Sadly, for a lot of developers, Heroku free-tier is no longer… free. If you’ve had applications running on the platform, you probably noticed they’re no longer available. You have two options:
- Pay for Heroku.
- Find an alternative.
This article is going to explore option 2, listing three alternatives to Heroku. However, we do recommended paying for hosting.
1. Render
Allowing you to get started for free, Render is a “unified cloud to build and run all your apps and websites with free TLS certificates, a global CDN, DDoS protection, private networks, and auto deploys from Git.” Render’s free-tier is very generous, and compares well to Heroku.
2. Railway
Railway can use just about any stack, offering templates to quickly deploy various applications, such as an Express and MongoDB application, a discord bot, and more. Starting with 512 MB RAM, 1 GB Disk space, and more, no credit card is required.
3. Cyclic
Cyclic directly compares their service with Heroku, so you can immediately see the benefits of using this service as compared to sticking with Heroku. Cyclic is very generous as well, offering a free forever to use service, which allows 3 apps, 100,000 API requests, 1 GB runtime memory, and more.
Conclusion
This is a short article meant to give you some alternatives to host your demo applications. We hope you find these resources useful!
Is there another service we forgot to include? Let us know in the comments below.
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About the Author

Matt Fay
Matt is the founder of JavaScript Today, a platform dedicated to high-quality JavaScript education and commentary. With a deep curiosity for technology, he gravitates toward understanding how things work and has been diving into the world of information security. Outside of coding, Matt enjoys exploring languages; he can understand some Russian and Italian, and is currently learning Thai.
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