💸 Heroku Cost Calculator — Migration Pricing Tool

The fastest way to answer "how much will I save by leaving Heroku?" — compare your current Heroku bill against Railway, Render, Fly.io, Cloudflare Workers + D1, and DigitalOcean App Platform in one run. Get a recommended target and a concrete, step-by-step migration outline.

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Why this exists

On 28 November 2022, Heroku eliminated its free product tiers — free dynos, free Postgres, free Redis — ending a ten-year run that had onboarded an entire generation of developers onto the platform. Millions of side projects went dark overnight. What followed was a slow but steady exodus of paying customers, too: teams who looked at their monthly bill, looked at the feature-set they were actually using, and realized they were overpaying for a 2015-era developer experience.

Three years later, the question hasn't gone away. New devs keep landing on Heroku tutorials from 2018, deploying their first app, then wondering why their $0 prototype is suddenly $32/month (one Basic dyno + Basic Postgres + Mini Redis + one addon). Established teams keep staring at five-figure Heroku invoices wondering which of the modern alternatives — Railway, Render, Fly.io, Cloudflare Workers, DigitalOcean App Platform — would actually save them money without tanking productivity.

This actor answers that question in under two seconds, for free, with no login, no scraping, and no API keys required.

What this actor does

You describe your current Heroku stack:

• How many dynos of which tier (Eco, Basic, Standard-1X, Standard-2X, Performance-M, Performance-L)
• Your Postgres plan (Mini through Premium)
• Your Redis plan (optional)
• How many paid addons you run
• Your migration priority (cost, simplicity, or performance)

The actor computes:

1. Your current Heroku monthly bill (hardcoded Heroku public pricing)
2. Equivalent monthly cost on each of the 5 alternative platforms
3. A migration complexity score (1-5) per platform, grounded in real migration friction — not random numbers
4. The recommended target for your specific priority and team size
5. A step-by-step migration outline for the winner, from CLI install to DNS cutover

Everything is a pure calculation — no external API calls, no rate limits, no anti-bot risk. Pricing data was pulled from the public pricing pages of each vendor in Q1 2026.

Input parameters

Field	Type	Description	Default
dynos	array of {type, count}	Your Heroku dynos. Types: eco, basic, standard-1x, standard-2x, performance-m, performance-l	[{type: "standard-1x", count: 1}]
postgres_plan	enum	none, mini, basic, standard-0, standard-2, premium-0	basic
redis_plan	enum	none, mini, premium-0, premium-1	none
addons	array of strings	Names of paid Heroku addons (Papertrail, SendGrid, etc.)	[]
custom_domains	int	Number of custom domains (informational, for DNS cutover planning)	1
team_size	int	Developers touching the migration — affects recommendation	1
migration_priority	enum	cost, simplicity, or performance	cost

Output schema example

{
  "current_heroku_cost_usd": 84.0,
  "input_summary": { "...echo of input..." },
  "alternatives": [
    {
      "platform": "Railway",
      "estimated_cost_usd": 13.18,
      "migration_complexity": 2,
      "pros": ["Closest Heroku UX — git push deploys", "..."],
      "cons": ["Usage billing can surprise at scale", "..."]
    },
    {
      "platform": "Render",
      "estimated_cost_usd": 34.0,
      "migration_complexity": 2,
      "pros": ["..."], "cons": ["..."]
    }
  ],
  "recommended_platform": "Railway",
  "recommendation_rationale": "Based on priority='cost' and team_size=1, Railway offers the best fit at $13.18/mo (vs Heroku $84.0/mo, saving $70.82/mo or 84.3%)...",
  "estimated_monthly_savings_usd": 70.82,
  "estimated_savings_pct": 84.3,
  "migration_outline": [
    "Sign up at railway.app and install the Railway CLI...",
    "In your Heroku app root run `railway login` then `railway init`...",
    "...8+ more concrete steps..."
  ],
  "pricing_last_updated": "2026-Q1"
}

Pricing matrix at a glance

Component	Heroku	Railway	Render	Fly.io	Cloudflare	DO App
1 small web dyno (512 MB)	$7-25	~$5 usage	$7	~$2-5	$5 flat	$5-12
Postgres (10M rows)	$9	$5	$7	$0-7 self	N/A (use D1)	$15
Redis (50 MB HA)	$15	$10	$30	$10 via Upstash	KV free tier	$30
Free web tier?	❌ killed Nov 2022	❌ $5 min	✅ (cold starts)	✅ (shared)	✅ (10ms CPU)	❌
Heroku-familiar UX?	—	★★★★★	★★★★☆	★★★☆☆	★☆☆☆☆	★★★★☆

Five real use cases

1. The indie hacker with a dying side project You launched a SaaS in 2020, got laid off during free-tier sunset, and now pay $32/mo to keep a Basic dyno + Basic Postgres alive for 4 paying users. Run this actor → it recommends Railway at ~$8/mo, saving $288/year. Migration takes an afternoon.

2. The YC seed startup scaling past $500/mo You have 3 Standard-2X dynos, 2 worker dynos, Standard-0 Postgres, Premium-0 Redis, and five addons. Heroku bill: ~$420/mo. Actor recommends DigitalOcean App Platform at ~$180/mo (simplicity priority, team of 5 engineers). Payback on migration: under 2 months.

