Heroku pricing breakdown

Heroku operates on a dyno-based model that abstracts the underlying AWS hardware, which typically runs on older Intel Xeon or modern AMD EPYC silicon depending on the region. The entry-level cost is $0.10/mo for an Eco dyno, providing a minimal 0.0488 GB of RAM. Scaling to enterprise-grade Performance-L dynos pushes the monthly cost to $750.00/mo, which grants the application a substantial 800 GB of RAM. Unlike raw VPS providers such as Linode or Vultr that enforce strict disk quotas and egress caps, Heroku treats disk storage and bandwidth as unlimited, removing the need to track data transfer metrics.

• Dynos scale linearly, meaning you pay for the number of active instances running your code, with 1 instance included in the base dyno price.
• There are no hidden overage fees for bandwidth or storage, as Heroku encapsulates these costs into the flat monthly dyno subscription.
• Memory limits are hard-coded to the dyno type; exceeding the 0.05 GB to 800 GB RAM allocations will trigger an R14 memory quota error, forcing a process restart.
• The platform does not charge for ingress or egress, making it a viable target for high-traffic public APIs that would otherwise bankrupt a project on standard cloud egress rates.

Heroku is built for teams that prioritize developer velocity over hardware-level configuration. You are paying for the buildpacks, the automated routing, and the removal of kernel-level maintenance. Because the platform abstracts away the underlying infrastructure, you lose the ability to tweak NVMe performance or manage specific ARM-based instances common in modern AWS deployments. It remains a high-cost, high-convenience choice for web services that need to scale horizontally without the engineering overhead of managing Kubernetes clusters or manual server patching.