5 Heroku Alternatives for Free Full Stack Hosting
Heroku’s cloud offering won’t be free for much longer, but there are still good alternatives if you’re looking to migrate.
Heroku is a platform as a service (PaaS) that enables developers to build, run, and operate their applications entirely in the cloud. It’s popular for its simplicity, usability, and free tier. This lets you run your applications for free using a full range of free cloud services available through the Heroku ecosystem.
Heroku recently announced they would stop offering some of their free plans from November 28, 2022.
This will be particularly relevant if you host applications for a short time, maybe to showcase to potential employers or clients.
Fortunately, there are alternatives.
1. Render
Render is a unified cloud to build and run all your apps and websites. It has free TLS certificates, a global CDN, DDoS protection, private networks, and auto deploys from Git.
Render provides a free tier for the following services:
- Static Sites: Render’s free plan for static sites features a swift CDN and an unlimited number of collaborators. Other features include continuous deploys from Git, 100 GB/ month bandwidth, and custom domains with fully managed TLS.
- Web Services: Render’s free plan for services supports web services with HTTP/2 and full TLS. Render supports custom docker containers and background workers. You can use it to host web apps in Node.js, the server-side JavaScript environment. It also had support for other languages including Python, Golang, Rust, Ruby, and Elixir.
- Databases: Render’s free plan features fully managed PostgreSQL and Redis databases. They allow connections from anywhere.
Using Render’s free plans, you can spin up web services and databases with zero cost. However, these plans have certain usage limits and are designed to help build personal projects and explore new tech.
2. Cyclic
Cyclic is a modern cloud architecture with serverless hosting and an easy onboarding experience.
Cyclic is ideal for hosting full-stack MERN apps. Its free tier features up to 100,000 API requests with fast builds and 1GB runtime memory. The service also includes 1GB object storage with amazon S3, three cron tasks per app, and seven-day log retention.
Using Cyclic’s free tier gives you an edge over competitors when it comes to inactivity delay. Platforms like Heroku and Render take approximately 30 seconds to restart a service after a period of inactivity. In contrast, this service takes approximately 200ms according to Cyclic’s benchmarks.
3. Railway
Railway is a platform where you can provision infrastructure, develop with it locally, then deploy it to the cloud.
Railway makes it possible to deploy your web applications in a single click using their templates. There are over 50 Railway templates for web apps built with different languages and frameworks.
Railway’s free tier features 512 MB RAM, shared CPU/container, and 1GB of disk space. It also offers unlimited inbound network bandwidth, multiple custom domains with SSL, and $5 or 500 hours of usage.
4. Deta
Deta is a free cloud platform for hosting web services with support for Python and Node.js applications. It features built-in API-Key authentication and cron, with 128 MB of RAM per execution. There’s also 10GB storage and an easy-to-use, production-grade NoSQL database with unlimited storage.
Unlike other Heroku alternatives, Deta does not have a paid tier. According to them, their services are free forever.
5. Fly.io
Fly.io is a platform that allows you to host and run small applications for free and scale costs affordably as your needs grow.
The free tier features up to three shared CPUs, 256MB VMs, 3GB persistent volume storage, and 160GB outbound data transfer.
Applications hosted on fly.io that exceed the above are billed at the usage-based pricing.
Other Heroku Alternatives
Other platforms like Vercel, Netlify, and GitHub pages offer free tiers. But these platforms are ideal for hosting static sites and full-stack applications. On the other hand, the platforms mentioned here allow you to host your entire web application for free.
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