Heroku - 7 The costs of Heroku

This lesson is about the cost of running on Heroku. Heroku pricing can look confusing at first because several elements add up. By the end of this video you will understand the main building blocks of a Heroku bill: dynos, add-ons, Teams, Heroku CI and Premium Support.

The four dyno types

  • Free — covers the basics: build slug, install dependencies, produce a release and run it. Sleeps after 30 minutes of inactivity, so the first hit after sleep takes longer to respond. Each account has a shared monthly quota of free dyno hours; if several apps run on free dynos, they all draw from the same pool.
  • Hobby — $7 per dyno per month. Main differences vs Free: it never sleeps (24/7 availability) and no hour limit. You also get extra app metrics over the last 24 hours: releases, memory usage, response time.
  • Standard (Professional) — Hobby features plus horizontal scalability: add as many dynos as you want, Heroku auto-balances incoming requests across them so workload is roughly even. You get threshold alerts (emails when, for example, memory usage gets too high) and the preboot feature: by default each release causes <1 minute of downtime; preboot allocates a new dyno running the new release while the others keep serving the old one, then rolls dynos over with zero user-facing downtime. RAM: 512 MB on Standard-1X, 1 GB on Standard-2X.
  • Performance — Standard features but on a dedicated machine: only your application runs on the box, no neighbors. Comes with automatic scaling (Heroku adds dynos automatically if memory thresholds are about to be hit). RAM: 2.5 GB on Performance-M, around 14 GB on Performance-L.

Dyno cost itself depends on usage and ranges roughly from $25 to $500 per dyno per month.

Add-ons, Teams, CI and Premium Support

Each add-on bills its own way; we use Heroku Postgres as an illustrative example. The free Postgres plan caps you at 10,000 rows — exceed that and you can no longer insert into the database. The first paid tier costs $9 per month and raises the cap to 10 million rows, with extra features like backups.

Teams (introduced in the previous lesson for fine-grained permissions) cost $10 per user per month once the Team has more than 5 members; up to 5 members the option is free.

Heroku CI adds an automated test step before each release: tests pass → release is created; tests fail → release is blocked. This costs $10 per month extra, plus a per-minute charge for the dynos used during test runs. Example: 5 test runs in the month using a Performance-M dyno (~$250/month base price) costs roughly $10 + ($250 × 5 × minutes_used / total_minutes_in_month).

Finally, Premium Support: every Heroku customer gets default support, but if you need 24/7 coverage with under-one-hour response time, you can subscribe to Premium Support. Pricing is custom (depends on app size, contact the Heroku sales team), starting around $1,000 per month. See you in the next lesson.