Skip to content
unnudged
Get early access
brandNo recent capture

Heroku on X

Talk about Heroku is split level: as many still rate it well as remember it fondly, with fewer saying it has declined. What it costs now that the free tier is gone, and which host people move to instead — AWS above all — runs underneath.

First written 27 Oct · what changed · from 83 posts by 76 people

Tracking posts that say “heroku”

Track this for your market
Posts, last 24h
—
Last captured 25h ago
Posts, last 7 days
97
27 in the last 72h
Velocity
14/day
7-day average
Momentum
—
Needs a recent capture to measure

Posts per day, last 30 days

as of Nov 3, 09:00 UTC
50250Oct 20: 14 postsOct 20Oct 21: 14 postsOct 22: 46 postsOct 23: 25 postsOct 24: 10 postsOct 25: 11 postsOct 26: 20 postsOct 26Oct 27: 14 postsOct 28: 24 postsOct 29: 13 postsOct 30: 16 postsOct 31: 8 postsNov 1: 9 postsNov 2: 14 postsNov 2

What changed

as of 27 Oct · checked once a month

First written 27 Oct. When what people say changes, it shows here.

Tone· 29 posts· written 27 Oct

How do people feel about Heroku?

Two themes sit level at the top of how people feel: 8 people still rate Heroku well and 8 remember the old Heroku fondly, with 7 saying it has declined or that they have left.

The positive words are practical more than enthusiastic. People who still rate it well point to reliability — one counts incidents and finds Heroku well ahead of Railway and Render — and to simplicity: it is the host some name when someone asks where to put an app, and one contrasts a tangled Helm chart with what would have been a plain Heroku manifest.

The nostalgia is for the early product: the free tier and its monthly hour allowance, and a deploy people still call magical, "`git push heroku main`". 4 people credit that pattern with saving hours and being copied by later tools. One describes a newer service as "it's giving early heroku".

A smaller group singles out Heroku Postgres: 2 people say the database is the part nobody easily replaces, one claiming it stays roughly two and a half times better than a newer managed database on JSON workloads.

The disappointed are fewer than either fan group. They describe a Salesforce-era platform in maintenance mode and retiring old servers; one has just migrated their last app off after fifteen years as a customer.

  • Still rates it well8
  • Fondly remembers the old Heroku8
  • Decline and departures7
  • Loves the git-push deploy4
  • Heroku Postgres is the part that stands out2
See 5 of 29 posts
Carlo IE | OurWiseTribe@CarloCrighton

@Railway's reliability has become a concern. 28 incidents in 90 days, including 2 major outages, with further disruption over the past 24+ hours. Compared with Heroku (3) and Render (12), that's not reassuring. Great platform for beta, but can I trust it for commercial?

Zachary McClung@hcaz32000

I've been able to match or beat Heroko nearly on everything except JSON text. Heroku Postgres remains like 2.5x better. I can't figure out why. Cool little tool within @planetscale is the insights > recommendations. It caught some stuff.

5 of the 29 posts behind this answer, one per person. The other 24, and every new one as it’s posted, come with tracking. Get early access

Pain points· 23 posts from 22 people· written 27 Oct

What do people complain about with Heroku?

No single complaint runs through this; the one named most is price, at 4 people, followed by the loss of the free tier at 3. The rest is a scatter of smaller grievances, each with a handful of people.

Price talk is about bills that surprise people or need watching. One recalls running a single service on about $6,000 a month of Heroku infrastructure; another is still paying $14 a month for an app shut down in 2022; a third manages a backend so it does not "fundirme heroku" — burn the account. Removing free dynos and free Postgres in November 2022 comes up as the moment hobby projects stopped being free, and one says a $5 VPS cannot do that to you.

Deploying frustrates 3 people: builds needing extra configuration, timeouts, and one describing a newer host as one that does not make you scream at deploys. 3 raise security: credentials left readable in ~/.netrc for any agent to read, dangling DNS records to Heroku that strangers can claim, and the 2022 breach, which one recalls as roughly equivalent to a recent incident elsewhere.

