David Babalola

Posted on Aug 26, 2022

Free Alternatives to Heroku

#help #heroku #webdev #python

Given the recent news about Heroku bringing an end to free dynos and PostgreSQL databases, what other free platforms can I use to host Django (Python) powered web applications for free.

Top comments (76)

Jan Vlnas • Aug 26 '22 • Edited

Services which come closest to Heroku's convenience with free tiers are Fly and Render. Render seems to offer Postgres on a free plan. Another option is Railway which AFAICT doesn't have a free tier, but basic usage is quite cheap.

Check out this list for more services with free tiers (not just PaaS like Heroku): github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev

Paweł Świątkowski • Aug 27 '22 • Edited

Bear in mind that free databases on Render are deleted after 90 days. That's not 90 days of inactivity, just 90 days after creation. They say it's a temporary measure and the are going to change it in the future (which I hope for), but for now it's not really a viable alternative for Heroku.

Jan Vlnas • Aug 27 '22 • Edited

Good point! So it may be better to look at external DBaaS providers. For Postgres/relational databases there's aforementioned CockroachDB, and some others like PlanetScale, ElephantSQL, and YugabyteDB (Managed).

Amy Liu • Mar 8 '23

Supabase is vanilla postgres and very generous free tier

Jan Vlnas • Mar 8 '23

Thanks for the tip. I didn't consider Supabase for their managed database but I will check it out.

I don't consider Supabase as a Heroku-equivalent replacement, since it supports only short-lived database / edge functions and triggers. Heroku and the likes can run a “traditional”, persistent application server.

Konstantin BIFERT • Aug 31 '22

Damn, thanks for the tip! 👌🏻

tnypxl • Aug 27 '22

AFAICT = As far as I can tell

Because it took me longer that it should have to figure that out.

Amanuel • Aug 30 '22

good tips

Steve_Val • Feb 13 '23 • Edited

can confirm Supabase is incredible.

Open Source
Huge and helpful community
Incredible support team

It ticks all the boxes

There is also a python client library for use with Django (or you can connect to it the same way you would any other PostgreSQL db since it's just vanilla pg under the hood)

David Babalola • Feb 13 '23

Thank you for letting me know this.

Sokhavuth TIN • Aug 26 '22 • Edited

You could try Vercel.com. It supports Node.js, Python, Go, Ruby. And you can add your own preferred language if you want. It is very similar to Heroku. You could follow the link below to setup and deploy Django to Vercel.
devmaesters.com/blog/15

Teo Jia Cheng • Jan 24 '23

Vercel is very solid

Wildan Mubarok • Aug 28 '22 • Edited

I've been working on my own cloud platform since 2 years ago because none cloud services (even heroku) is good enough to me. It has a free option (1GB storage) for everybody and it support Django and/or other languages.

pahosler • Sep 2 '22

signed up, but there is an error setting up ssl

There were too many requests of a given type :: Error creating new order :: too many certificates already issued for: domcloud.io: see https://letsencrypt.org/docs/rate-limits/
Ask for help or search for solutions at https://community.letsencrypt.org. See the logfile /var/log/letsencrypt/letsencrypt.log or re-run Certbot with -v for more details.

also can you update rust or allow access to rustup?

thanks

Wildan Mubarok • Sep 2 '22

That SSL error means the static files path aren't adjusted properly in NginX. I should write docs for that. Fire up an email if you need help to solve that.

Rust can be installed with SSH/without sudo: webinstall.dev/rustlang/

pahosler • Sep 2 '22

ah ok, thanks!

pahosler • Sep 2 '22

and nope, had already tried that, but rust is already installed, and rustup isn't available.

Monica El Khoury • Feb 13 '23 • Edited

Supabase is indeed a fantastic choice! It provides a simple interface for working with Postgres database, and the free tier makes it an accessible option for developers of all skill levels ⚡️

Comment deleted

Zernonia • Feb 16 '23

Agree! Supabase is 🔥

awalias • Feb 13 '23 • Edited

Supabase ftw

Jonathan Summers-Muir • Feb 13 '23

⚡️⚡️⚡️

David Babalola • Feb 13 '23 • Edited

Sounds interesting. I would look into it. Thanks a lot.

Sokhavuth TIN • Aug 27 '22 • Edited

By browsing this GitHub repository github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev, I found out that this web hosting Deta offers free hosting service and unlimited applications & database. However, at the present time, it supports only Node.js and Python with micro-frameworks such as Express, Bottle.py, Flask, FastAPI etc. I did not try it yet. It is people from Germany who are building this Deta platform.

Jan Vlnas • Aug 27 '22

Deta is nice, but you need to specifically design your app around their platform, like their serverless containers (Micros) and NoSQL database (Base). So Django and Postgres from the original question are nonstarters.

Sokhavuth TIN • Aug 27 '22 • Edited

I just want to give some clue for people who want a free alternative to Heroku, not just to host Django and Postgres.

Talking about Deta Micros, it just two lines of code, that is it.

# to create a project locally and on Deta platform
deta new --python myproject

# to deploy the updated project to Deta
deta deploy

The rest is the regular Python language and framework.

For Deta NoSQL database, there are only 6 methods to interact with the database.

put – Stores an item in the database. It will update an item if the key already exists.
insert – Stores an item in the database but raises an error if the key already exists. (2x slower than put).
get – Retrieves an item from the database by its key.
fetch – Retrieves multiple items from the database based on the provided (optional) filters.
delete – Deletes an item from the database.
update – Updates an item in the database.

Data entry in Deta Base is JavaScript object called "document" like in many other NoSQL databases.