Heroku vs Sevalla

• Heroku manages database pricing between $5.00/mo and $1500.00/mo, offering up to 126 GB of RAM, while Sevalla scales up to 229 GB of RAM with a higher price ceiling of $3250.00/mo.
• Storage capacity differs significantly; Heroku provides up to 2000 GB of disk space, whereas Sevalla caps included storage at a much tighter 100 GB.
• Sevalla enforces a $0.30/GB penalty for storage overages and a $0.10/GB charge for egress, creating a predictable path for invoice growth when exceeding base allocations.
• Heroku’s vCPU allocation peaks at 16 vCPU, trailing Sevalla’s high-end offering of 58.5 vCPU, which is comparable to high-performance dedicated hardware found on platforms like Equinix Metal.

Operating a database on Heroku relies on their established Postgres platform, which prioritizes simplicity over raw hardware customization. Their pricing structure remains stable for standard web-tier applications, though teams managing large datasets will eventually hit the ceiling of their storage tiers. Sevalla caters to compute-heavy requirements, providing significantly more RAM and vCPU density for intensive analytical workloads. While the entry price is higher, the ability to scale to 229 GB of RAM makes it a viable target for memory-bound applications that require more overhead than standard cloud-native Postgres offerings provide. The lack of storage in Sevalla's entry plans means that any application relying on large blobs or extensive historical logs will incur the $0.30/GB overage rate quickly.

Heroku is cheaper for the default baseline workload at $50.00/mo compared to Sevalla at $65.00/mo. Sevalla becomes the better fit when your application requires more than 126 GB of RAM, as their hardware allocation scales significantly higher than Heroku’s maximum capacity.