Heroku

Heroku is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that lets developers deploy, run, and scale applications without managing servers or infrastructure. You push code with Git (or connect a repo), and Heroku builds and runs it in lightweight containers called dynos, handling routing, load balancing, logging, and scaling behind the scenes. This "git push to deploy" simplicity and polished developer experience made Heroku a defining PaaS and a popular choice for startups, prototypes, and production apps that value speed over infrastructure control.

The platform is built around composability. Buildpacks automatically detect and build apps in many languages (Ruby, Node.js, Python, Java, Go, PHP, and more); a large add-ons marketplace provisions managed databases (Heroku Postgres, Redis/Key-Value Store), caching, monitoring, and third-party services with a command; and pipelines, review apps, and CI support modern workflows. Heroku dynos scale vertically (bigger types) and horizontally (more instances), and managed data services remove database operations. Now part of Salesforce, Heroku continues to serve teams wanting managed simplicity.

Heroku serves developers, startups, and teams that prefer managed deployment over raw cloud infrastructure. Since removing its free tier, pricing is usage-based per dyno and add-on: Eco dynos at about $5/month (shared 1,000 hours), Basic at about $7, Standard dynos at $25–$50, and Performance dynos at $250–$500, plus managed Postgres and other add-ons billed separately. It competes with Render, Railway, Fly.io, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and DigitalOcean App Platform, differentiating on developer experience and its add-ons ecosystem.