Websites and hosting decision
Heroku
Build only if you need total control; otherwise keep paying. Heroku’s durable advantages — a large add-on marketplace, audited compliance posture, enterprise integrations, and global scale — are expensive to replicate for most teams.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Heroku alternatives, with the arithmetic →
Code Heroku publishes itself
Not a way out of the subscription - these are the vendor’s own repositories. Worth a look for how they build, and for anything you would have to integrate with.
What a replacement has to do
- Provide a minimal hosted app platform that accepts app source, builds a container, runs it on managed containers, routes HTTP, and exposes basic scaling and metrics.
What it still won’t have
- Heroku-managed global scale and operations
- Large add-on marketplace and community-built buildpacks
- Enterprise compliance attestation (PCI/HIPAA/ISO/SOC) and Shield features
- Heroku Connect and tight Salesforce integration
- Heroku enterprise support and SLAs
What remains hard
- Marketplace liquidity
Heroku’s 150+ third-party add-ons and 380+ open source buildpacks provide a rich ecosystem of preintegrated extensions and services.
- Compliance and regulation
We regularly perform audits and maintain PCI, HIPAA, ISO, and SOC compliance
- Integration maintenance
Heroku Elements Marketplace Accelerate your app development with our ecosystem of add-ons, integrations, and buildpacks.
- Infrastructure at scale
Heroku handles more than 65 billion requests every day
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 15 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal Heroku-like PaaS using Git/Docker build-to-image and Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS) + a single managed Postgres. Stack: GitHub Actions (build), Docker, Kubernetes, Nginx/Traefik ingress, cert-manager, and a small Node.js/Express control-plane. In scope: accept git push or Docker image, build image, deploy to k8s, create/update a Deployment and Service, provision a managed Postgres instance, route custom domains with TLS, provide a web UI and CLI to scale dyno replicas and view basic logs/metrics. Out of scope: multi-tenant private spaces, enterprise SSO, full add-on marketplace, advanced autoscaling policies, and paid SLA support. Deliver: container images, k8s manifests/Helm chart, a small control-plane repo, end-to-end tests for deploy/scale/teardown, and error handling/logging for build and deploy failures.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Pay verdict base20
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-9
- Evidence score26
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productHeroku | The Cloud Application Platform For Developers
- official pricingCloud Application Platform Pricing & Plans | Heroku
- official docsHeroku Enterprise | AI PaaS Developer Experience
- open sourcecloudfoundry/bosh
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
