Heroku Pricing Comparison & Reduction
Heroku has been able to greatly reduce the amount of dev time spent on tooling, maintenance and DevOps. Teams are willing to pay for good infrastructure so that they can spend more time building applications - but at scale, the Heroku pricing model and total costs become unfair and expensive.
Northflank solves this with a fair, straightforward pricing model that scales evenly as your consumption grows, while levelling up developer experience and deployment flexibility.
Heroku Dyno pricing vs Northflank containers
| Heroku plan | RAM | Price | vs | Northflank plan | CPU | RAM | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eco | 512MB | $5.00 | vs | nf-compute-10 | 0.1 | 256MB | $2.71 |
| Basic | 512MB | $7.00 | vs | nf-compute-20 | 0.2 | 512MB | $5.41 |
| Standard 1X* | 512MB | $25.00 | vs | nf-compute-50 | 0.5 | 1024MB | $12.00 |
| Standard 4X | 1GB | $50.00 | vs | nf-compute-100-1 | 1 | 1024MB | $18.00 |
| Performance 12X* | 2.5GB | $250.00 | vs | nf-compute-100-2 | 1 | 2048MB | $24.00 |
| vs | nf-compute-200 | 2 | 4096MB | $48.00 | |||
| vs | nf-compute-200-8 | 2 | 8192MB | $72.00 | |||
| vs | nf-compute-400 | 4 | 8192MB | $96.00 | |||
| Performance 100X* | 126GB | $1500.00 | vs | nf-compute-200-16 | 2 | 16384MB | $120.00 |
| vs | nf-compute-400-16 | 4 | 16384MB | $144.00 |
On top of the compute and storage costs, Heroku has additional expenses which might be required by your team.
- Pay-per-seat in your 5+ person team: $10 per user per month
- Heroku CI: $10 per month per pipeline
- Private and Shield workloads required for greater security or high compliance apps, starting at $1000-$5000 per month.
These additional costs on top of the compute and storage cost will make the cloud bill end up way above required.
Northflank offers the features highlighted below for free for all users, regardless of your compute usage or support contract.
CI/CD
Deploy latest setting on a deployment service will switch between deploying a specific build or linking to a branch or pull request.
Advanced private networking
Secure private network, enable public load-balancing and connect locally with Northflank CLI proxy.
Observe and Monitor
Observe your container runs and builds in real-time with log tailing, search and performance metrics.
Teams
At Northflank teams are supported by default, regardless of the size.
TLS and secure connection
TLS is enabled by default and generated connection details.
Custom Domain SSL
Seamlessly create free Let’s Encrypt certificates for your domains and subdomains with automatic regeneration.
Data: Heroku Postgres vs Northflank Postgres Addon
| Heroku Name | Replicas | RAM | Storage | Heroku Price | vs | Northflank Name | Replicas | RAM | Storage | Northflank Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Essential 0 | 1 | 1GB | $5.00 | vs | nf-compute-10 | 1 | 256MB | 6GB | $4.50 | |
| Essential 1 | 1 | 10GB | $9.00 | vs | nf-compute-20 | 1 | 512MB | 12GB | $9.00 | |
| Essential 2 | 1 | 32GB | $20.00 | vs | nf-compute-20 | 1 | 512MB | 40GB | $17.40 | |
| Standard S | 1 | 4GB | 64GB | $50.00 | vs | nf-compute-100-4 | 1 | 4096MB | 60GB | $54.00 |
| Standard L | 1 | 61GB | 1TB | $1,400.00 | vs | nf-compute-200-32 | 1 | 65536MB | 1TB | $780.00 |
| Premium S | 2 | 4GB | 64GB | $200.00 | vs | nf-compute-100-4 | 2 | 4096MB | 64GB | $132.00 |
| Premium L | 2 | 61GB | 1TB | $2,500.00 | vs | nf-compute-200-64 | 2 | 65536MB | 1TB | $1,560.00 |
Data: Heroku Redis vs Northflank Redis Addon
| Heroku Name | RAM | Connections | Replicas | Heroku Price | vs | Northflank Name | RAM | Connections | Replicas | Northflank Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mini | 1 | 25MB | 20 | $3.00 | vs | Developer Free | 256MB | Unlimited | $0.00 | |
| Premium 0 | 2 | 50MB | 40 | $15.00 | ||||||
| Premium 2 | 2 | 500MB | 400 | $120.00 | vs | nf-compute-20 | 512MB | Unlimited | $10.82 | |
| Premium 5 | 2 | 1GB | 1000 | $200.00 | vs | nf-compute-100-1 | 1024MB | Unlimited | $36.00 | |
| Premium 7 | 2 | 7GB | 10,000 | $750.00 | vs | nf-compute-200-8 | 8192MB | Unlimited | $144.00 | |
| Premium 9 | 2 | 10GB | 25,000 | $1,400.00 | vs | nf-compute-200-16 | 16384MB | Unlimited | $240.00 |
Private cloud: Heroku Private Space vs Northflank in your cloud
Northflank operates on a secure multi-tentant infrastructure. For some workloads or organisations this is not enough: teams would like to run their builds and deployments in their own VPC and own cloud account. To cater to this, Northflank has built a bring your own cloud (BYOC) experience.
Using Northflank you can create a project that deploys into your own AWS, GCP, Azure or Alibaba Cloud account. In the background Northflank provisions a managed GKE, EKS, AKS or ACK cluster. Clusters are ready for production deployments in minutes. Integrate with your existing infrastructure, billing arrangements, cloud credits and debugging and observability tools.
| Feature | Heroku Private Space | Northflank BYOC |
|---|---|---|
| Dedicated, isolated application runtimes | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi cloud support | ✕ | AWS, GCP, Azure, Civo, Oracle, Bare-Metal |
| Isolation for apps and data | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multiple geographic regions enable lower latency for globally distributed users | ✓ | ✓ |
| Ability to add private databases | Postgres and Redis | Postgres, Redis, MySQL, MinIO, MongoDB, RabbitMQ |
| Services, jobs and databases inside a project communicate directly on a private network | ✓ | ✓ |
| Secure connections to external resources with Trusted IPs and Stable Outbound IPs | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audit logging for improved governance and data residency control | ✓ | ✓ |
| Keystroke logging of interactive one-off service sessions | ✓ | ✕ |
| Strict TLS enforcement disabling TLS 1.0 on all web apps | ✓ | ✓ |
| Services with encrypted volumes and disks | ✓ | ✓ |
| Postgres with encryption enforcement | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pricing | $3000/month | Starting at $300/month → |
Get Started
Check out this blog post for insights into Heroku's latest developments and the best alternatives available. We break down key features, limitations, and why businesses are making the switch.
If you're considering migrating from Heroku, our documentation provides a step-by-step guide to help you move your projects to Northflank. The process is straightforward—use our automated import tool for a seamless transition or manually migrate your applications with full control. Either way, we ensure a smooth and hassle-free experience.