Heroku vs Render vs Railway: pricing, free tiers and databases in 2026
THE SHORT ANSWER
For a small always-on app, Heroku Basic and Render's starter instance both cost $7 a month for 512 MB of memory, and Railway bills by usage from a $5 Hobby plan that includes $5 of usage. Render is the only one of the three with a free web tier that has no time limit, but it sleeps after 15 minutes and its free Postgres expires after 30 days. Heroku has no free tier and moved to maintenance-only engineering in February 2026. Railway is cheapest for small, mostly idle services and the hardest to predict for busy ones.
Which one should I pick?
- Render if you want fixed monthly prices, a free tier to try things on, and Dockerfile or native builds. It has the most regions of the three on its standard plans.
- Railway if your services sit idle most of the time and you'd rather pay per second of real CPU and memory than a fixed price per instance.
- Heroku if you already run there and it works. For a new project, weigh its February 2026 announcement that it now focuses on stability and security, not new features.
How do the prices compare?
Everything here comes from each vendor's own pricing page or docs, read on November 7, 2026:
| Heroku | Render | Railway | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Fixed price per dyno | Workspace plan plus a fixed price per instance, prorated by the second | Plan fee that doubles as usage credit, then per-second usage |
| Free option | None. Eco is $5/month for 1,000 shared hours | 750 free instance hours a month; sleeps after 15 minutes idle | $5 one-time trial for 30 days, then a Free plan with $1/month of credit |
| Cheapest always-on | Basic dyno, $7/month, 0.5 GB | $7/month, 512 MB, 0.5 CPU | No fixed tier. About $10 per GB of RAM and $20 per vCPU a month |
| Postgres | From $5/month (Essential-0, 1 GB). No free plan | Free for 30 days, then from $6/month | Runs as a service, billed by usage |
| Redis | Key-Value Store Mini, $3/month for 25 MB | Key Value: free 25 MB (memory only), paid from $10/month | Runs as a service, billed by usage |
| Workers and cron | Worker dynos at dyno prices; cron through the Scheduler add-on | Workers at instance prices; cron billed per minute | Workers are normal services; cron at most every 5 minutes |
| Pull request previews | Review Apps, billed like normal apps | Single-service previews on Hobby; full-stack previews from Pro | PR environments |
| Regions | US and EU; 10 more with Private Spaces | Oregon, Ohio, Virginia, Frankfurt, Singapore | California, Virginia, Amsterdam, Singapore |
| Request timeout | First byte within 30 seconds, then a rolling 55-second window | Not stated in the docs | Up to 15 minutes while data moves; 5 minutes idle |
What does a small always-on app cost?
Take one web service with 512 MB of memory that runs all month. On Heroku that is a Basic dyno at $7. On Render it is the $7 instance with 0.5 CPU, on the free Hobby workspace plan.
On Railway the price depends on what the service uses. Holding 0.5 GB of RAM for a month is about $5 at Railway's rate of roughly $10 per GB, before CPU. A service that mostly waits for requests uses little CPU and can fit inside the $5 included in the Hobby plan. A busy one goes past it, and you pay the difference. Included usage doesn't roll over to the next month.
Add Postgres and the order changes. Heroku's Essential-0 is $5 a month for 1 GB of storage, with shared RAM and a pricing page that allows up to 4 hours of downtime a month. Render's cheapest paid database is $6 with 256 MB of RAM, and $19 for 1 GB. On Railway the database is another service on the same usage bill.
Which free tier is actually usable?
- Render gives each workspace 750 free instance hours a month. A free web service spins down after 15 minutes without traffic and takes about a minute to wake up. It has no persistent disk and can be restarted at any time. Free Postgres expires 30 days after you create it and is deleted after a further 14 days unless you upgrade. More in Render free tier cold starts.
- Railway starts you on a one-time $5 trial for 30 days with no card. After that, the Free plan gives $1 of credit a month, with each service capped at 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB. That is enough for something tiny, not for an app with a database running all month.
- Heroku has no free tier, and you have to verify a card before you can create an app. The cheapest option is Eco at $5 a month: 1,000 hours shared across your account, and each Eco web dyno sleeps after 30 minutes without traffic.
What changed at each one in 2026?
- Heroku announced on February 6, 2026 that it is moving to “sustaining engineering”: stability, security and support, without new features. It stopped selling Enterprise Account contracts to new customers, and said card-paying customers see no pricing change. Its next-generation Fir platform is generally available, but only inside Private Spaces.
- Render dropped per-seat fees on April 23, 2026. The Pro workspace plan is a flat $25 a month (it replaced Professional at $19 per member), and Scale is $499. Existing workspaces moved over on August 1. Hobby is still $0.
- Railway now asks for a card on file for its post-paid plans. On May 19 to 20, 2026, an automated suspension of its Google Cloud account made every Railway workload unreachable for about 8 hours, according to its incident report.
How do builds and deploys differ?
All three deploy from GitHub on push. Heroku builds with buildpacks, and supports Docker through heroku.yml on its classic Cedar generation only; Fir supports Cloud Native Buildpacks and no Docker. Render builds from a native runtime, a Dockerfile or a prebuilt image. Railway builds with its own Railpack builder.
Timeouts matter if you have slow endpoints or large uploads. Heroku ends a request that hasn't sent its first byte within 30 seconds, and neither limit can be changed. Railway allows up to 15 minutes as long as data keeps moving. Long jobs belong in a worker on any of the three.
Where does EthioDeploy fit?
EthioDeploy is a fourth option with flat plans. The Free plan runs one project with a Postgres, MySQL or Redis database and sleeps after 30 minutes idle. Pro is $10 a month for always-on containers with 1 GB of memory each, and the database is part of the plan rather than a separate bill. You can pay by card in USD or by bank transfer in Birr.
It has one region, so if your users are spread across continents, Render or Railway give you more choice. Side-by-side details are on EthioDeploy vs Heroku, vs Render and vs Railway.
Questions
For one small always-on service they cost the same: $7 a month for 512 MB on Heroku Basic and on Render's starter instance. Render's cheapest paid Postgres is $6 against Heroku's $5, but Render also has a free tier and Heroku does not.
For small, mostly idle services, usually yes: one can fit inside the $5 of usage included in Railway's Hobby plan. For a service that keeps CPU and memory busy all month, Railway's usage bill can pass Render's fixed $7 instance price.
No. The cheapest option is Eco at $5 a month for 1,000 dyno hours shared across your account, and Eco web dynos sleep after 30 minutes without traffic. You also need a verified card to create apps.
No. In February 2026 Heroku said it is moving to sustaining engineering, focused on stability, security and support rather than new features, and that card-paying customers see no pricing change.
Yes. A free Render Postgres database expires 30 days after it is created, and Render deletes it after a further 14-day grace period unless you upgrade to a paid plan.
Sources
Checked on November 7, 2026:
- Heroku pricing
- Heroku Eco dyno hours
- Heroku Postgres plans
- Heroku generations (Cedar and Fir)
- Heroku regions
- Heroku request timeout
- Heroku account verification
- Heroku Review Apps
- Heroku: An update on Heroku
- Render pricing
- Render free instances
- Render preview environments
- Render regions
- Render: Updated plans for workspaces
- Railway pricing
- Railway pricing docs
- Railway databases
- Railway cron jobs
- Railway regions
- Railway networking limits
- Railway incident report, May 19 2026
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