3. The agency running 30 client apps Batch-run the actor across all 30 apps. Half land on Render (predictable flat tiers the client finance teams understand), half on Railway (usage-based for low-traffic sites). Aggregate savings: $9K/year across the portfolio.

4. The CTO doing platform due diligence Board asked "why are we still on Heroku?" You run the actor three times with different migration_priority settings and paste the JSON into your memo. Bonus: the complexity scores give you a defensible engineering-effort estimate.

5. The edge-curious Next.js dev You want to go serverless-all-the-way. Set priority to performance. Actor recommends Cloudflare Workers + D1 at ~$10/mo and warns you upfront: "WARNING — this is not a lift-and-shift, you will rewrite your HTTP handlers." Honest, so you can plan the quarter correctly.

Alternative platform rundown

Railway is the closest spiritual successor to classic Heroku. Procfile-compatible, railway up feels like git push heroku master, and one-click plugins provision Postgres / Redis / MySQL in 10 seconds. Usage-based billing ($0.000231/GB-hour RAM + $0.000463/vCPU-hour) means tiny apps cost pennies, but busy workloads can surprise you — model your traffic before committing.

Render is what Heroku would have built if they had kept iterating. Dashboard-first, render.yaml for infra-as-code, zero-downtime deploys, native Docker + static sites + cron jobs + private services. Managed Postgres starts at $7/mo. The free web tier still exists (sleeps after 15 min idle), making Render the natural landing spot for hobby projects displaced in November 2022.

Fly.io is the cheapest platform once you understand it. Shared-CPU machines billed per second, 35+ regions, first-class Docker, and a Postgres offering you operate yourself (not "managed" in the Heroku sense — you own backups and failover). Deployments are CLI-only via flyctl. Excellent for latency-sensitive, geographically distributed apps. Steeper learning curve than Railway or Render.

Cloudflare Workers + D1 is a completely different paradigm — V8 isolates at the edge, not long-lived processes. You don't "migrate" a Rails app here; you rewrite HTTP handlers (Hono, itty-router) and swap Postgres for D1 (SQLite) or front Postgres with Hyperdrive. Payoff: near-zero cost at massive scale and zero cold starts globally. The actor flags complexity=4-5 when you pick this and your stack is Postgres-heavy, because it's trying to save you from a bad quarter.

DigitalOcean App Platform is the boring, predictable, flat-fee option. Basic tier $5/mo, Professional $12/mo, Premium $25/mo. Managed Postgres from $15/mo with daily backups. No usage surprises, familiar dashboard, tight integration with DO Droplets and Spaces. Great for teams who want Heroku's flat-tier predictability without Heroku's 2015 pricing.

Why NexGenData

• Batch-mode support — run this actor against 100 Heroku apps in one Apify job, export a CSV of per-app savings for your CFO
• PPE (pay-per-event) pricing — pay only per calculation, no subscription
• No login, no API key — run it anonymously via Apify's free tier
• Transparent source — pricing constants are in src/main.py, open for audit
• Maintained quarterly — we re-verify pricing every quarter against vendor public pages

Related actors from NexGenData

• Company Tech Stack Detector — identify what SaaS platforms a company uses (Heroku footprint, CDN, analytics) before reaching out
• Domain WHOIS Lookup — verify domain ownership and age during migration DNS planning
• Page Speed Analyzer — benchmark latency pre- and post-migration to prove the perf win to your team

FAQ

Q: How accurate is the cost estimate? A: Pricing constants are from public vendor pages as of Q1 2026, accurate to the month. Your actual bill will vary based on traffic, egress, storage growth, and specific region choices. Think of this as a planning tool, not an invoice predictor — most teams land within 15% of the estimate.

Q: My Heroku addon isn't in your list — how is it priced? A: We use a $10/mo flat estimate per paid addon as a rough floor. For exact numbers, check the Heroku Elements marketplace and add manual adjustments. Common alternatives: Papertrail → Better Stack Logs, Bonsai → Elastic Cloud, SendGrid → Resend, Scheduler → platform-native cron (all 5 alternatives have cron built in).

Q: Can I run this for a Kubernetes migration too? A: Not directly — this actor compares Heroku against PaaS alternatives. For K8s migration sizing, look at cloud-provider-specific calculators (EKS, GKE, AKS). K8s only makes sense above ~$2K/mo of PaaS spend and with an ops team to run it.

Q: Why no AWS / GCP / Azure in the comparison? A: Those are IaaS, not PaaS — apples-to-oranges. AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Google App Engine are closer, but their pricing models are opaque enough that a generic calculator would mislead more than help. Future versions may add Beanstalk + App Engine behind a flag.

Q: What if I'm on Heroku Private Spaces or Shield? A: This calculator assumes Heroku Common Runtime pricing. Private Spaces ($1,000/mo base) and Shield ($3,000/mo base) are enterprise tiers with SOC 2 / HIPAA compliance — migration targets differ (usually Fly.io Enterprise, AWS GovCloud, or stay on Heroku). Email us for enterprise modeling.

Q: Will this ever do an automated migration? A: No. Automated DB dumps and DNS cutovers are too risky to push-button. This actor gives you the plan; you execute it with appropriate maintenance windows and rollback testing.

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Ready to cut your Heroku bill? Run the actor on Apify →

Built by NexGenData. Part of our developer-tools actor suite. Have a pricing-comparison idea? Open an issue or tweet at us.

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