Heroku Alternatives in 2026
Heroku is in maintenance mode. 6 places to move an app and its review apps, priced
If your team opens a review app for every pull request, the cheapest Heroku alternative for a small app is Light Cloud at $5 a month, review apps included, against $16.80 for the same app and four review apps on Heroku. Railway starts at the same $5 and copies the database into each pull request environment, which we don't. If you rely on worker dynos and Heroku Scheduler, look at Render first: it feels the most like Heroku and lands at $16.10.
We make Light Cloud, the first row below. The method comes before the table so you can check every number on the vendors' own pages.
Why move off Heroku now
Nothing broke. On 2026-02-06 Heroku said it is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model "focused on stability, security, reliability, and support", and that Enterprise contracts will no longer be offered to new customers. Apps keep running, and prices for card-paying customers did not change. What changed is the direction: the platform you deploy to has stopped adding things.
The money side is older news. Free dynos and free Postgres ended on 2022-11-28, and you need a verified card before you can create an app. Any dyno scaled above zero bills whether or not it gets traffic; only Eco dynos sleep, and Eco is for personal apps, not team apps. For teams that live on review apps, that means paying for a dyno and a database per pull request while the reviewer is at lunch.
How we ranked
The reference app is the one from where to host a SaaS app: a React frontend, one Node.js API, a small PostgreSQL database and a custom domain, at about 1,000 API requests a day. On top of it I added the Heroku habit this post is about: four pull requests a month, each with a preview of the frontend and API that stays open for three days.
On Heroku that costs $12 for the app on a Basic dyno with Essential-0 Postgres (pricing), plus four review apps. Review apps are billed like normal apps, so a Basic dyno and Essential-0 for three days is about $1.20 each. Total: $16.80.
For every other platform I priced the cheapest way to get a preview of the frontend and API per pull request, with list prices from the vendor's own pages, checked on 2026-10-13, in US dollars. Whether that preview also gets its own database is in the table, because Heroku review apps can carry one and not every alternative copies it. The second column covers the other two Heroku habits: worker dynos and the Scheduler add-on.
Kept running all month, with no scale to zero, the same app gets the Always on prices in the table. Light Cloud comes last there at about $56, because an always-on instance needs the $19 Starter plan and a Micro costs about $52 a month. Every other platform here already runs the API around the clock at the price above, so their bills don't move.
The ranking
1. Light Cloud
Best for: teams that open a review app for every pull request and are tired of paying for idle dynos.
Lite is $5 a month with $5 of usage included, a custom domain and one shared PostgreSQL database (pricing). The reference app uses about $4.33 of that: $4 for the database, around 20 cents for the API, a few cents of builds. Four previews add about eight cents, because a preview only costs its two builds and then sits at $0 until somebody opens it. That's the trade in pay-per-use hosting from $5 a month: no dyno waits for a reviewer.
You get a review app for every branch, frontend and API, on every plan including Free, and a pull request comment with the link. Deploys come from GitHub, so git push heroku main becomes a plain push to your repository and deploys on every git push take it from there. The database is managed Postgres in the same console; moving yours over is a plain-SQL pg_dump (the import doesn't take the custom format) and an upload of up to 512 MB.
The gaps a Heroku team will hit first: there is no worker app type and no scheduler, so a worker: line in your Procfile has nowhere to go. A branch preview uses the production database until you point it at another one, which is not what a Heroku review app with its own Postgres does; the preview tutorial shows the setup. Shared databases run in Belgium only. Containers scale to zero, so a quiet API answers its first request in 3.1 to 3.7 seconds, and an always-on instance needs Starter and costs about $52 a month.
2. Railway
Best for: review apps that copy the whole app, database included.
Hobby is $5 a month with $5 of usage included (plans), and usage is metered by the resource: $10 per GB of RAM a month and $20 per vCPU a month. Pull request environments mirror the production workloads, Postgres included, and are billed as normal usage while they exist. If the app and its previews stay under about half a GB of RAM on average, the bill stays at $5; busier review apps push it over.
Railway also has cron jobs (at least 5 minutes apart) and private networking on every plan, and a hard usage limit you can set from $10 (cost control). It recommends Pro, $20 a month, for commercial apps. Of everything here, it's the closest to Heroku's review apps at our price.
