Heroku Pricing Complaints

The cluster centers on criticisms of Heroku's high costs compared to cheaper alternatives like AWS, DigitalOcean, and EC2, with debates on its value for hobby projects versus production apps.

📉 Falling 0.1x DevOps & Infrastructure
3,212
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#1101
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
1
2008
13
2009
54
2010
251
2011
175
2012
321
2013
340
2014
216
2015
200
2016
211
2017
110
2018
99
2019
138
2020
174
2021
219
2022
426
2023
104
2024
85
2025
73
2026
2

Keywords

DO S3 Railway.app AWS UX SQL IMO HN VPS VM heroku mo expensive app price aws hosting pay free tier convenience

Sample Comments

paxys Oct 29, 2022 View on HN

If your problem with Heroku is the price why would you use something that is even more expensive?

granshaw Jan 26, 2023 View on HN

Just use Heroku and move on with your life... its not THAT expensive :) And if it is for you, youre probably at a point with the product where you can afford it.

simplify Oct 3, 2018 View on HN

How much money do you save vs using Heroku?

fenwick67 Dec 11, 2018 View on HN

Heroku is a bit pricy, that's probably related.

sunsu Aug 20, 2012 View on HN

Price! Heroku is vastly more expensive.

paxys Nov 23, 2020 View on HN

Heroku is terrible value for money. You can very easily use one of the dozens of free & open source deployment managers or CLIs for EC2 and get the same ease of use at 1/10-1/20 of the cost. It's good for hosting a hobby project for free or $5/mo and forgetting about it, but it doesn't make any sense for a startup.

lukasm Aug 12, 2014 View on HN

I really love Heroku. It's so well design, but I'm considering change to DigitalOcean, AWS or something similar.The main reason is price: Former providers are 3x cheaper to host side project. I don't make money out of it and it's getting too expensive.AWS gives 20k to startups which is enough to take pain of maintenance/devops.I'd be happy if I got 2 dynos for half the price for 2 years.

idlewords Oct 9, 2016 View on HN

Using Heroku puts two levels of bloat between you and the hardware, and locks you into a hosting environment that becomes very expensive quickly. Eschew.

dtech Nov 12, 2025 View on HN

No, Heroku is just bonkers expensive

general_failure Nov 14, 2014 View on HN

It's expensive comparatively. The convenience heroku provides is vastly overweighs the price.