Heroku Pricing 2026: Dynos, Postgres and Real Monthly Bills

Heroku has no free dyno plan in 2026: the cheapest way in is the Eco plan at $5 a month, then Basic dynos at $7, Standard-1X at $25 and Performance-M at $250, per Heroku's pricing page on October 19, 2026. Postgres starts at $5 a month on Essential-0. A small always-on app with a worker, a database and a small cache lands around $26 a month on our math below, so budget from the stack, not the dyno.

Our view: Basic is the honest floor for anything users depend on, and Standard is where a team starts paying for Heroku's real advantages, preboot deploys, metrics and horizontal scaling. Eco is fine for side projects that can sleep. The product itself is covered in our Heroku review; this page is about the invoice.

Toolradar data: Heroku's entry plan ranks 23rd of 118 hosting and deployment tools with a verified entry price on Toolradar, the software directory we run, where the median entry price is $12 a month, and Heroku is listed as an alternative to 35 other tools, fifth of 317, as of October 2026 (Heroku on Toolradar). The wider field is in Toolradar's hosting and deployment ranking.

Dyno type	Max price per month	RAM	Best for
Eco	$5 for 1,000 shared hours	0.5 GB	Side projects that can sleep when idle
Basic	$7	0.5 GB	Small always-on apps, one dyno per process
Standard-1X	$25	0.5 GB	Production apps that need zero-downtime deploys
Standard-2X	$50	1 GB	Production apps that outgrow 512 MB
Performance-M	$250	2.5 GB	Dedicated compute and autoscaling
Performance-L	$500	14 GB	High-traffic apps
Private-S to Shield-2XL	$125 to $1,800	1 to 126 GB	Network isolation and compliance in a Private Space

Dyno prices are monthly maximums for a dyno running all month, read on Heroku's pricing page and its usage and billing docs on October 19, 2026.

How does Heroku billing work?

Heroku bills by wall-clock time, prorated to the second, so the listed dyno price is a ceiling, not a fee. Its billing docs say any dyno scaled above zero accrues usage regardless of traffic, and that you are billed in arrears for the previous month. A Basic dyno works out to roughly $0.01 an hour, so a two-hour test costs about two cents.

That proration cuts both ways for a developer. Review apps and short experiments cost almost nothing if you scale them to zero afterwards. A forgotten staging app costs its full price, because Heroku's docs say all usage is charged, including apps created for staging, tutorials or testing.

Eco is the exception. The Eco plan is a flat monthly subscription for 1,000 dyno hours shared across all your Eco dynos, charged whether you use them or not and in full even if you subscribe mid-month. Eco dynos sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, work on personal accounts only and are not available on Heroku Enterprise, per the Eco dyno hours docs and the pricing page.

What each dyno tier adds

Basic adds what Eco lacks for a public app: dynos that stay on, free SSL and up to 10 process types. Heroku's dyno tiers docs say an app on Basic can run only one dyno per process type, so horizontal scaling starts at Standard. A Basic web dyno plus a Basic worker is the cheapest way to run a background queue without sleep.

Standard-1X and Standard-2X add preboot and zero-downtime deploys, app metrics with threshold alerts, unlimited process types and horizontal scaling. The jump to more than three times Basic's price per dyno buys deploy safety and visibility rather than memory, since Standard-1X has the same 0.5 GB of RAM as Basic. For a team shipping several times a day, preboot alone can justify the price, because users stop seeing errors during each restart.

Performance dynos add dedicated compute and autoscaling, from Performance-M up to Performance-2XL at $1,500 a month with 126 GB of RAM. Heroku's docs describe them as single tenant, the first Cedar tier that does not share a server, which is what a latency-sensitive API needs under load.

Private and Shield dynos run inside a Private Space with full network isolation, and Shield adds the ability to sign BAAs for HIPAA plus PCI compliance. The pricing page lists a dyno price for each size but no list price for the Private Space itself, so budget that piece with Heroku's sales team.

