Heroku vs Netlify

• Heroku pricing scales significantly higher, topping out at $1500.00/mo for 126 GB of RAM, whereas Netlify caps their primary tier at $99.00/mo with a static 1 GB RAM allocation.
• Netlify provides unlimited app instances and visits, but enforces a steep $0.55/GB overage rate for egress bandwidth, which is substantially more aggressive than Heroku’s bundled tiers.
• Disk storage management differs; Heroku bundles up to 2000 GB within higher tiers, while Netlify includes 100 GB and charges $0.05/GB for additional capacity.
• Heroku operates as a traditional PaaS for long-running processes, while Netlify is built primarily for static site delivery and serverless functions, often running on edge infrastructure similar to Vercel or Cloudflare Pages.

Heroku is designed for stateful applications requiring consistent memory overhead and background workers. When you scale your dynos to the 126 GB limit, you are essentially paying for the convenience of a managed runtime that handles OS-level patching and container orchestration. This makes it a standard choice for legacy monoliths or complex Ruby/Node.js backends that do not fit the serverless paradigm. The cost of entry starts at $5.00/mo, but the lack of a free tier for long-running services means your baseline burn rate increases immediately upon deployment.

Netlify offers a more attractive entry point for frontend-heavy projects, especially given the $0.00/mo starting price and unlimited instance count. However, the 1 GB RAM limit per function is a hard ceiling that prevents hosting large-scale backend logic. If your application relies on high-bandwidth assets, you must monitor your usage closely to avoid the $0.55/GB egress penalty, which can quickly exceed the cost of a dedicated Heroku dyno. Heroku provides a predictable monthly invoice for heavy compute needs, whereas Netlify rewards developers who offload state and complex processing to external APIs, keeping their internal resource footprint under the 1 GB threshold.