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↗$5/mo
$60/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off80 h to build
$65/mo40 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 15 seats.
The code exists. It is not what you are paying for.
This project is real, published, and does the core job — and this page still says keep paying. What the subscription buys is marketplace liquidity, compliance and regulation and integration maintenance, and none of that ships in a repository. Fork it anyway if you want to. Go in knowing what it does not carry. What stays hard ↓ · 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.