Fir dynos: the Kubernetes-based generation

Heroku now sells two dyno generations. Cedar is the long-standing platform priced above. Fir is the Kubernetes-powered generation, and every Fir dyno requires a Private Space. Its sizes run from Classic 1CPU-0.5GB, priced like a Standard-1X, to Compute 32CPU-64GB at $2,400 a month, in Classic, General Purpose, Compute and Memory families.

Fir targets teams that want finer control over CPU and memory ratios and in-region builds and telemetry. Memory 1CPU-8GB, for example, costs $100 a month for 8 GB on one vCPU, a shape Cedar does not offer below Performance-L. The Private Space requirement makes Fir a poor fit for a solo developer with one small app, who pays for isolation they do not need.

Heroku Postgres and Key-Value Store prices

Heroku Postgres starts on Essential-0, at the same price as the Eco plan, with 1 GB of storage and 20 connections on shared RAM. Essential-1 costs $9 for 10 GB, and Essential-2 costs $20 for 32 GB and 40 connections. Every Essential plan lists a maximum downtime of 4 hours a month and a 4,000-table limit.

Data plan	Price per month	What it includes
Postgres Essential-0	$5	1 GB storage, 20 connections, shared RAM
Postgres Essential-1	$9	10 GB storage, 20 connections
Postgres Essential-2	$20	32 GB storage, 40 connections
Postgres Standard-0	$50	Dedicated server, 4 GB RAM, 64 GB storage, 4-day rollback
Postgres Premium-0	$200	Standard-0 sizing plus high availability and 7-day rollback
Postgres Advanced 4G-Performance	$150	2 vCPU, 4 GB memory, 400 connections, first 100 GB-month of storage included
Key-Value Store Mini	$3	25 MB, 20 connections
Key-Value Store Premium 0	$15	50 MB, high availability with failover

The step from Essential to Standard-0 is the one that matters for production. Standard-0 moves you to a dedicated server with fork and follow support, rollback and a 1-hour monthly downtime ceiling instead of 4. Premium-0 costs four times as much for the same sizing, and what it buys is high availability and a 15-minute downtime ceiling.

Key-Value Store, Heroku's Redis-compatible store, starts at $3 a month on Mini and scales to dedicated plans in the thousands. Apache Kafka on Heroku starts at $100 a month on Basic 0. For a side-by-side of managed Postgres prices elsewhere, our Neon pricing and Supabase pricing guides cover the serverless alternatives.

Four app stacks, priced line by line

We priced four common setups at Heroku's monthly maximums, with every dyno running all month. These are list prices; add-ons from the Elements Marketplace and support plans come on top.

Stack	Line items	Monthly total
Side project	1 Eco web dyno, Postgres Essential-0	$10
Small always-on app	Basic web, Basic worker, Postgres Essential-1, Key-Value Mini	$26
Team production app	2 Standard-1X web, 1 Standard-1X worker, Postgres Standard-0, Key-Value Premium 0	$140
High-traffic app	2 Performance-M web, Postgres Premium-0, Key-Value Premium 2	$760

The side project at $10 is cheap but sleeps. One Eco dyno running all month fits inside the 1,000 shared hours, but it sleeps after 30 minutes idle, so the first visitor after a quiet spell waits for a cold start. That is fine for a portfolio or internal tool, and wrong for anything with paying users.

The small always-on app is the realistic floor for a public product. Switching Eco to Basic adds only $2 per dyno and removes the sleep. The constraint is scale: Basic dynos do not scale horizontally, so a traffic spike means upgrading to Standard rather than adding a second dyno.

The team production app is where Heroku's price premium shows. Three Standard-1X dynos cost $75 of the $140, and the Standard-0 Postgres plan is the second-largest line. Add a staging copy on Basic dynos with Essential-0 and the bill rises by another $19, since staging apps are billed like any other.

The high-traffic app spends two-thirds of its bill on two dynos. Performance-M brings dedicated compute and autoscaling, and Premium-0 adds database failover. Autoscaling can push the dyno line higher on busy days, so set a maximum dyno count before you turn it on.

