When Heroku ended its free tier many years ago, a wave of alternatives like Render, Vercel, Fly.io, and Railway sprouted up everywhere. Some have free tiers, but even with VC money, they all come with limitations. The golden free era was effectively over. 😭
In this article, we’ll cover Heroku, Render, Vercel, Fly.io, and Railway and introduce Blossom, a humble alternative.
About Me
- I spent a decade building one of the largest sports websites in the world — larger than Yahoo Sports, second only to ESPN.
- I’m a former AWS Container Hero and once spoke at one of the first DockerCon keynotes.
- I’ve been lucky enough to work with all the major cloud providers — AWS, GCP, Azure, and others — and seen their trade-offs up close.
- These days, I do consulting, build SaaS products, and run my own projects.
- I’m still in the trenches, figuring it out like everyone else.
- I also created Blossom.
Since I built Blossom, this article reflects some of my own biases — but hopefully also offers a unique and useful perspective. I hope you enjoy it 🥳
Heroku
After Salesforce acquired Heroku, the writing was on the wall. It did not take long before Heroku officially killed its free tier on November 28, 2022. Indie devs, students, and side projects all wailed and screamed in vain as their free dynos were scaled down to 0 and Heroku’s free Postgres databases were wiped off the face of the planet 🌎
Heroku tried to lighten the blow by introducing a new low-cost Eco plan. But the plan still has monthly fees.
The great thing about Heroku is their almost magical deployment with git. It naturally takes away the DevOps infrastructure and mental overhead. All you have to do is know how to use git. Voilà 🎻
Strengths:
- Git-based deployments with
git push - Easy scaling with dynos
- Support for multiple programming languages
Weaknesses:
- Expensive. Cost escalates quickly — $50/month for a 1GB Standard Dyno, $250/month+ for 2.5GB Performance Dynos
- Heroku is nice, but for $50/month you don’t get very much RAM
- Add-ons and managed databases further increase the price
The main issue with Heroku has always been that it’s pretty expensive. Once your app grows, the costs can quickly spiral out of control. A production-grade setup with multiple dynos, add-ons, and databases can easily run into hundreds or thousands of dollars per month.
See: Heroku Pricing
Render
Render emerged as one of the first major alternatives to Heroku, offering a similar developer experience. Render still offers a free tier.
Free Tier Includes:
- 750 hours of free usage per month
- Free static site hosting
- Free PostgreSQL databases
Limitations:
- Free PostgreSQL databases are deleted after 90 days!
- Free services are stopped after 15 minutes of inactivity
- Limited build minutes on the free tier
- No custom domains on the free tier
Like I said, there are caveats galore! That aside, Render can be great. Particularly if you’re a student who needs to learn and practice. Their free offering are right up that alley. Just be aware of cold starts that take a few seconds. Render allows you to deploy an app with their UI easily. It doesn’t use the Heroku-style Procfile but lets you configure build/start commands directly. Overall, I think it’s straightforward.
Like Heroku, Render’s issue will be cost once you scale up. Render charges a baseline charge for the non-free Plan, $19/mo. Then you add the compute costs. Here are 2 examples: 2GB 1CPU costs $25/mo, and 4GB RAM 2CPU will cost $85/mo. It’s a model similar to Heroku; once you use it for real-world applications, the costs increase quickly. Again, like Heroku, Render will scale, but it comes with a cost.
See: Render Pricing
Vercel
Next in this battle is Vercel. Vercel is especially useful for frontend applications and static sites. One reason is that Vercel is the creator of the JavaScript Next.js framework. Like the other platforms, you can click around, connect your git repo, and deploy your app pretty easily. It has a smooth UI developer experience. Their strength is also their weakness. They focus more on frontend stacks and don’t play as well with backend frameworks like Rails and Django.
Vercel is more like a serverless platform. You deploy your app as a whole, but it’s not a Docker image. Vercel will deploy static assets directly to CDNs, and run your app in a lightweight container. They use something like Lambda or Lambda with container support. The details are abstracted out, so we don’t see them. Vercel is fine for those particularly focused on frontend apps, especially if you’re using their framework, Next.js.
Free Tier Includes:
- 100,000 invocations per month, with a maximum duration of 10 seconds
- 100 GB-hours per month
- 6,000 build minutes per month.
Limitations:
- Non-Commercial Free Use: You agree to use its free plan only for personal, non-commercial projects.
- Less support for backend frameworks like Rails, Django, etc
- Once you exceed your free limits, it can get expensive quickly
Their Pricing reflects their serverless model. They charge per request. You get a free tier. However, it has significant limitations on build minutes, bandwidth, and requests. Once you hit the limits, the cost can skyrocket. It will get expensive for any high-traffic site. Vercel also has a baseline cost of $20/mo.
