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.

Summary

This lesson explores Heroku's pricing model across four dyno types: Free (limited, sleeps after 30 minutes), Hobby ($7/month, always-on), Standard ($25–500/month with horizontal scaling and load balancing), and Performance (dedicated hardware with auto-scaling). The lesson also covers add-ons such as PostgreSQL (free tier: 10,000 rows; Basic: $9/month for 10 million rows), team options ($10/month for teams over 5 members), and CI/CD pipeline integration that prevents deployment of failing code.

Key points

  • Heroku offers four dyno tiers: Free (sleeps after 30 min inactivity, 1000 hours/month shared pool), Hobby (always-on, $7/month), Standard ($25–500/month with horizontal scaling), and Performance (dedicated resources, auto-scaling).
  • Load balancing on Standard and higher dynos automatically distributes requests evenly across multiple instances, preventing overload on any single dyno.
  • PostgreSQL add-on pricing: Free tier (10,000 rows), Basic ($9/month for 10 million rows), with additional backup and capability features at higher tiers.
  • Team option costs $10/month only for teams with more than 5 members; free for 5 or fewer, enabling better permission and application controls.
  • Zero-downtime deployments are achieved using multiple professional dynos: new code deploys to a fresh dyno while existing dynos continue serving traffic, then older dynos gracefully transition.
  • CI/CD pipeline integration runs automated tests before release creation, blocking deployment if tests fail.

FAQ

What happens when a free Heroku dyno becomes inactive?

After 30 minutes of inactivity, the free dyno enters sleep mode and takes additional time to restart when accessed again. Free dynos also share a pool of 1000 monthly operating hours across all your free applications—if you exceed this limit, Heroku stops the dyno.

How does Heroku's load balancing work on Standard dynos?

Heroku automatically distributes all incoming requests across your standard dynos, ensuring roughly equal workload distribution. This prevents any single dyno from being overwhelmed while others remain idle, improving application reliability.

What PostgreSQL pricing tiers does Heroku offer?

PostgreSQL has a free tier supporting up to 10,000 rows. The Basic tier costs $9/month for 10 million rows. Higher tiers offer additional backup capabilities, and you can upgrade at any time as your data grows.