Smaller still: dyno memory — one runs a backend on a 512MB dyno and hits spikes — and the platform being easy to start on but hard to leave, with switching costs and technical debt compounding.

  • It's expensive4
  • No free tier anymore3
  • Deploying is a pain3
  • Security worries3
  • Tight dyno memory and shared resources2
  • Account and billing surprises2
See 5 of 23 posts
Kenneth Reitz@kennethreitz42

Eight years ago, running httpbin cost me about 6,000 dollars a month in Heroku infrastructure. Now, I’m watching AI agents show up in conversations about the public internet. Sometimes the tools outlast the world they were built for. What a time to be alive.

Le Techno-archéologue@shulses

The best ad for self-hosting was written by Heroku. On 28 November 2022 it switched off free dynos and free Postgres, and years of hobby apps scaled to zero overnight. A $5 VPS can't do that to you. Who's on call when the Raspberry Pi in the closet dies, though?

Zachary McClung@hcaz32000

Any suggestions for rails hosting for a @Shopify app that is like Heroku; however, has dedicated resources? I didn't know see the dedicated resources as a thing until we moved to @PlanetScale. Planet Scale because it is dedicated resources gives us A LOT more stability with our responses. I spent a lot of time over the last two weeks optimizing our database and our processes. When I reduced our load on our dyno, our responses got worse because ummm someone else took the resources. I want our app to perform as consistently as possible.

5 of the 23 posts behind this answer, one per person. The other 18, and every new one as it’s posted, come with tracking. Get early access

Alternatives· 24 posts from 22 people· written 27 Oct

What are the alternatives to Heroku?

The biggest group — 5 people — weighs Heroku against AWS and the other hyperscalers, with 4 people pointing to Coolify as the self-hosted replacement; behind them sit a long tail of named tools each with one or two people.

The hyperscaler argument is that the reason for a managed platform has thinned. One says to put the whole stack on AWS, Azure, GCP or Cloudflare rather than a list of services that includes Heroku; another argues that agentic development can now run things directly on AWS or Google Cloud, with a warning to set budget alerts. Others describe the move itself: a main application migrated from Heroku to AWS EKS, planned for months and rehearsed; earlier hand migrations, now done in minutes.

Coolify is recommended as the cheap route to the same feel — "your own Heroku by the price of the VPS", with git-push deploys and databases, and a caveat to keep it updated and the panel off the open internet.

The tail is a set of named destinations, one or two people each: Railway, called the Heroku of this era by one and regretted by another after twelve months; Laravel Cloud, one app moved there by an agent; DigitalOcean's app platform, chosen on cost and flexibility; Render, Vercel, Shuttle, Dokploy, Primcloud, PlanetScale for the database; and a couple of people running on their own VPS or home server.

  • AWS and hyperscalers6
  • Coolify4
  • Railway2
  • Laravel Cloud2
  • Own VPS or home server2
  • DigitalOcean2
See 5 of 24 posts
John Solly@_jsolly

F’it, just put your entire stack on the hyperscalers. Don’t use Superbase, Resend, Heroku Vercel, Railway, Twilio, Loveable, WordPress, Mailchimp, Just build it all on AWS, Azure, GCP, and Cloudflare.

Hugh Tipping@HughTipping

The point of rehearsing a migration is not to get it right the first time. It is to find out what is wrong with the plan. At a prior company we moved our main application from Heroku to AWS EKS. We planned for months and rehearsed the cutover several times over several weeks, with a full back-out plan. Every rehearsal turned something up. I don't remember most of the specifics now, and that is fine. The specifics didn't matter. The process that found them did. Nobody gets excited about this kind of work. It can be onerous and feels like it's taking away from other productivity. Run the plan, write down what broke, fix the plan, run it again. Unglamorous, but the most important weeks of the project. It is also what let the business say yes. A migration that has already failed and been fixed in pre-prod repeatedly is an easier thing to approve than one that has never even been tried. When migration day came, I could hit enter at 3am because the plan had already been fixed. If your team is planning a big platform move, don't ask whether the plan is good. Ask how many times you looped through the plan before any customer was watching. How many rehearsals did your last migration get?

