Direct answer
Heroku killed its free tier in 2022, and nothing has replaced it. In 2026, the best Heroku alternatives with real free tiers are Render (750 free hours/month, Git deploys, free TLS), Railway ($1/month credits on the free plan), and Google Cloud Run (2M free requests/month, scale-to-zero). If you just need static hosting, Vercel and Netlify are the zero-cost defaults.
Why Heroku’s free tier is gone
Heroku’s free dynos ended in November 2022 — first for new accounts, then entirely. Today the cheapest Heroku entry point is Eco: $5/month for 1,000 dyno hours drawn from a shared pool, with apps sleeping after inactivity. Paid plans start from there. So “free Heroku” means finding a different platform entirely.
The best free alternatives in 2026 (verified 2026-09-28)
| Platform | Free tier | Limits | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Render | Web services, 750 hrs/mo | 512 MB RAM, sleeps after 15 min idle; free Postgres expires 30 days | Direct Heroku-like deploys |
| Railway | $1/mo credits (free plan) | 512 MB RAM/service, no custom domains on free; $5 one-time trial | Containers, quick apps |
| Google Cloud Run | 2M requests/mo | 180K vCPU-s + 360K GiB-s, scale-to-zero | Containers, APIs |
| AWS Lambda | 1M requests/mo | 400K GB-seconds, 15-min limit | Serverless functions |
| Cloudflare Workers | 100K req/day | 10 ms CPU/request, edge runtime | Edge functions, APIs |
| Vercel | 1M invocations/mo | 100 GB transfer, builds included | Full-stack frontends |
| Netlify | 300 credits/mo | ≈15 GB bandwidth, ~20 prod deploys | Static + functions |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | 3 static-site apps | 1 GiB outbound/app/month; full container apps are paid | Static frontends with an easy upgrade path |
| Fly.io | None | 2 VM-hours/7-day trial only, then paid | Docker containers |
Which one should you pick?
- “I want Heroku but free” → Render. Closest workflow: push to Git, it deploys, free TLS, logs UI. Accept the 15-min spin-down and the 30-day free-Postgres expiry.
- “I want to run a container” → Railway (cheap, simple) or Google Cloud Run (most generous free compute, scale-to-zero).
- “I want an API/function” → Cloudflare Workers (100K req/day, no cold starts at the edge) or AWS Lambda (1M req/month).
- “I just need my app up” → Vercel (static + serverless, no sleep on static), or Netlify if you prefer its workflow.
- “My app is a static/SSG frontend with an easy upgrade path” → DigitalOcean App Platform (3 free static-site apps, 1 GiB outbound each; upgrade to full container apps from the same dashboard).
- “I wanted a free Fly.io” → that era is over: Fly.io’s free tier became a 7-day trial in 2025. Don’t build on a trial; pick Render or Cloud Run.
The honest warning
Every free PaaS tier has a catch: spin-down (Render), credit pools (Railway, Netlify), or scale-to-zero cold starts (Cloud Run, Railway). If your app needs to respond instantly 24/7, none of these are free — budget $5–7/month for a hobby instance instead. For side projects where 15-second cold starts are fine, the free tiers above are genuinely usable.
Verified against official pricing pages on 2026-09-28 (DigitalOcean entry re-checked 2026-10-01) — see the full compute comparison and our data registry.