Last week, Heroku announced that they were killing off their free teir. I have been using it off and on ever since a creating an OWASP Juice Shop instance on it at That Conference, a few years ago. Recently, I used it for my How to deploy a Laravel app example and an example on Laravel Socialite that I don’t seem to be able to get into a presentable shape.
So, what’s next? You could keep using Heroku and just pay for it. Render still has a free tier and there are a lot ways it is better than Heroku. I have used Cloudflare Workers for some stuff. That is free and works well. If JAMstack is your jam, there is Cloudflare Pages. DigitalOcean Functions has a free alotment (but I don’t understand the pricing terms at all). Google Cloud has a free offering and I hosted this very blog using it for years. I don’t think that I ever paid more than $3/mo for the VM while I was using the service. My employer bought me a Visual Studio Professional subscription that includes a generous monthly Azure credit but even if you don’t have that, Azure has it’s own free offerings.
The big benefit of Heroku was the fact that you could easily run server-side code and attach it to a PostgresSQL database. I liked the ease of installing things like Laravel on Heroku. If you are looking to do that elsewhere there isn’t a great answer (maybe Forge?). If your jam is Node or vanilla PHP, I would say that you should check out Render or Cloudflare Workers.
Like a service that I didn’t meantion? Have an opinion one way or the other? Please drop a comment, below.