Heroku just went into "sustaining engineering mode." Here are 5 alternatives whose free tier actually doesn't sleep.

Chalom Ellezam — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:00:27 +0000

In February 2026, Heroku quietly announced it was entering "sustaining engineering mode" — shifting focus away from new features toward "stability and security." They also stopped offering Enterprise contracts to new customers.

Translation, for the rest of us: Heroku is in maintenance mode. It still works. It's not getting better.

If you've been on Heroku (especially if you came back after the free-dyno era ended), this is a good moment to revisit the landscape. The PaaS market has actually gotten better since Heroku stopped innovating. The alternatives below all do parts of what Heroku did well — often for less money.

But here's the question I rarely see asked in "Heroku alternatives" listicles, and it matters a lot for side projects and MVPs:

Does the free tier actually stay up, or does it sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity?

This is the #1 gotcha in the alternatives market. A lot of "free" tiers aren't really free if your first user of the day gets a 30-second cold start. Below, each platform is evaluated specifically on that question, plus pricing, free-tier limits, and who it's actually best for.

1. HostingGuru

Free tier: never sleeps. This is the specific promise — your app stays online, period. One always-on service, free SSL, GitHub auto-deploy, a free custom subdomain. No credit card.

Paid tiers: $19/mo Hobby (3 services, custom domains, encrypted env vars) → $35/mo Pro (10 services, guaranteed resources, background workers, on-demand scripts).

Frameworks: 14+ including Next.js, Django, Rails, Laravel, FastAPI, Express, Rust, Go, Docker, static sites.

Data centers: Germany (EU) and Oregon (US). ISO 27001 / GDPR compliant.

What's different: built-in AI monitoring that tails production logs and pings the team on Telegram when something looks off — hangs, retry loops quietly burning tokens at 3am, unusual error spikes. Most PaaS products leave observability entirely to you.

Best for: solo devs, freelancers, and small teams who want a never-sleeps free tier to start on, and a predictable paid path from there. Also: anyone who needs EU hosting for GDPR reasons.

Caveats: smaller team than the big players. Discord + email is where help happens.

2. Render

Free tier: sleeps. Free web services spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity. Cold start is ~30 seconds. Free background workers don't exist.

Paid tiers: $7/mo Starter web service (no sleep, 512MB RAM, 0.5 CPU). Managed Postgres from $7/mo. Cron jobs, preview environments, background workers all available.

Frameworks: most things, with Dockerfile fallback for anything else.

What's different: probably the most "Heroku-like" option out there. Blueprints (infra-as-code), preview environments on PRs, cron jobs, background workers, managed Postgres. Polished product, long track record.

Best for: teams who liked the Heroku model and will pay $7+/mo right away. If you specifically want a free tier that stays up, Render isn't it.

3. Railway

Free tier: time-limited trial credit. You get ~$5 of trial credit that expires. After that, usage-based billing (roughly $0.000231 per GB-hour compute). No perpetual free tier.

Paid: pay-as-you-go; a typical small web service runs $5–20/mo depending on traffic and memory footprint.

Frameworks: anything that speaks HTTP, really. Nixpacks handles most stacks automatically.

What's different: slickest developer UX in this list. Deploy-from-GitHub is one-click. Usage-based billing is fair-feeling if your project is genuinely small, and scales smoothly if it grows.

Best for: builders who hate pricing tiers and prefer usage-based, predictable scaling. Not a fit if your MVP needs to run for free while you figure out product-market fit.

4. Fly.io

Free tier: 3 shared-cpu-1x VMs, ~256MB RAM each, ~3GB persistent volume. They've tightened the free allowance over time (it used to be more generous), but it's still one of the only real "free always-on" options outside HostingGuru.

Paid: pay-as-you-go beyond the free resources.

Frameworks: anything Dockerizable. There's a fly.toml file you'll touch.

What's different: deploy to multiple regions by default. Your app runs close to your users globally, not in a single region. More "infra-native" feel than the other options here — it leans toward the ops side of the spectrum.

Best for: devs who want edge/multi-region behavior, are comfortable with slightly lower-level abstractions, and don't mind writing a config file.

5. DigitalOcean App Platform

Free tier: static sites only. Dynamic web services start at $5/mo. Managed databases from $15/mo.

Paid: from $5/mo for a basic web service. Higher tiers unlock more CPU/RAM and autoscaling.

Frameworks: buildpack-based, supports the main stacks and Docker fallback.

What's different: lives inside the broader DigitalOcean ecosystem — Droplets, managed databases, Spaces object storage, Kubernetes. The upgrade path is clear: if you outgrow App Platform, you can move the same app to Droplets or DOKS without switching providers.

Best for: teams who plan to scale beyond PaaS later and want a single provider to grow into.

Quick comparison

Platform	Free tier stays up?	Min paid	Best for
HostingGuru	Yes, never sleeps	$19/mo	Always-on free start + AI monitoring
Render	No (sleeps 15 min)	$7/mo	Heroku-like, paid-from-day-one
Railway	Trial credit only	~$5–20/mo usage	Usage-based, predictable scaling
Fly.io	Yes (3 shared VMs)	Pay-as-you-go	Multi-region / edge
DO App Platform	Static only	$5/mo	Scale-out path inside DigitalOcean

How to actually pick

Three questions cut through the marketing:

1. Does your free tier need to stay up?
If yes → HostingGuru or Fly.io. If no → Render is probably the closest to Heroku ergonomics.

2. Do you want a tier ladder or usage-based pricing?
Tiers (HostingGuru, Render, DigitalOcean) are predictable and simple. Usage-based (Railway, Fly.io) is fair if your project is small — and occasionally produces surprises if traffic spikes.

3. Where does your data need to live?
For European customers or GDPR-sensitive workloads → HostingGuru or Fly.io both have EU regions. Render is US-primary (an EU region exists but less mature). DigitalOcean has global data centers but App Platform defaults to the US.

Migrating from Heroku

Most of these have a "deploy from GitHub" flow that makes migration fairly painless for standard stacks (Node, Python, Ruby, Go). The tricky parts are usually:

Scheduled jobs. Heroku Scheduler → each platform has its own cron story. Most support cron syntax natively now.
Background workers. Test carefully; resource limits differ.
Managed Postgres data migration. pg_dump + restore into the new managed DB is the universal answer. Expect 5 minutes of downtime for a small DB.
Environment variables. Most platforms let you bulk import from a .env file or paste from Heroku config vars.
Custom domains and SSL. Trivial everywhere — swap DNS, SSL auto-provisions.

For a Rails or Django app with one web dyno, one worker, and a Postgres DB, a full migration is usually a 1–2 hour job end to end.

Conclusion

Heroku's transition to "sustaining engineering mode" is, in a way, a gift. It forces a market that had gone quiet to start innovating again, and the alternatives above reflect that.

If your top priority is "free tier that stays up" — look at HostingGuru (what I build) or Fly.io. If your priority is "Heroku ergonomics, willing to pay $7/mo from day one" — Render. If your priority is "usage-based, no tiers" — Railway. If your priority is "future-proof path to bigger infrastructure" — DigitalOcean App Platform.

What are you moving to? I'm curious what specifically pushes people one direction or the other — the free-tier question, the pricing model, the frameworks supported, the region. Leave a comment, happy to answer specific migration questions.

If you want to try HostingGuru's always-on free tier, it's at hostingguru.io. No credit card, no sleep, GitHub-to-production in about 90 seconds. I'd love feedback if you give it a spin.

Forem: Chalom Ellezam