Heroku is dead. Here's what to use instead.

Let's not sugarcoat it: Heroku had a great run. For nearly a decade, git push heroku main was the fastest path from code to production. But Salesforce happened, the free tier vanished, and what's left is an overpriced platform running on legacy architecture.

If you're still on Heroku in 2026, you're overpaying for infrastructure that hasn't meaningfully improved since 2018. Here's your escape plan.

What happened to Heroku

The decline wasn't sudden — it was death by a thousand cuts:

• • November 2022: Free tier eliminated. The move that broke the community's trust.
• • Pricing creep: A basic dyno starts at $7/month. A production app with a database, Redis, and a worker easily runs $100-$300/month for a single service.
• • Salesforce neglect: No meaningful platform innovations in years. The dashboard still feels like 2015.
• • Security incidents: The 2022 OAuth token breach shook confidence, and the response was sluggish.
• • No containers, no K8s: While the rest of the industry moved to containers and Kubernetes, Heroku stayed stuck on dynos.

The result? A platform charging premium prices for commodity infrastructure, with no compelling reason to stay.

The alternatives landscape

There are real options now. Here's an honest comparison of the main contenders:

Render is what Heroku should have become. Familiar push-to-deploy workflow, modern infrastructure, better pricing. Best for side projects and small apps.

Railway nails the developer experience. Beautiful UI, instant deploys, usage-based pricing. Best for individual developers and small teams.

Fly.io runs your containers on bare metal at the edge. Great for latency-sensitive apps. Steeper learning curve, but excellent performance.

Your own cloud with Kapten — the option most people overlook. Run on your own AWS/GCP account, managed by a platform that handles the complexity. Full control, no vendor lock-in, cloud credits apply.

Why "your own cloud" wins long-term

Every PaaS has the same fundamental problem: you're renting someone else's infrastructure at a markup. That's fine when you're small, but the economics flip fast.

A typical Heroku app paying $250/month would cost roughly $60-$80/month on your own AWS/GCP account. At $1,000/month on Heroku, the gap widens to 4-5x. And you'd have better performance, more control, and zero risk of another Heroku-style rug pull.

The traditional problem was that running your own cloud required DevOps expertise. But platforms like Kapten eliminate that barrier. You get your own Kubernetes cluster on your cloud account, managed through a dashboard that's as simple as Heroku's best days.

The migration playbook

Before you pick a platform, think about what you're optimizing for:

• • 1-3 services? A PaaS like Render or Railway is probably fine.
• • 4+ services or cloud credits? Your own cloud account makes more sense.
• • Planning to scale past $500/month in infra? Own your cloud now — it only gets harder to migrate later.
• • SOC2/HIPAA compliance? You need your own cloud account, period.

The practical advice: don't try to migrate everything at once. Pick your least critical service, move it first, and validate the new platform. Then migrate the rest one service at a time. Most Heroku apps are already containerizable — if you have a Procfile, you're 80% there.

What we recommend

The Heroku era taught us something valuable: developers shouldn't have to think about infrastructure. That principle hasn't changed — just the platform that delivers on it.

Kapten is the bridge between PaaS simplicity and cloud ownership. You get the push-to-deploy workflow Heroku made famous, but running on your own cloud account. No markup on compute, no vendor lock-in, and Kubernetes under the hood for when you need real scaling power.

Choose the option that gives you simplicity today without locking you in tomorrow. Your future self will thank you.