Heroku has announced that on November 28th, 2022, it’ll stop providing free tiers of products like Dynos or Postgres. For a while now, Heroku has been known for being the go-to platform for easy deployment and hosting of various projects — from large enterprise applications to personal side projects — thanks to user-friendly CLI and built-in scalability.
It’s easy to see how removing free offerings will mark a new chapter for Heroku and its clients. While it does mean one less option of free hosting for your side projects, it’ll enable Heroku to focus more on implementing new features and limit fraud and abuse of its services.
Still, I think this is a perfect time to explore possible alternatives. While Heroku was and still is a great choice, there have been many changes in the cloud hosting space, with many new offerings you might want to consider.
Backend as a Service (BaaS)
While quite different from Heroku, the Backend as a Service (BaaS) cloud model is very popular among developers, allowing them to create all kinds of apps with little to no effort required on the backend. Developers can focus on building the UI, while database, user management, and other backend features needed by modern apps are provided out-of-the-box, with easy access right from the front end.