felon@cryptofelon

this mf is not a dev >terraform to provision new infra on aws/hetzner/do >script to harden ec2/vps/dedi etc >script to bootstrap a PaaS (coolify, caprover, dokploy) >manage projects thu paas boom, free heroku/railway paas-level ux for only infra-level costs

Mahdi@mahdi

Coolify is a self-hosted alternative to Heroku and Vercel. Your own server, git push deploys, databases, and 280+ one-click services. Nice middle ground if a VPS is cheap but you miss the deploy button. link

5 of the 24 posts behind this answer, one per person. The other 19, and every new one as it’s posted, come with tracking. Get early access

Questions· 6 posts from 4 people· written 27 Oct

What do people ask about Heroku?

The two questions here are level by person: 2 people ask whether Heroku is still the right host to be on or move to, and 2 ask who still uses it in 2026 and what became of it.

Three of the four posts in the bigger theme come from one person, who asks what Heroku is like now, what others' opinion of it is, and — while Railway was mid-outage — whether Render, Heroku or something else is the better place to move to. A founder with an outage on their hands puts Railway, Render and Heroku side by side and asks which is the more reliable host.

The other question is simpler and answered by nobody in the posts: "Who still uses Heroku in big 2026?" and "What happened to heroku?" It suggests people arrive without knowing the platform's current standing rather than with a specific complaint.

Nothing in the section asks how to do something on Heroku — no configuration, pricing or migration how-tos. What people want is a read on whether the platform is still a sensible choice, which is the kind of question the rest of the page answers from people already using it.

  • Is Heroku still the right host?4
  • Who still uses Heroku?2
See 5 of 6 posts
Joaquin@snesseye

SaaS-founders, which cloud provider are you using? - Railway - Render - Heroku @Railway is currently experiencing an outage and looking for a more reliable service.

5 of the 6 posts behind this answer, one per person. The other 1, and every new one as it’s posted, come with tracking. Get early access

Wishes· 3 posts· written 27 Oct

What do people want from Heroku?

This is thin: 3 people, each with a different wish. One hopes Heroku survives, one wants Heroku-style Rails hosting with dedicated resources, and one says someone should build a real replacement.

The clearest wish is about shared resources. Someone running a Rails app for a Shopify store asks for hosting "like Heroku; however, has dedicated resources" — after moving a database to a dedicated service for stability, they found that cutting their own dyno load made responses worse because someone else took the capacity. They want consistent performance, not a bigger plan.

The other two are single remarks. One, reacting to an outage elsewhere, hopes Heroku survives. The other says the platform has gone as far as it will and that a well-known Rails figure with server and Linux experience should build the alternative PaaS.

Nothing here asks for new features, lower prices or specific runtimes. The wants are about the shape of the platform — resources that belong to your app, and a successor worth moving to — rather than additions to what Heroku already offers.

  • Hoping it survives1
  • Heroku-like hosting with dedicated resources1
  • Someone should build a Heroku replacement1
See the 3 posts
Zachary McClung@hcaz32000

Any suggestions for rails hosting for a @Shopify app that is like Heroku; however, has dedicated resources? I didn't know see the dedicated resources as a thing until we moved to @PlanetScale. Planet Scale because it is dedicated resources gives us A LOT more stability with our responses. I spent a lot of time over the last two weeks optimizing our database and our processes. When I reduced our load on our dyno, our responses got worse because ummm someone else took the resources. I want our app to perform as consistently as possible.

In their words

How do people talk about Heroku?

The phrases people use most, counted once per person.

  1. 1“git push”4
  2. 2“git push heroku”2
  3. 3“push heroku main”2
  4. 4“heroku postgres”2
  5. 5“heroku to aws”2
  6. 6“render heroku”2

Posts are shown the way X shows them. One of them yours? Here’s why it’s shown, and how to take it off.

Also in App hosting and deploy

See all 6 in App hosting and deploy →

Get every post about Heroku, filtered and labelled

This page is the summary. Tracking gives you the stream behind it for any brand, keyword or @mention: each new pain point, request and question as it’s posted, with the spam and promotions already taken out.