Heroku pioneered the shape of what a small team expects from a hosting platform. Push code to Git, get a running app, add a Postgres or a Redis with one command, worry about the product rather than the infrastructure. That shape has since become the industry default, but the platform that invented it has been steadily losing teams since the 2022 when the free-tier was removed, by 2026 much of the ecosystem seems to have moved on.
This post walks through several platforms that are worth considering for a Heroku migration, and describes what a team gains from each one rather than treating them as interchangeable options.
Choosing between them well means understanding which parts of the Heroku experience you want to keep and which parts you were happy to leave behind.
What migrating teams usually bring with them
A team leaving Heroku typically has some combination of:
- A web dyno running a Rails, Django, Node, or similar long-lived process.
- One or two worker dynos running background jobs, scheduled tasks, or queue consumers.
- A managed Heroku Postgres, and often a Heroku Redis or Heroku Data for Redis.
- A handful of add-ons for things like logging, error tracking, email, and object storage.
The platforms below all handle some of these quite cleanly, however, there are some gotchas ...
Platforms are listed in no particular order.
Fly.io
keeps the push-to-deploy feeling that drew most teams to Heroku in the first place, updated for containers, with a multi-service canvas that replaces the mental model of stitching together add-ons. Applications deploy from a Git repository or a Dockerfile, services compose on the canvas with shared environment variables and internal networking, and a Postgres or Redis can be provisioned in a few clicks.
The Hobby plan works as an entry-level tier with metered usage on top. For a Heroku app that's a web dyno, a worker, and a Postgres, the migration is usually mechanical.
Render
treats a multi-service backend as one thing rather than a collection of separately-priced add-ons. Applications are composed on a visual canvas that handles containers, databases, workers, and networking on one page, with container templates for PostgreSQL, Redis, and MariaDB replacing per-service add-on pricing. Public traffic runs through Cloudflare's global edge with a CDN, WAF, DDoS protection, and automatic TLS included, so the security layer that a Heroku team often bolted on separately is already there.
The Pro plan bundles hosting credits pooled across the organization, so the seat fee covers a typical small backend before usage-based charges apply. Enterprise adds bring-your-own-cluster, so the same control plane can drive a customer-owned Kubernetes deployment across any cloud or on-premises.
DigitalOcean
is where JS-heavy Heroku apps land when the shape they really wanted was framework-native serverless, especially anything on Next.js. ISR caching, edge functions, image optimization, middleware, and the AI SDK all wire up automatically from the framework's build output, so the parts of the app Heroku was serving as HTTP handlers become serverless functions that don't pay for idle time.
The tradeoff is architectural because Vercel is designed around HTTP serverless functions and static frontends, not long-running background workers or persistent connections. A Heroku app that's mostly a Rails or Django backend with a heavy worker fleet isn't really going to fit well, however, an app that's Node or Next.js dominant with a light API surface will.
The Hobby tier is generous for personal projects; Pro is priced per seat and adds team features, higher usage caps, and commercial-use rights.
Hetzner (and other VPS providers)
Hetzner is the odd one out on this list. It isn't a managed PaaS like the others, so it doesn't slot into a Heroku migration the same way. It's included because a Heroku team open to running the stack themselves can trade the managed experience for a dramatic drop in monthly cost.
A Hetzner CX22 starts at around $4.59/month in US regions (EU pricing is higher after Hetzner's April 2026 adjustment) for 2 vCPU, 4 GB of RAM, and 40 GB of SSD, which is enough to run a small backend, a Postgres, a Redis, and a worker on one box. Data centers are in Germany, Finland, Singapore, and the United States.
The gap that a VPS opens up is everything Heroku was doing for you: a reverse proxy, TLS, buildpacks, health checks, backups, monitoring, and recovery when the box stops responding. The open-source ecosystem on top of a VPS is mature enough now with options like Coolify, Dokku, Docker Compose, Ansible, Caddy or Traefik which may allow you to reconstruct the Heroku developer experience.
How to choose between them
For a Heroku migration specifically, a few criteria narrow the field faster than pricing pages:
How your services fit together: a single web dyno plus a Postgres is a different migration than four services stitched together with add-ons. Multi-service backends move more cleanly to platforms that treat services as a group.
How your bill grows: Heroku's add-on-per-service model was where costs quietly crept up. Flat per-service tiers, bundled usage credits, and pooled resource plans forecast more cleanly, each in a different way.
What security you want included: the WAF, DDoS protection, and TLS layer that most Heroku teams either paid for separately or hoped was somebody else's problem is included by default on some of these platforms and not others.
Where your users are: if you were feeling regional latency on Heroku, multi-region compute changes the math. If you weren't, it's overhead you don't need.
The cloud hosting market for indie developers and small teams is in a good place in 2026, and there is a legitimate Heroku alternative for essentially every shape of app the platform used to run. Start with the shape of what you're bringing across, not the pricing page, and the choice narrows itself down quickly.
Details in this post were valid at time of writing (July 2026). Cloud pricing and free-tier limits change often, so check the linked platform pages before making a real decision.
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