Heroku vs Scaleway

Heroku and Scaleway serve different market segments when it comes to managed PostgreSQL and MySQL deployments. Heroku targets rapid application development, starting at $5.00/mo for entry-level hobbyist tiers with 0.5 GB of RAM and 5 GB of storage. Their high-end plans scale to $1500.00/mo, offering 126 GB of RAM and 2000 GB of disk. Scaleway, which often competes with regional European players and Hetzner, approaches database hosting with a more hardware-forward mindset. Their pricing begins at $0.10/mo for minimal instances, scaling up to $1861.50/mo for massive 256 GB RAM configurations running on significantly higher vCPU counts, maxing out at 48 vCPU cores.

• Scaleway offers a higher memory ceiling of 256 GB compared to Heroku's maximum of 126 GB, making the former better suited for large-scale, memory-resident datasets.
• Heroku includes substantial storage volumes up to 2000 GB within its top-tier pricing, whereas Scaleway defaults to a fixed 20 GB baseline.
• Scaleway enforces transparent overage fees of $0.12/GB for additional storage and $0.01/GB for network egress, which provides a predictable cost model for teams running high-volume data ingestion.
• Heroku abstracts away the underlying instance hardware entirely, while Scaleway allows for more direct interaction with the underlying compute environment, often leveraging the performance of modern AMD EPYC processors.

Heroku is built for teams that prioritize developer experience and want to avoid managing database patches or underlying disk IOPS, even at the cost of significantly higher monthly spend per gigabyte of RAM. Scaleway is the pragmatic choice for infrastructure-heavy workloads where you need to maximize the number of vCPU cores and raw memory capacity for analytical processing. If your primary goal is to minimize administrative overhead, Heroku remains the standard, but the price-to-performance ratio for large datasets favors Scaleway's hardware-dense offerings.