In February 2026, Salesforce announced that Heroku is moving to "sustaining engineering": stability, security and support, with no mention of new features. Nothing breaks today. But a platform that will never ship anything new again is a different bet than the one teams made when they first ran git push heroku main. I wrote up the full comparison on DevToolLab, and this is the short version.
The Real Push Isn't the Announcement, It's the Price List
Existing customers keep their billing and support. What actually moves teams is Heroku's own tier structure: Standard-2X tops out at 1 GB for $50/mo, and the next step up, Performance-M, is $250/mo for 2.5 GB. That is five times the cost for two and a half times the memory, with nothing in between. Teams that outgrow the middle tier hit that wall long before they think about the sustaining engineering announcement.
Managed vs Self-Hosted
Render, Railway, Fly.io and DigitalOcean App Platform all take a repo, build it and run it, the same shape as Heroku, just with a different bill. Coolify and Dokku instead run on a VPS you rent yourself, trading a per-app fee for the job of patching the box and owning your own uptime.
Render is the closest match to Heroku's actual feel, down to running a dedicated "Migrate to Render" push with migration credits. The catch is a two-part bill: a flat $25/mo Pro workspace fee sits on top of instance pricing, so a Standard 2 GB instance at $25/mo is really $50/mo once the workspace fee is counted.
Railway bills what you consume, not what you reserve, at roughly $20 per vCPU-month and $10 per GB-month, metered by the second. That is great for spiky traffic and bad for predictability: a service that's up but idle still accrues cost every second.
Fly.io runs apps as Firecracker microVMs and has the cheapest raw compute of the group, a 1 GB machine for $5.92/mo in Amsterdam. The trap is the database: managed Postgres starts at $38/mo, six times the app it's backing, and you're editing fly.toml and thinking about regions and volumes in a way the others don't ask of you.
DigitalOcean App Platform is flat-rate with bandwidth bundled in, no separate workspace fee, no metering. A 1 vCPU / 1 GB container is $10/mo with 100 GiB of transfer included. It's also the plainest of the four, and the $7/mo dev database is explicitly not for production traffic.
Coolify is Apache-2.0 with no feature gates, a Laravel app managing Docker Compose deployments with 280+ one-click services. Coolify Cloud is $5/mo for the control plane on top of your own servers. A single-server setup has no failover, so a bad kernel update takes the app down with it.
Dokku is the minimalist option, MIT licensed, and the one that most literally reproduces the Heroku workflow: dokku apps:create, add a git remote, push. It's CLI and SSH only with no dashboard, single-host by default, and you're the entire ops team.
Pricing a Real App
I built a small script that prices one always-on 1 GB web service plus each platform's cheapest managed Postgres, since RAM is the one unit every provider actually publishes. At 1 GB, DigitalOcean comes out cheapest at $17/mo, Railway a dollar behind at $18, Render at $31, and Fly.io at $43.92 once you add its $38/mo Postgres. Heroku itself lands at $55/mo for the same shape. The full runnable script and the comparison table covering all seven platforms are in the original writeup on DevToolLab.
Migrating Without Losing Anything
The mechanical parts of a Heroku migration - config vars, builds, Postgres - port cleanly with heroku config -s and pg:backups:capture. The part that actually bites people is Heroku Scheduler, which has no direct equivalent anywhere else and needs to become cron or a scheduled GitHub Actions workflow before cutover, not after. Run both stacks in parallel behind a low DNS TTL and leave the old Heroku app running one full billing cycle before you shut it down.
Which One to Pick
If you want to think about this the least, DigitalOcean App Platform at $17/mo for a 1 GB app is the answer. Render costs more but matches Heroku's polish closest. Railway suits spiky or multi-service workloads where metered billing works for you. Fly.io wins on latency and raw compute if you bring your own database. Coolify and Dokku are for teams who'd rather own a VPS than pay a per-app fee indefinitely.
References
- Best Heroku Alternatives in 2026: Render, Railway, Fly.io and Open Source PaaS Compared - the original article, with the full seven-way comparison table and the complete pricing script
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Connection String Parser - breaks a Heroku
DATABASE_URLinto host, port, user and sslmode when repointing it at a new database - Caddyfile Generator - generates a reverse proxy config with automatic TLS for a self-hosted Coolify or Dokku box
- Salesforce's February 6, 2026 announcement on Heroku moving to sustaining engineering
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