How Heroku compares with Render on a small app

Render's entry compute is priced close to Heroku's. A Render web service starts at $7 a month for 0.5 CPU and 512 MB, and its smallest paid Postgres costs $6 a month for 256 MB of RAM, per Render's pricing page on October 19, 2026. Render also offers a free web service and a free Postgres with limitations, which Heroku does not.

On a one-dyno app with a small database, the two land within a dollar or two of each other. Heroku Basic plus Essential-0 costs $12, while Render's paid web service plus its smallest paid Postgres costs $13 before any workspace fee. The gap opens at the next step: Heroku's first horizontally scalable dyno costs $25, and team features on Render sit in a separate workspace plan, covered in our Render pricing breakdown.

If the bill is the reason you are looking around, our Heroku alternatives list compares the main options, and the how to migrate from Heroku guide prices a real move step by step. Our Railway vs Render comparison and the Fly.io pricing and Railway pricing guides cover the per-second meters on the other side. Render's directory record is Render on Toolradar.

Heroku AI and the costs outside dynos

Heroku Managed Inference and Agents bills per million tokens, separate from dynos. On the pricing page, claude-4-5-sonnet costs $3.30 per million input tokens and $16.50 per million output tokens, and gpt-oss-120b costs $0.15 and $0.60. MCP servers run on one-off dynos billed pay-as-you-go.

Support and add-ons follow their own rules. Basic support is free for every customer, and Heroku sells Standard, Premier and Signature Success Plans to Enterprise customers. Marketplace add-ons are priced by each add-on. Heroku Enterprise has no public price on the pricing page.

How we checked these prices

Louis Corneloup, founder of Dupple and Toolradar, prepared this breakdown for developers sizing a Heroku bill. We read every dyno, data and AI price on Heroku's pricing page and the proration, hourly rates and Eco rules in Heroku's usage and billing and Eco dyno hours docs on October 19, 2026. Render figures come from its pricing page the same day. The stack totals are our arithmetic from those list prices, at a full month of runtime. The Toolradar rank and median come from Heroku's Toolradar record that month. Publishing rules for this site sit on the Devshot about page.

Cite this: Devshot, "Heroku Pricing 2026: Dynos, Postgres and Real Monthly Bills", October 2026.

FAQ

How much does Heroku cost in 2026?

Heroku's Eco plan costs $5 a month for 1,000 shared dyno hours. Always-on dynos cost $7 a month on Basic, $25 on Standard-1X, $50 on Standard-2X and $250 on Performance-M at most, prorated to the second. Postgres starts on Essential-0 at the same price as Eco. Prices were read on Heroku's pricing page in October 2026.

Is Heroku free in 2026?

No. Heroku's pricing page lists no free dyno plan; the cheapest option is the Eco plan, a flat monthly fee for a pool of hours shared by all Eco dynos, which sleep after 30 minutes idle. Render, by contrast, still offers a free web service with limitations.

How much does a small production app cost on Heroku?

A Basic web dyno, a Basic worker, Postgres Essential-1 and Key-Value Mini cost $26 a month at list price, by our arithmetic from Heroku's pricing page. A team setup with three Standard-1X dynos and Postgres Standard-0 comes to $140 a month.

Does Heroku charge for idle dynos?

Yes. Heroku bills wall-clock time for any dyno scaled above zero, regardless of traffic, including staging and test apps. Scaling a dyno to zero stops the charge, and costs are prorated to the second.

What is the cheapest Heroku Postgres plan?

Essential-0 is the cheapest, at the same monthly price as the Eco plan, for 1 GB of storage and 20 connections on shared RAM, with up to 4 hours of downtime a month. The first dedicated plan, Standard-0, costs $50 a month.

What are Heroku Fir dynos?

Fir is Heroku's Kubernetes-powered dyno generation. Its sizes run from $25 to $2,400 a month, and every Fir dyno requires a Private Space, for which the pricing page shows no list price.

Devshot covers developer tool prices and the bills behind them in its newsletter at devshot.co.

Some offers on this page may be paid placements or contain affiliate links.