Explore what’s free on Heroku

Many developers are looking for a free cloud web hosting services to run their apps, blogs, or bots without the hassle of managing servers. Others are curious about trying the platform-as-a-service model, but not quite ready to invest. Here’s an overview of free cloud services for developers available through the Heroku platform and ecosystem.

Provision resources to run your app

Heroku’s free cloud services begins with the apps - apps which can be deployed to dynos - our lightweight Linux containers that are at the heart of the Heroku platform. When you sign up with Heroku, you automatically get a pool of free dyno hours to use for your apps. When your app runs, it consumes dyno hours. When it idles (automatically, after 30 minutes of inactivity), or when you scale it down, your app will stop consuming dyno hours.

You can deploy your free app as many times as you need to, (we love continuous deployment practices), and as long as you have dyno hours, your app will be live and publicly accessible.

Maximize your free platform services

Get 1000 free dyno hours by verifying your Heroku account with a credit card; unverified accounts receive 550 free hours. You will not be charged, unless you decide to use a paid service. Account verification provides other benefits too, including running more than 5 free apps, as well as free custom domain names.

Add any number of data stores

As most apps require some form of data storage, Heroku users can choose from a wide range of free cloud databases. Many of these offer a free plan, and all provide an easy path to upgrade when the time comes.

Heroku Postgres Free Plan

  • Rows: 10k
  • Concurrent Connections: 20
  • Max 4 hours downtime/month
  • Access via Heroku CLI
  • PGBackups: 2 retained
  • Dataclips
  • Rollback: 0 seconds

Heroku Redis Free Plan

  • RAM: 25 MB
  • Concurrent Connections: 20
  • Performance analytics
  • Access via Heroku CLI
  • Redis log metrics

More Storage Add-ons

Many of Heroku’s add-on partners provide limited free cloud hosting solutions for popular data stores, such as Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, and Neo4j Graph.

Explore Heroku Data Services

Use developer-friendly platform tools

Whether you are using free or paid services, you have access to the same free platform tools and open source elements that can make your life a lot easier.

Heroku Dashboard

Manage, scale, and monitor your apps using Heroku Dashboard, an integral part of the Heroku platform experience.

Heroku CLI

Deploy and manage your free apps from the command line using the Heroku CLI, a downloadable tool available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Heroku Platform API

Heroku’s Platform API helps you programmatically automate, extend, and combine Heroku with other services.

Heroku Buttons

With one click, Heroku Buttons let you easily configure and deploy third party components, libraries, and pattern apps. Over a thousand free Buttons are available from open source repos in the Elements Marketplace.

Heroku Buildpacks

Buildpacks are open source scripts that automate the build processes for your preferred languages and frameworks. Choose from over a thousand free buildpacks created by Heroku and the community in the Elements Marketplace.

Heroku Flow

Adopt continuous integration workflows using three free capabilities that are built-in to the Heroku platform: Heroku Pipelines, Review Apps, and GitHub integration.

Extend your app with Heroku Add-ons

Over 200 fully-managed add-on services can be provisioned and scaled with a single command. Many of our add-on partners offer a free plan. This means you can mix and match to determine what’s best for your app.

Some of our most popular add-ons offer a free plan:
Monitoring
New Relic APM
Librato
Logging
Papertrail
Logentries
Email/SMS
Mailgun
SendGrid
Caching
MemCachier
IronCache
Error & Exceptions
Rollbar
Raygun
Deployment/CI
Codeship
Deploy Hooks
Messaging & Queuing
CloudAMQP
Pusher
Search
Bonsai Elasticsearch
Algolia Realtime Search
Security
Tinfoil Security
Secure Key

For more free cloud web services, see the full list of Heroku Add-ons in the Heroku Elements Marketplace.

Get support when needed

Sometimes you need a little help from the experts. All Heroku users can access online documentation and resources 24/7, and if you’re still stuck, then there is free support to help get you unstuck.

Dev Center

Learn everything you need to know about building, deploying, and managing your apps on Heroku.

Help Center

Connect to Heroku and the community resources to help solve common problems. Post your own questions on Stack Overflow.

Standard Support Plan

All Heroku users can access limited free support during regular business hours. Open a ticket to get a response within 1-2 business days.

Upgrade to scale your app

When you're ready to move an app into production, then it’s time to upgrade that app to a paid plan. From the Heroku Dashboard or the CLI, select a Hobby or Professional plan for your app—and you're good to go. Heroku’s slider interface provides simple horizontal scalability as well as visibility into costs.

The next level up is the Hobby dyno, perfect for small apps and projects. It offers all the capabilities of the Free dyno, except:

  • The app will no longer sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity—it's always up
  • The app will no longer consume your free dyno hours, leaving you to spend those on new experiments.

See the pricing page for more information.