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

Heroku's pricing model depends on four dyno types—Free, Hobby, Standard, and Performance—with increasing features and costs. Beyond dynos, expenses include add-ons like PostgreSQL, team management fees, and CI/CD integration. Understanding each component is essential to controlling your Heroku bill, as Free dynos sleep and share monthly hours while paid tiers offer 24/7 uptime, auto-scaling, and dedicated resources. Strategic selection can significantly reduce infrastructure costs.

Key points

  • Free dynos sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity and share a 1000 dyno-hour monthly limit across all apps; Hobby dynos ($7/month) run 24/7 with metrics dashboards showing release, memory, and response time data.
  • Standard dynos support horizontal scaling with automatic load balancing across multiple dynos and memory-threshold alerting; Standard 1x offers 512MB RAM while Standard 2x provides 1GB RAM.
  • Performance dynos use dedicated machines (not shared) with automatic scaling capabilities; Memory options are Performance M (2.5GB) and Performance L (14GB), with costs ranging from $25-$500 per dyno per month.
  • PostgreSQL add-on pricing varies by tier: free tier allows up to 10,000 rows; basic plan costs $9/month for 10 million rows; additional tiers include enhanced backup capabilities and features.
  • Team management costs $10/month when more than five members join an organization; teams with five or fewer members get the feature free and gain better permission control over applications and users.
  • Heroku CI (continuous integration) automatically runs tests before each release; deployments proceed only if tests pass, otherwise the release is blocked—all tied to your dyno type and add-on configuration.

FAQ

Why does my Heroku bill vary month to month even though I use the same dyno type?

Heroku charges based on multiple factors: dyno type, add-on usage (e.g., PostgreSQL rows stored), team member count (charged at $10/month if five or more), and Performance dyno actual usage ($25-$500 per dyno). Additionally, Free dynos share a monthly hour limit across all your applications, so multiple apps deplete the same pool.

How can I avoid sleep times and keep my application running 24/7 on Heroku?

Switch from Free dynos (which sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity) to at least Hobby dynos ($7/month), which run continuously without sleep. Standard and Performance dynos are more expensive options that also provide 24/7 uptime plus additional features like horizontal scaling and auto-scaling.

What is the benefit of Heroku's continuous integration feature mentioned in the lesson?

Heroku CI automatically runs your application tests before deploying a new release. If tests pass, the release is created and deployed; if tests fail, the deployment is blocked. This ensures code quality and prevents broken deployments, protecting application stability without manual intervention.