Cheaper Heroku alternatives
Pricing data as of 2026-08-28 · refreshed weekly
Baseline: a Next.js app with startup-level traffic (~50,000 visits/month) costs $5/month on Heroku (Eco). Every provider below can run the same workload — ranked by real list price. Cheaper is not always better: a paas platform and a raw VPS differ in how much ops work lands on you.
| Provider | Type | Plan | $/month | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel | serverless | Hobby | $0 | Heroku vs Vercel → |
| Orkestr | paas | Starter | $0 | Heroku vs Orkestr → |
| Koyeb | paas | eco-micro | $2.68 | Heroku vs Koyeb → |
| DigitalOcean Droplets | vps | Basic 512MB | $4 | Heroku vs DigitalOcean Droplets → |
| OVHcloud VPS | vps | VPS-1 | $4.54 | Heroku vs OVHcloud VPS → |
| Fly.io | paas | shared-cpu-1x 512MB | $4.8 | Heroku vs Fly.io → |
| Vultr | vps | Cloud Compute 1GB | $5 | Heroku vs Vultr → |
| Railway | paas | Hobby | $5 | Heroku vs Railway → |
| Linode (Akamai) | vps | Nanode 1GB | $5 | Heroku vs Linode (Akamai) → |
| AWS Lightsail | vps | $5 bundle | $5 | Heroku vs AWS Lightsail → |
| Netcup | vps | VPS 500 G12 | $6.4 | Heroku vs Netcup → |
| Hostinger VPS | vps | KVM 1 | $6.49 | Heroku vs Hostinger VPS → |
| Hetzner Cloud | vps | CX23 | $7.09 | Heroku vs Hetzner Cloud → |
| Scaleway | vps | DEV1-S | $7.1 | Heroku vs Scaleway → |
| Render | paas | 512 MB / 0.5 CPU | $17.35 | Heroku vs Render → |
| Netlify | serverless | Pro | $20 | Heroku vs Netlify → |