Heroku review covering dynos, Postgres, pricing tiers, its 2026 sustaining engineering mode under Salesforce, and the best modern alternatives.
Heroku is widely regarded as the platform that invented the modern platform-as-a-service category, letting developers push code and have it built, deployed and scaled automatically without touching a server. Founded in 2007 by James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins and Orion Henry, it launched commercially in 2009 for Ruby applications and was acquired by Salesforce in a 212 million dollar deal that closed in January 2011.
Applications run inside isolated Linux containers called dynos, originally on Heroku's Cedar runtime and more recently on a Kubernetes-based runtime called Fir, with deployment via git push, Docker or GitHub integration and automatic handling of routing, load balancing and scaling.
Heroku's core platform includes web and worker dynos across Eco, Basic, Standard and Performance tiers, plus Private and Shield tiers for network isolation and compliance-sensitive workloads. Managed data services cover Heroku Postgres, a Key-Value Store and Apache Kafka, alongside a large Add-ons marketplace for logging, monitoring and other third-party integrations.
Developer workflow tools include pipelines and review apps for staging changes before production, Heroku CI for automated testing, and buildpacks supporting Ruby, Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, Go, Scala and Clojure. More recently, Heroku Managed Inference and Agents added hosted access to AI models like Claude and GPT-OSS billed per token, positioning the platform for AI-backed application workloads.
Heroku prices by dyno tier rather than a flat subscription: Eco dynos start at 5 dollars a month for light, sleep-on-inactivity workloads, Basic dynos at 7 dollars a month stay always-on, and Standard and Performance dynos scale from 25 dollars a month up to 1500 dollars a month for dedicated, high-throughput compute. Postgres, Key-Value Store and Kafka add-ons are priced separately and scale independently of dyno cost.
Since Salesforce moved Heroku into sustaining engineering mode in February 2026, new Enterprise Account contracts are no longer being sold to new customers, though existing credit-card billed customers on the standard dyno and add-on pricing can continue using the platform with no changes to their current billing or service.
As of February 2026, Salesforce moved Heroku into sustaining engineering mode, meaning it receives security, stability and reliability maintenance but no new features, though existing apps continue running normally.
No, Heroku removed its free dyno tier in November 2022; the cheapest option today is the Eco dyno starting at 5 dollars a month.
Heroku has been owned by Salesforce since Salesforce's 212 million dollar acquisition closed in January 2011, following Heroku's founding in 2007 by James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins and Orion Henry.
Render, Railway, Fly.io and Vercel are the most commonly cited modern alternatives, alongside hyperscale options like AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Google Cloud Run.
Heroku charges per dyno, starting at 5 dollars a month for an Eco dyno and scaling up to 1500 dollars a month for the largest Performance dynos, with Postgres, Key-Value Store and Kafka add-ons billed separately.
No, as part of the February 2026 sustaining engineering announcement, Salesforce stopped offering new Enterprise Account subscriptions to new customers, though credit-card billed customers can continue signing up and using standard plans.