What is the closest thing to Heroku today?

For the hosted experience, Railway and Render are the nearest equivalents: connect a repository, get a running service, add a database. If the reason you are leaving Heroku is control or ownership of the cloud account, look at bring-your-own-cloud platforms, which run the workload in an account you own.

Is there a free Heroku alternative?

Vercel has a Hobby plan at $0 per month, but it is for personal, non-commercial projects only, so a business app needs a paid plan. SeaGit has a free plan with one cluster, one environment and 100 deployments per month. Check each vendor’s pricing page for current limits. On a bring-your-own-cloud platform the platform fee can be free, but your cloud provider still bills you for the compute, so the total is not zero.

Can I run these platforms in my own AWS account?

Heroku, Vercel and Render run on their own infrastructure. Railway’s pricing page lists bring your own cloud on its top plan, so ask them what it covers before you plan around it. SeaGit provisions Amazon EKS inside your AWS account today, and does not yet support Azure or GCP.

Do Heroku add-ons move with the app?

No. Add-ons are products Heroku sells, so each one needs a replacement: a managed database service in your cloud, a chart running in your cluster, or a third-party service. Databases are usually the largest piece, so plan that migration first and test the restore before you cut over the application.

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Platform comparisons

Heroku alternatives: Vercel, Railway and Render compared

Four hosted platforms cover most of what teams want from Heroku, Vercel, Railway or Render. The choice that matters is less about features and more about where the workload runs and who operates it. This guide compares them on that basis, with the prices we could verify and the limits of each option.

By Muhammad Soliman, Founder at SeaGit

Published 1 September 2026 · Updated 10 October 2026

Key takeaways

Hosted platforms (Heroku, Vercel, Railway, Render) solve convenience. The infrastructure stays with the vendor.
If your reason is cost at scale or which cloud account runs the workload, a hosted swap does not solve it. You need a platform that deploys into your account.
Vercel suits frontend-first apps. Once you need long-running backends and data services, compare the others.
Railway is usage-based and fast to start. Render prices by service and suits a conventional production setup. Check both pricing pages against your real resource use.
As of 10 October 2026, Heroku’s Eco dyno is $5 per month, Vercel Pro is $20 per month plus usage, and EKS charges $0.10 per cluster per hour before compute.

Why teams leave these platforms

Three reasons come up again and again, and the reason decides the answer.

Cost. Per-dyno or per-service pricing is predictable, but the bill grows with the number of processes. Usage-based pricing is cheap when the load is small and harder to forecast when it is not.
Control. A managed abstraction is good until you need a particular instance type, a GPU, a private network, or a Kubernetes-level setting. Then the abstraction becomes the obstacle.
Ownership. Some teams must say which cloud account and region a workload runs in, for compliance, data residency, or an exit plan. A hosted platform answers that with “the vendor’s account”.

A hosted replacement fixes cost and sometimes control. It does not fix ownership. That is the point where the category changes.

Comparison at a glance

Prices are as of 10 October 2026, from the vendor pricing pages. Where a page shows usage-based or per-instance prices, the table says so rather than guessing a number.

Four hosted platforms, one bring-your-own-cloud option, and self-managed EKS, compared on where the workload runs.
Option	Where it runs	Pricing (checked 10 Oct 2026)	Pick it when	Main limit
Heroku	Heroku’s infrastructure	Eco dyno $5 per month; sleeps after 30 min idle	You want the mature Heroku model and its add-ons	Hosted; dyno count drives cost
Vercel	Vercel’s infrastructure	Hobby $0 (non-commercial); Pro $20 per month plus usage	Frontend and Next.js apps, edge and static	Frontend-first; backends and data fit less well
Railway	Railway’s infrastructure	Usage-based, with monthly credits on paid plans	Fast start from a repository to running services	Bills are harder to forecast; hosted by default
Render	Render’s infrastructure	Per service and instance; see the pricing page	Conventional services, cron jobs and managed databases	Hosted; less control than raw infrastructure
SeaGit	Your AWS account, on Amazon EKS	Free plan; flat per-seat platform fee; AWS bills compute	Push-to-deploy, with infrastructure in an account you own	Needs an AWS account; AWS only today
Self-managed EKS	Your AWS account	$0.10 per cluster per hour (standard support) plus EC2, EBS, data transfer	You have a platform team that wants full control	You operate Kubernetes yourself

Heroku alternatives

Heroku’s model is a process type on a dyno, deployed with a git push or a container image. Its pricing page lists the Eco dyno at $5 per month, with 0.5 GB of memory and up to four compute units. Eco dynos sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, and the listed Eco tier is for personal accounts. Heroku’s Basic Support is free, and Enterprise success plans are sold separately.

