Blog · Alternatives

Best Heroku alternatives in 2026, now that Heroku is in sustaining engineering

By the Pethost team · 4 October 2026 · Updated 5 October 2026 · 10 min read

Your app runs on Heroku, and you have read that Heroku is in “sustaining engineering”. Since 6 February 2026 it gets fixes and no new features; it still runs, at the same prices. The best Heroku alternatives in 2026 come in four kinds, and for a small app, a few side projects or an early startup the best value is a machine of your own at a flat price: three apps, a worker and a Postgres are $33 a month on Heroku and €9.99 on Pethost.

Heroku's sustaining engineering model: what the 2026 announcement means for customers

On 6 February 2026 Heroku, which Salesforce owns, published “An Update on Heroku”: it is moving to a “sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support”.

What stays: Heroku “remains an actively supported, production-ready platform”, prices and billing are unchanged for customers who pay by card, and pipelines, teams and add-ons are unaffected. What ends: new features, and Enterprise contracts for new customers.

Heroku's status: what it does not mean

The announcement is not a shutdown notice and not a price change. What it settles is the question “will Heroku add this?”. A dyno has no disk that survives a restart (“Volume mounting is not supported”), and every process is a dyno with its own price. With no new features coming, that is the Heroku to plan with.

Heroku pricing after the announcement: no changes

The announcement changed no price, and Heroku lists no free dyno or database. A Basic dyno is $7 a month for 0.5 GB, “Always on”; a Standard-1X is $25 for the same 0.5 GB, with zero-downtime deploys and metrics; Postgres starts at $5, for 1 GB of disk and 20 connections. A web process and a worker are each a dyno, so three apps, a worker and a Postgres are 4 × $7 + $5 = $33.00.

Why people leave Heroku, and what Heroku still does well

No new features are coming. Every worker and database is one more line on the bill. And the low end sleeps: the $5 Eco dynos sleep after 30 minutes without traffic (see always-on hosting compared).

Heroku is the original platform as a service, and what it does well still works: git push and a buildpack, with no Dockerfile to write, a marketplace of add-ons, pipelines.

The best Heroku alternatives, in four kinds

Each kind sells a different unit: a service, a second of use, a server you look after, or a machine someone looks after for you.

Platforms that price each service: Render, DigitalOcean App Platform, Scalingo

The bill reads like Heroku's. On Render each web service, worker and database has its own price, $7 a month for a 512 MB service, and request logs need the Pro workspace, $25 more. Render is built for a team's production app, with autoscaling and a managed Postgres with replicas: see Render alternatives. DigitalOcean App Platform prices each component, from $5 for 512 MiB, and has no volumes. Scalingo, a French platform, keeps Heroku's manner, with buildpacks and add-ons, at €14.40 for a 512 MB container; it is built for teams that need SecNumCloud certification.

Platforms that meter use: Railway and Fly.io

Railway meters by the second: $10 a month for a gigabyte of memory and $20 for a vCPU. It is built for a service that may grow past one machine. Fly.io bills each Machine for its size while it runs, with no free tier and no spending cap, and is built for one app in several regions. Plan by plan: Railway vs Render vs Fly.io pricing.

Self-hosted Heroku: Dokku, Coolify and Dokploy

Dokku calls itself “An open source PAAS alternative to Heroku”: git push, buildpacks and a Procfile, on one server of yours, run from the command line (a web UI is the paid Dokku Pro). Coolify and Dokploy are panels with a web UI. With all three the server is yours to rent, update, secure and back up, also with Coolify Cloud ($5 a month) or Dokploy Cloud ($4.50 a server), which host only the panel. See Dokku alternatives.

A managed machine at a flat price: Pethost and Sliplane

Here the unit is the machine, and what runs on it is not counted. Sliplane's server that holds three apps, a worker and a Postgres, 3 vCPU and 4 GB, is €28.80 a month. On Pethost €9.99 is 2 vCPU, 3 GB and 30 GB, and a project is a Docker Compose file that runs as written: see managed Docker Compose hosting.

Render vs Railway vs Fly.io pricing, compared with Heroku

One workload on every managed host above: three always-on web services of 512 MB each, a worker, a Postgres and 10 GB of outgoing traffic a month. That fills about 2.5 GB of Starter's 3 GB.

