Heroku vs Supabase

Heroku and Supabase represent two distinct philosophies for Postgres hosting. Heroku operates as a classic platform-as-a-service, charging between $5.00/mo and $1500.00/mo. Their entry-level tiers provide 0.5 GB of RAM and 5 GB of storage, scaling up to a ceiling of 126 GB of RAM and 2000 GB of disk. Supabase, while built on AWS, leans into a more aggressive scaling model with a free tier and high-end enterprise plans reaching $7460.00/mo. Their hardware specs are significantly wider, offering up to 256 GB of RAM and 128 vCPU cores, though their base bundled storage is surprisingly thin compared to Heroku's legacy offerings.

• Supabase maintains a restrictive 8 GB maximum disk allocation on standard plans, requiring users to pay $0.13/GB for additional storage, whereas Heroku provides up to 2000 GB of storage inclusive of the base price.
• Memory density favors Supabase for compute-heavy workloads, offering up to 256 GB of RAM compared to Heroku’s 126 GB cap.
• Supabase enforces an egress penalty of $0.09/GB, a cost vector that Heroku largely obscures within its platform subscription model.
• Heroku’s vCPU allocation starts as low as 0.25 vCPU, which is useful for idling dev environments, while Supabase begins at 0.5 vCPU.

Heroku remains the simpler choice if your database footprint is large and you prefer predictable monthly invoices without worrying about granular storage overages or egress spikes. The platform effectively abstracts away the disk management that often complicates AWS-backed deployments. Supabase is better suited for applications requiring high-concurrency compute or massive RAM allocations for complex analytical queries, provided the team is prepared to manage the storage costs associated with their more restrictive base disk quotas.