and nothing you do to your traffic will change that. The full rate cards for the other two are on our Netlify pricing breakdown and our Vercel pricing breakdown, and we work four monthly bills through both in Vercel vs Netlify pricing.

When is a VPS cheaper than Heroku?

Earlier than with the bandwidth-metered platforms, because the crossover is driven by process count rather than traffic. The $85 a month app in the second example above runs comfortably on a single $18 DigitalOcean droplet with 2 GB of RAM and 2 vCPUs, with Postgres and Redis installed alongside the application. The $190 example fits on a $48 droplet with 8 GB of RAM. In both cases the saving is roughly 75 to 80 percent, and it happens without any reduction in what the application can do.

What you take on in exchange is real and worth stating plainly. You become responsible for provisioning, firewall rules, certificate renewal, security patches, database backups and being the person who gets paged when a release fails. Heroku's price includes all of that, and for a team without an operations habit it is money well spent.

The reason the comparison is worth making at all is that most of that work is now automatable. Provisioning, atomic zero downtime releases, one click rollback, certificates, cron and queue workers can be driven from a panel instead of a runbook, which is exactly what background job processing looks like when you move it off a worker dyno. If you are running Laravel, our guide to Laravel queue workers under Supervisor covers the piece that replaces the worker dyno, and deploying from git covers the release pipeline.

One migration detail catches people out. Applications that have been served from a herokuapp.com subdomain pick up their own domain during the move, and search engines treat that as a new address rather than a rename, so it is worth making a deliberate effort to get the new URLs crawled and indexed again rather than assuming the old rankings follow you across. Redirects help, but they work faster when the destination is actually being fetched.

What Heroku does not publish

Heroku quotes Enterprise arrangements individually, so there is no published figure for private spaces beyond the listed dyno rates, and no published discount schedule for annual commitments. Third party sites that cite specific enterprise totals are estimating. Prices also move: everything here was read on 30 August 2026, and it is worth checking heroku.com before you commit a budget to it.