Heroku and Vercel are getting too expensive: where to migrate in 2026?

Heroku killed its free tier in late 2022. Since then, the platform has been running in "maintenance" mode under Salesforce, with little innovation and prices that climb as soon as you move past the hobby project stage. Vercel, for its part, advertises a Pro plan at $20/month per member that looks reasonable — until the day a $700 bill lands because your traffic spiked.

If you are the CTO or founder of a startup and your current PaaS is starting to weigh on the budget, this article reviews the concrete alternatives in 2026 — with a focus on European options that combine cost control and sovereignty.

Heroku in 2026: what has changed

Heroku was a game-changer for a whole generation of developers. git push heroku main was synonymous with instant deployment. But the reality of 2026 is different.

The free tier is gone. Since November 2022, free dynos, free PostgreSQL databases and free Redis have disappeared. The entry point is now the Eco dyno at $5/month (1,000 shared hours, sleeping after 30 minutes of inactivity). Add an Essential PostgreSQL database at $5/month and you are already at $10-12/month for a project that is barely running.

Prices rise fast once things get serious. A Basic dyno (always on) costs $7/month. A Standard dyno with 512 MB of RAM: $25/month. To get 1 GB of RAM, expect $50/month per dyno. Databases go up in steep steps, not gradually. And every add-on (Redis, monitoring, scheduler) comes with its own billing.

Salesforce has put Heroku into maintenance mode. As a former product lead at the platform summed it up, Salesforce has not truly invested in Heroku for years. The new runtime (Fir) is reserved for enterprise Private Spaces. For individual developers and small teams, the platform is stagnating.

Vercel in 2026: simplicity comes at a price

Vercel remains excellent for frontend deployment and Next.js projects. But its pricing model has become a trap for growing applications.

Per-seat pricing. The Pro plan costs $20/month per deploying member. A team of 5 developers pays $100/month before any usage at all. It is a model that penalises team growth.

Bandwidth overages. Pro includes 1 TB of data transfer per month. That sounds generous until an article goes viral or a bot scrapes your site. Beyond 1 TB, each additional GB costs $0.15. Developers report bills of several hundred dollars after an unexpected traffic spike — and Vercel offers no automatic spending cap.

Serverless functions that blow up the bill. Vercel charges for CPU execution time, provisioned memory and the number of invocations of your serverless functions. For lightweight APIs, that is marginal. But as soon as a function runs for longer (AI streaming, image processing, complex queries), the bill climbs. One developer documented how a single screenshot function consumed 494 GB-hours in 12 days, projecting $160 in extra monthly cost — for a single service.

In short: Vercel rewards low usage and punishes success. The more your app grows, the more you pay — often out of all proportion to the real cost of the infrastructure.

What to assess before migrating

Before choosing an alternative, ask yourself three questions:

What kind of application do you have? A static site or a Next.js frontend does not have the same needs as an API with a database, workers and Redis. PaaS platforms like Heroku and Vercel are optimised for specific use cases — your alternative has to cover yours.

Do you need scaling? If your startup is growing, the ability to scale up (and down) automatically without a rebuild is crucial. A VPS at €5/month is cheap, but it does not scale on its own.

How much management are you prepared to take on? The appeal of Heroku and Vercel was simplicity. If you migrate to a solution that requires you to manage Kubernetes by hand, you are trading a cost problem for a complexity problem.

The alternatives in 2026

Competing PaaS platforms (Render, Railway, Fly.io)

Render, Railway and Fly.io position themselves as the natural replacements for Heroku, with more competitive prices and free tiers (more or less generous depending on the platform). Render offers instances from $7/month with 2 GB of RAM — twice what Heroku gives you for $50.

Pros: a developer experience close to Heroku's, deployment from Git, more transparent pricing.

Cons: these are American platforms (Cloud Act, data hosted in the US or on AWS), pricing is still based on tiers that rise with usage, and depending on a proprietary PaaS reproduces the same lock-in pattern.

The bare European VPS (Hetzner, Scaleway, OVH)

The cheapest option. A Hetzner CX33 server (4 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD, 20 TB of traffic) costs €5.49/month. That is 10 to 20 times cheaper than an equivalent Heroku setup.

Pros: unbeatable price, data in Europe, full control.

Cons: it is a bare server. You manage everything — OS, security, deployments, monitoring, backups, updates. Without DevOps skills, it is a minefield.

Managed Kubernetes on a European provider (Fransys)

This is the option that combines the advantages of the two previous approaches: the aggressive pricing of European providers with the simplicity of a PaaS — and the power of Kubernetes underneath.

Fransys deploys your infrastructure on the European provider of your choice (Hetzner, Scaleway, OVH) through a visual drag-and-drop interface. No YAML, no manual Kubernetes configuration. You connect your GitHub or GitLab repo, and the platform handles build, deployment, monitoring, backups and security.

What it costs in practice: for a startup with 3 servers (6 vCPUs, 12 GB RAM), expect around €150/month all in — hosting, Kubernetes management, CI/CD, 24/7 monitoring, automatic backups and DevOps support. On Heroku, an equivalent configuration (3 Standard dynos + PostgreSQL Standard + Redis) easily exceeds $400-500/month.

The key advantage over PaaS platforms: no vendor lock-in. Your infrastructure is standard Kubernetes. You can export your manifests and Helm files and leave whenever you like. You can also migrate from one European provider to another directly from the platform.

The advantage over a bare VPS: everything is managed. Production-ready security by default, auto-healing, automatic SSL certificates, and a real DevOps team watching over your clusters. You get the simplicity of Heroku back, without Heroku's pricing.

Quick comparison table

• Heroku (3 Standard dynos + DB + Redis): ~$450-550/month → US PaaS, lock-in, stagnating platform
• Vercel (5 Pro members + usage): ~$200-700/month, variable → frontend only, unpredictable pricing, no budget cap
• Render / Railway (equivalent config): ~$150-250/month → US PaaS, better value for money but the same model
• Bare Hetzner VPS: ~€15-25/month → cheap, but you manage everything yourself
• Fransys on Hetzner: ~€150/month all in → European pricing, managed Kubernetes, zero lock-in, DevOps support included

Key takeaways

Heroku has been in maintenance mode since the Salesforce acquisition, with prices that no longer reflect the value on offer. Vercel excels at frontend, but its usage-based model generates unpredictable bills as soon as traffic grows.

The American PaaS alternatives (Render, Railway) offer better value for money but reproduce the same model: a proprietary US platform, data outside Europe, creeping lock-in.

For European startups that want to keep costs under control and their data in Europe, the combination of a European provider and a managed Kubernetes platform offers the best trade-off between simplicity, price and sovereignty. Fransys brings back Heroku's "deploy and forget" experience — on infrastructure you genuinely control, at a fraction of the price.