Heroku pricing in 2026, explained, and the same app on while
Heroku bills each dyno and each add-on at a monthly price, counted by the second, with no free plan. Here’s how to read its price list, what three typical apps cost, and the same app on while.
By Grégoire Mougeolle, co-founder of Nextmap. Facts checked on November 2, 2026. How this comparison is made.
How Heroku bills
- Each dyno has a price. Basic costs $7 per month and doesn’t sleep, Standard-1X costs $25, Standard-2X $501.
- You pay for the time it’s on, not the work done. A running dyno is billed by the second, whether it receives traffic or not4.
- The database has its own tiers. Essential-0 costs $5 per month, without point-in-time recovery. You need Standard-0, at $50, to go back 4 days3,1.
- There’s no free plan. Eco, at $5 per month1 for 1,000 hours, sleeps after 30 minutes and is limited to personal accounts5.
Try while on your app, without an account. Copy the instructions
Heroku’s plans
| Plan | Price | What’s included |
|---|---|---|
| Eco | $5 per month | 1,000 dyno hours, personal account5 |
| Basic | $7 per dyno per month | 0.5 GB, always on1 |
| Standard-1X and 2X | $25 and $50 per dyno | Zero-downtime deployments, alerts1 |
| Performance | $250 and up per dyno | Dedicated CPU1 |
The database, storage and traffic
| Item | At Heroku |
|---|---|
| Heroku Postgres | Essential from $5 to $20, Standard from $50, Premium from $2001 |
| Point-in-time recovery | None on Essential, 4 days on Standard, 7 on Premium3 |
| Key-Value Store | From $3 per month1 |
| Spending cap | None: resources are billed as long as they run4 |
Three typical apps, per month
| App | At Heroku | On while |
|---|---|---|
| A small always-on API (0.25 vCPU, 0.5 GB) and its database | $12, about €10.70, without point-in-time recovery. $57, about €50.82, with it | At most €13.75, point-in-time recovery included |
| The same API with 1 vCPU and 2 GB, and its database | $255, about €227.35, with the first dyno above 2 GB | At most €39.25 |
| An app asleep most of the time, with its database | $10, about €8.92, on Eco with Essential-0 | About €5.96, for the database and 60 hours of activity |
Calculated on November 2, 2026 from the public price list1, excl. VAT, in euros at the November 2 exchange rate6. The sleeping app is active 60 hours per month. On while, a lightly loaded app costs less than these maximums.
What you pay on while
On while, you pay for what an app uses: €17 per vCPU and €8.50 per GiB of memory, per month, counted by the second. An S database costs €5 per month, and its disk €0.25 per GiB, backups included: one per day, with point-in-time recovery, and for a production database, a test restore every day proves it starts again. Each project has its budget: a change that would exceed it waits for your approval, an alert goes out at 80% and at 100%, and a live app is never cut off. Your AI agent, Claude Code or Cursor for example, deploys on its own, and everything runs in France.
Which one to choose
- Choose Heroku if your apps run well there, you don’t need to roll your database back, and France doesn’t matter.
- Choose while if you want point-in-time recovery from the smallest database up, to pay for what you use in euros, in France, and for your AI agent to deploy without breaking anything.
Next steps
Sources
- Heroku, the pricing page, accessed November 2, 2026
- Heroku, dyno types, accessed November 2, 2026
- Heroku Postgres, plans, accessed November 2, 2026
- Heroku, usage and billing, accessed November 2, 2026
- Heroku, Eco dyno hours, accessed November 2, 2026
- European Central Bank, the euro exchange rate on November 2, 2026 (€1 = $1.1216), accessed November 2, 2026