Commercial Launch

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When Adam, Orion, and I started Heroku two years ago, we had no idea how much new technology we would have to build to realize our vision of an instant platform for Ruby that just works.

Luckily, we were able to attract an amazing team to work on this problem with us, and the team has really shaped Heroku into the offering it is today. We’re currently by far the fastest and easiest deployment platform for Ruby, and we’ve gotten great feedback on our provisionless hosting architecture.

We have over 25,000 apps running on the platform today, and many of our users have been asking for pricing and paid services for some time now. So today we’re pleased to announce that we are officially out of beta and available for commercial use.

Detailed pricing information is now available.

Dynos

As discussed previously, our system is built around a dyno grid that allows us to deploy your app just by pushing your code, and to scale it up and down instantly. Your app runs inside this grid in any number of dynos.

The number of dynos you run directly affects the concurrency and therefore the performance of your app, so our pricing is based around this same concept. The first dyno for an app is always free, and additional dynos will be billed at $0.05 per dyno-hour.

Play with the dyno slider on our pricing page to estimate your bill.

You can scale your dynos up and down instantly at any time via the web interface, our API, or our command-line gem.

Database

At the database layer, we have two categories of options. We offer a shared database cluster in three storage sizes. The smallest size is free, and you can upgrade/downgrade between options instantly at any time.

For more serious needs, we also offer three dedicated database plans, ranging from small to large in compute and storage levels. These can also be changed at any time, but resizing requires a few moments of downtime.

Add-ons

We’re also officially launching some add-on features. Some of these features, like backups and more frequent cron tasks are paid features. Others, like custom domains and SSL are free, but require you to enter your billing information as an abuse protection measure (more info).

There is a lot more to come – you can get a preview by checking out the beta features in the add-ons section.

Free Service

It’s important to us to continue to provide a free service tier, useful enough to get started with Heroku. This is still available, and is the default for new apps with a single free dyno and free shared database.

This free tier is well suited for rapid-prototyping, staging, and testing purposes, as well as actually running lightweight apps.





Pricing and paid-features are being rolled out in phases across our user base. It may take a few days for commercial service to be activated for all accounts.

The official press release is available here.