Railway's figure counts memory only, on our assumption of 0.5 GB for each app: each 0.1 vCPU a service uses adds $2. Fly.io's are Ashburn prices: the lower one with a Postgres you run yourself, the higher with its managed one, from $38. DigitalOcean's database has no backups by default.

The totals differ less than what they buy. Starter's 3 GB of always-on memory, at each host's own plan prices:

A gigabyte of always-on memory is €3.33 on Pethost and $14 on Heroku.

What €9.99 a month buys, next to Heroku's price list

Heroku sells the dyno, and what an app needs around it is a higher tier or an add-on. We rent out the whole machine with that work done: Starter is €9.99 a month without VAT for a virtual machine of your own, in the EU, with 2 vCPU, 3 GB and 30 GB, for as many projects and databases as fit. In the price:

• 30 days of request logs
• 14 nights of encrypted backups, off the machine
• 13 MCP tools for your agent

Also in it: HTTPS addresses and your own domains, a deploy on every push to GitHub, named volumes that survive a deploy, SSH into any container, and security updates that install themselves. Nothing sleeps, and there is no free tier. Postgres is a container in your project, in the nightly backup; it is not a managed database with replicas or point-in-time recovery.

That is the best value among Heroku's alternatives: the most memory for the money, with the work around the app already done. Grow is twice the machine for €17.99.

How to move a Heroku app: Procfile, config vars, Postgres and the domain

Each line of a Procfile, say web: npm start and worker: node worker.js, becomes a service of a Compose file with the same command. The Postgres add-on is one more service, with a named volume:

services:
  web:
    build: .
    command: npm start
    env_file: .env
  worker:
    build: .
    command: node worker.js
    env_file: .env
  db:
    image: postgres:17
    env_file: .env
    volumes: ["pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data"]
volumes:
  pgdata:
x-pethost:
  routes:
    - {host: app.sam.pethost.app, service: web, port: 3000}

The route does the work of Heroku's router: it gives web its HTTPS address. An app that a buildpack built has no Dockerfile: with our plugin installed, your agent writes one.

1. Config vars into .env heroku config -s -a example-app > .env prints them in shell format. Add PORT=3000, which Heroku set itself, and POSTGRES_PASSWORD, and point DATABASE_URL at the service db.
2. Heroku Postgres by dump and restore Turn on maintenance mode, then run heroku pg:backups:capture and heroku pg:backups:download. Upload the file, latest.dump, into the db container and run pg_restore --no-acl --no-owner there.
3. The domain Add it as a second route, and change its DNS record to a CNAME to your machine's name. The certificate comes by itself, and Heroku keeps answering until the record changes.

Or say it once, and your agent does all of it through our MCP server:

What if I just rent a VPS?

You can, and two things are worth knowing first. An agent on a bare server works as root over SSH: nothing tells it what runs there, and one wrong command takes down the proxy, a database or the firewall. On Pethost it works through 13 tools, and its shell is inside your containers, never on the machine.

And a server is not sure to cost less. Hetzner, the one guides and assistants name first, raised its prices twice in 2026, and its cheap Cost-Optimized range has long been out of stock. Those servers are hardware it bought at good prices, before the RAM shortage, and on 5 October every plan of the range was marked “not available”. The 2 vCPU, 4 GB server it does sell, CPX22, is €19.49 a month, up from €7.99. Add a panel, backup storage and your hours. Starter is €9.99 with those done.

Who Pethost is for

Prices are what each vendor's own pages said on 5 October 2026, in the vendor's currency; ours are without VAT. The sums are ours.

1. Heroku: An Update on Heroku
2. Heroku: pricing
3. Heroku: Eco dyno hours
4. Heroku: container runtime
5. Heroku: the Procfile
6. Heroku: CLI commands
7. Heroku: Postgres import and export
8. Render: pricing
9. Railway: pricing
10. Fly.io: pricing
11. Fly.io: Managed Postgres
12. DigitalOcean App Platform: pricing
13. Scalingo: pricing
14. Sliplane: pricing
15. Dokku
16. Dokku Pro
17. Coolify: pricing
18. Dokploy: pricing
19. Hetzner Cloud: Cost-Optimized plans
20. Hetzner: price adjustment