![Cover image for 9 Hand Picked FREE Heroku Alternatives [2023]](https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=1000,height=420,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Fyvpbyxo3tqelg0chy8ad.png)
Beginning November 28, 2022, Heroku, one of the most popular go to choice used by developers to host their apps, announced that it would be shuttin...
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
I have apps on Render, Vercel, and Heroku. Have been putting all new things on Render since last year, working good so far, one key thing on Render is you get shell access ❤️. Netlify is great for a free basic front end app, I have a simple thing on there and it was effortless. Vercel is excellent for a serious app but def more complicated (beyond simple stuff) and hard to stay free. You could look at Supabase for a free backend and put the front end on Netlify. Looking to move off of Heroku as soon as feasible, it seems like more and more problems with them.
Thank you for your input! 🙌
Missed one. Deno Deploy. My site is running on it. Also puts your site on 35 international POPs. Zero latency for my friends in Australia:
russbrooks.com/colophon
Deno Deploy is just a great service.
Damn awesome stuff. Thank you for adding this!
VPS' with Caprover is my goto solution.
I also just a VPS (from Contabo) and host with Coolify which is really great.
Great! What VPS do you currently have? Any recommendations?
I can recommend Contabo. Anyways it's not really free. But really cheap
Great, I had heard of BuyVM too but this seems even cheaper. Thanks a lot!
What's about Netlify?
Netlify can be considered similar to Vercel. Maybe check this out. Thanks!
Thanks
I usually use either the github pages or even cloudflare but those are awesome for beginners. I am thinking about moving towards AWS to get more into their web services and have a familiarity to get my certificates
GitHub Pages and Cloudflare Pages work seamlessly 💯
Render.io is my personal favourite in the sense of a free server.
Yup, great service! Though Deta is my current go to platform for deploying hobby projects :)
Have you checked out Koyeb?
Nice stuff. Seems better than railway.app with their recent pricing change. Thank you!
Let me know if you have any questions or feedback as you check out Koyeb and get started. More than happy to chat and help!
Deta looks very good. I have deployed my django rest api application for free on Deta Space.
Now, I definitely love it
Yup, Deta is really good!
A bit apples and oranges?
Compared to other articles on this topic, I think I covered most aspects of what free services are comparable to Heroku specifically for hobby projects. Free services will never provide services closer to paid products. But I think these tools do the job for hosting simple projects, which one can avoid paying money for.
For backend application, you have Deta and Cyclic.
For frontend, GH Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, etc.
For a managed solution more closer to Heroku, Railway.
All rounder, Oracle.
Yeah that's just what I meant, Heroku is a PaaS where you can deploy/host/monitor/manage your traditional Rails or Django "full stack" app - so Railway would be more "apples to apples", within that category.
Well, and also Fly.io apparently, they have a very detailed "cookbook" on how to transfer your Rails app fro Heroku onto their platform.
But for Fly.io I'd add as a "con" that their pricing model is way more complex compared to some others who have more like 3 tiers along the lines of "hobby, pro, enterprise" (with a base monthly price and optionally an "on demand" component) - with Fly.io it seems thoroughly unclear up front what the costs will be.
Vercel, Cloudflare, Github Pages and most others are more the new school "JAMStack" thing - build (and host) a SPA, and build an API (often using "functions" or comparable 'serverless' technology).
So you first have to consider what kind of 'stack' you want for your app (a traditional monolith, or "JAMStack", SPA + API) - and then the options that make sense are already greatly reduced.
But it's an interesting overview, thanks for that - there are even some options which I'd never heard of, the choices are MANY ... do you think all of these platforms/providers will survive in 5 years from now? This market is starting to look rather crowded.
P.S. and Deta is neither "JAMStack" not "Heroku" it seems - it goes more a bit in the direction of Github Codespaces? Having your own 'machine' somewhere in the cloud ... and what about platforms like Firebase and Supabase? JAMStack "with a twist" ...
Very true! Fly.io's system is a bit complicated. Maybe because they care to build and manage things themselves to provide too much flexibility, it gets overkill for an average user.
Regarding the tech stack, I think most of the people on Heroku's free tier, like me, used it only for simple Node.js backend api's and discord bots. That segment of users is already not too concerned where they are hosting their apps — the only condition being they get the service for free. I have some open source projects requiring a simple backend (e.g. deref and jekyllex), and I do not plan to pay a monthly fee to host them anytime soon.
I also agree that free services like these are not for the long term. If one is very concerned about the uptime of their services for as long as possible, they are better off paying some established hosting platform. There is always a trade off using things that are free — in this case it being migrating every now and then as free plans shut down.
Deta had a transition from what it called "Cloud" to now "Space". Cloud was more concerned with hosting micros (small backend services which exposed endpoints), that stored data in their NoSQL database "Base" or file storage "Drive". The transition has introduced the concept of installing apps to user accounts. This is similar to forking repositories on GitHub. You can install apps from their marketplace, set up your environment (so your app data stays with you), and update apps when new versions are available. This was done to introduce monetization in their service. But hosting backend and frontend applications without listing your project to their marketplace is still possible. I have had a great experience so far and thus it is my current go to platform to host my hobby/open-source backend projects.
Thanks a lot for your input!
Thank you too! Interesting stuff :)
Here is a project deployed on Deta Space for definitely free.
I used Django and restframeowork as a backend, and used React.js as a frontend.
Please take a look at this project, and If you think it's useful, please give it a star.
github.com/crazy-man22/django-reac...