[en-us] Good alternatives to heroku

2 minutes read

A while ago, I attempted to deploy a side project on Heroku, and, to my surprise, a lot had changed on the platform. Basically, Heroku’s free-tier service was no longer available. This was not only bad news for me, but also for every Rails developer who had side projects running there.

So, I went to Twitter to express my concerns about these changes and received many replies suggesting good alternatives. As a result, I have compiled all these suggestions here for you and for my future reference

Here’s the list:

  1. Digital Ocean - Good prices, documentation and they have something similar to Heroku with App Platform. Good for small and big projects.

  2. Hetzner - Very similar to Digital Ocean, you can create VPS, databases, load balancers and more. Good prices and it can handle both big and small projects.

  3. Vercel - Never used but and it seems very specific for Frontend developers.

  4. Fly.io - Very similar to Heroku too, easy to use and support for multiple stacks/languages.

  5. Pocketbase - Never used before but it says in their home page the following: “Open Source backend for your next SaaS and Mobile app in 1 file”. Seems porwerful.

  6. Planetscale - Directly from their website: “PlanetScale is a MySQL-compatible serverless database that brings you scale, performance, and reliability — without sacrificing developer experience.”

  7. Render - I think render is more like a cloud agnostic builder/runner platform, this means that your application needs to be hosted somewhere else.

  8. Railway - Language agnostic and for projects big and small. Never used but it seems very easy to use like Heroku.

  9. Subpabase - Like Planetscale this is only for databases. It is an open source Firebase alternative for building secure and performant Postgres backends with minimal configuration.

  10. Oracle Cloud - Oracle Cloud offers a free-tier for a year.

  11. AWS Amplify - Very easy to use, connects to your github repository and can also create review apps based on branches.

  12. Cyclic - “Connect your GitHub repo. We will build, deploy and manage the hosting.”

And last but not least, Netlify, which is the one I use to host this website(for free). Hugo + Netlify is a powerful combination.

If you have any suggestions that I might have missed, feel free to post in the comments.

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