The nearest hosted replacements are Railway and Render. Both keep the git-push workflow and handle databases, and both keep the infrastructure with the vendor. They solve cost and convenience. They do not solve ownership, because the workload still runs in the vendor’s account.

If you want the Heroku experience on infrastructure you own, bring-your-own-cloud platforms keep the push-to-deploy flow while the cluster runs in your AWS account. SeaGit is one of them. Porter, Northflank and Qovery are others. We have not verified their pricing for this article, so check their sites directly.

Vercel alternatives

Vercel is a frontend cloud. It is strongest for Next.js, static sites and edge functions. Teams look for an alternative when the application grows a backend: long-running processes, background workers, queues, and databases that need a home. Bandwidth and function-invocation costs can also grow faster than the product, and some teams need to state exactly where a workload runs.

Vercel’s pricing page lists Hobby at $0 per month (personal, non-commercial use only) and Pro at $20 per month, with usage billed beyond the included amounts, and an Enterprise tier that is quoted. The Pro tier adds team access and spend controls. Those are the numbers to compare against, not a monthly estimate, because usage drives most of the bill.

For a backend-heavy app, the realistic options are:

A hosted backend platform such as Railway or Render, which runs services and databases without a frontend-and-functions model.
A bring-your-own-cloud platform, if the reason is cost ownership or account control. A bring-your-own-cloud platform deploys into your AWS account.
Keeping Vercel for the frontend and moving the backend elsewhere. Many teams split this way, and it is often the lowest-risk change.

Railway vs Render

Railway and Render solve the same problem: run my application without operating servers. They differ in shape. Railway prices by usage and suits a project that grows from a few services into a product. Its pricing page describes up to 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB per service on its starter plan, with monthly usage credits on paid plans. Render organises the app as web services, background workers, cron jobs and managed databases, each configured and priced on its own.

Pick Railway if the priority is speed to a first deploy and you accept usage-based bills. Pick Render if you want a conventional production layout with per-service costs you can read off a list. Render’s pricing page did not render in our check, so read its current plans directly rather than trusting a number from this article.

Neither changes where the workload runs. If your question is cost at scale, data residency, or which account owns the cluster, the honest answer is that choosing between Railway and Render does not resolve it.

Where bring-your-own-cloud fits, and where it does not

SeaGit is a bring-your-own-cloud platform. It provisions Amazon EKS clusters inside your AWS account, handles builds, deploys, DNS and TLS on top, and bills a flat per-seat platform fee. Your cloud provider bills the compute directly, with no infrastructure markup.

It fits teams that want push-to-deploy but need the infrastructure in an account they own, for cost, compliance or exit reasons. It does not fit a team that wants to avoid AWS entirely, or one that wants the vendor to hold the infrastructure and never think about a VPC. For that, a hosted platform is the better choice.

The limits are real. You need an AWS account. Azure and GCP are not supported. You will still see Kubernetes concepts in some places, because the platform runs on it. Compare these options against the hosted options on the same terms as the others, using your own workload, before you decide.

How to choose

Start with the constraint, not the feature list. These questions narrow the field quickly:

Is the app mainly a frontend? If yes, Vercel is still a strong fit. If it has a backend with workers and data, look at the other three.
Must the workload run in an account you own? If yes, a hosted platform is out. Choose a bring-your-own-cloud platform or self-managed EKS.
Is cost predictability the main concern? Compare the Render and Railway pricing pages against your real resource profile, and the Heroku dyno count for the same workload.
Do you have a platform team? Self-managed EKS gives the most control and asks for the most operating effort. A managed platform in your account is the middle option.

Migration notes

Most failed migrations break on the data or the add-ons, not on the application code. The order below avoids most of that:

Inventory first. List every process type, scheduled job, environment variable, custom domain, add-on and webhook. For Heroku, the Procfile and the add-on list are the starting point.
Move the data before the code. Restore a copy of the database on the new platform and test a read and a write. Only then plan the cutover.
Replace each add-on. Each Heroku add-on needs a managed service, a chart in your cluster, or a third-party SaaS. Decide that per add-on, with its owner.
Package the app. A Procfile process becomes a container image or a service definition. On Vercel, any function that needs long-running work moves to a process that runs continuously.
Cut DNS with a short TTL. Lower the TTL a day ahead, run both platforms in parallel, switch the record, and keep the old platform until error rates are normal.