3. DigitalOcean App Platform
Best for: fixed container prices with workers and scheduled jobs.
A 512 MiB container is $5 a month and a development database $7 (pricing), so the app is $12 with the frontend on the free static tier. Worker components are priced like services, and scheduled jobs are billed only while they run, which covers both Heroku habits.
There is no review app switch. DigitalOcean documents a GitHub Actions workflow that deploys a separate app per pull request and deletes it on merge; each one is an ordinary app billed by the second. The development database has no backups by default, so a real product moves to managed Postgres from $15, and a payment method is needed before you create anything.
4. Render
Best for: the closest feel to Heroku, workers and cron included.
A Starter web service is $7 a month and the smallest Postgres $6 plus $0.30 per GB (pricing): $13.30, with the frontend as a free static site. On the free Hobby workspace each service gets its own pull request previews, billed at the service's rate, so four API previews for three days add $2.80. That's $16.10, about Heroku's bill, but those previews come without a database of their own. Full-stack preview environments that copy the database need the $25 Pro workspace, which makes it $43.50.
Render is where a Heroku app maps over with the least rethinking: web services, background workers, cron jobs (minimum $1 a month each), a private network and fixed monthly prices. What its docs don't describe is scaling a paid service to zero while it's idle, or a visitor password for a staging site.
5. Koyeb
Best for: worker services on a private network, on one paid plan.
New users have needed a paid plan and a card since Koyeb announced it is joining Mistral AI on 2026-02-17. Pro is $29 a month with $10 of compute included (pricing), so the reference app is $29 plus whatever passes $10. Workers are a service type, services talk over a private mesh, and scale to zero is in public preview with a 1 to 5 second cold start.
Previews per pull request come from a 2023 GitHub Actions tutorial, not a setting. I found no scheduled-job feature in the docs, and Koyeb says spending limits are still in the works.
6. Fly.io
Best for: apps that should run close to users in several regions.
Machines are cheap, from $2.19 a month always on (pricing), and can stop when idle. Postgres is the expensive part: Managed Postgres starts at $38 plus $0.28 per GB (docs). With four preview machines for three days each, about $41.
Fly's review apps come from a GitHub Action that deploys one app without other resources, so a database per pull request is your own workflow to write. Workers are just Machines; scheduled jobs run through Cron Manager, which you deploy as its own Fly app. No free tier for new accounts, and no billing alerts yet.
Where the others beat us
Worker dynos and Heroku Scheduler are the big ones. If your Procfile has a worker: line or your app depends on a nightly job, Render, Railway and DigitalOcean run those today and we can't. A review app with its own copy of Postgres is a Railway feature at our price, and a Render one on Pro. If your users are on several continents, Fly is the better home. And if your company buys software through procurement, Upsun is worth a call: its pricing page lists full-stack preview environments for every branch, a per-project fee and per-user licenses. I left it out of the table because I couldn't find its smallest app size next to the prices, so I can't price the reference app there.
Where we come out ahead is the bill for waiting. On Heroku a review app is a dyno and a database that run for as long as the pull request is open, and most of that time nobody is looking. Here the preview of every branch costs its build and then nothing, the API scales to zero when traffic stops, and a five-dollar plan covers the app, the database and the domain. If your Heroku invoice is mostly review apps, that's the comparison to run.
What's the first thing in your Procfile you'd have to change?
More articles
Free Hosting for Startups
Free hosting for startups, ranked by the first bill: Cloudflare stays free longest for apps that fit in Workers, and Light Cloud's first bill is $5 a month for your own domain, Postgres and an API in any language. Vercel's is $20 per seat, because a startup counts as commercial.
Julia
Supabase Alternatives in 2026
Supabase alternatives for teams that use it mainly as Postgres: Light Cloud runs the database and the API for $5 a month, Firebase and Prisma land near $10, against $25 for Supabase Pro. If you rely on Supabase auth, realtime and storage, Appwrite, Nhost and Firebase are the closer matches.
Julia
Host a SaaS MVP for Under $10
Six ways to host a SaaS MVP for under $10 a month: Fly.io with Neon's free Postgres is the cheapest at about $2.19 across two bills, Light Cloud is the cheapest single bill at $5 with branch previews and a staging password included, and Railway, Cloudflare and DigitalOcean also land at $5.
Julia