See: Vercel Pricing
Fly.io
Fly.io also tries to abstract containers to be as simple as Heroku.
Key Features:
- Global deployment with edge locations
- Docker-based deployments
- PostgreSQL support
Interestingly, Fly.io used to not actually run Docker images. They built a Docker image and unpacked your Docker layers to run on their Fly machines. It runs this in the lightweight firecracker virtualization. Then they changed course. Now Fly.io runs actual Docker containers on their platform instead. Check out this video: We use containers now. Here’s why. I prefer that as you’ll be less likely to run into firecracker limitations.
Fly.io comes with a steeper learning curve for people. Their documentation is comprehensive and can be overwhelming for newcomers. However, if you’re familiar with some infrastructure, it’s not that bad and a pretty flexible platform.
Challenges:
- Steeper learning curve
- More complex configuration
- No more free tier
- Can be more expensive as you scale
Fly.io used to have a free tier. It was free as long as you stayed within their resource allowances. Later, they replaced that free tier with a $5 credit. You would get a $5 free credit when you sign up. It was free as long as you stayed within the $5 allowance. Anything over that, you get charged. Both of these free offerings are gone now. Like the others, as your app starts to scale, your bill will also start to fly 💸
See: Fly.io Pricing
Railway
Railway invented and uses nixpacks to build Docker images. Nixpacks work by analyzing your source code and generating a Dockerfile. From there, Railway builds a Docker image and deploys it. You can also provide your own custom Dockerfile for Railway to build. So if your app fails to build using their nixpack, you can use a Dockerfile as an escape hatch.
Railway Offers:
- Simple deployment process
- Support for multiple languages and frameworks
- Allows custom Dockerfile builds
Weaknesses:
- Free tier removed
- I’ve found Nixpacks can be quirky and don’t always build successfully for non-simple project
- Costs add up with scale
As for the free tier — there isn’t one. Railway shut it down years ago on August 1, 2023. See: Railway, the Heroku Alternative, Shuts Down Their Free Tier
See: Railway Pricing
Platform Comparision Table
Here’s a comparison table to help you choose the right tool:
| Platform | Free Tier | Pricing Model | Custom Docker Support | Good Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heroku | No (Eco plan starts at $5) | Dynos + Add-ons | Yes (Dockerfile or buildpack) | Easy git push deploy |
| Render | Yes (with limits) | Baseline + Compute | Yes (Dockerfile) | Good free tier for students |
| Vercel | Yes (with limits) | Serverless per request + baseline | No | Frontend apps, esp. Next.js |
| Fly.io | No (Formerly $5 credit) | Pay-per-resource usage | Yes (Dockerfile) | Infra-savvy devs, global apps |
| Railway | No (Removed free tier) | Compute-based | Yes (Dockerfile or nixpack) | Nice Docker support |
| Blossom | No (5-day trial) | Per server | Yes (Dockerfile, buildpack, nixpack, prebuilt) | Cost-conscious, more control |
Blossom
Now, onto my shameless plug 🤣 Blossom takes a slightly different approach from the platforms above. Instead of running your apps on someone else’s infrastructure, you bring your own server, and Blossom helps you set it up and makes it easy to deploy your app to it.
This approach doesn’t work for everyone, but it can offer serious benefits — especially if you care about cost, visibility, and flexibility.
Cost Advantages
One of the biggest benefits of Blossom is cost structure. Traditional PaaS platforms typically charge you per app, container, or request — often with steep markups. Blossom flips that model:
- Charges per server, not per app or container
- Let’s you run multiple apps on a single server without paying extra
- You can pick your own provider — AWS, GCP, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, bare metal, etc.
- Avoid lock-in — you can move your infra anytime
- There is no empty promise of a free tier — just a 5-day free trial to test it out
Because you’re managing the infrastructure cost directly, the total bill is often far lower — especially once you go beyond side projects. This can result in significant cost savings compared to alternatives.
Here’s a real-world example showing how Blossom can save you money:
As your application grows, these savings compound significantly. The more resources you need, the more you save with Blossom’s per-server pricing model compared to the per-app or per-container pricing of other platforms.
See: Blossom Pricing and the Comparision Calculator
Developer Friendly Experience
Blossom aims to keep things as simple and transparent as possible:
- Build from source — no Dockerfile required (auto-detects)
- Or use a custom Dockerfile, buildpack, nixpack, or prebuilt image
- Supports all major programming language and framework and static sites
- Uses Docker Compose for simplicity
- CI/CD and SSL are built-in
Blossom uses Docker but does not use Kubernetes for simplicity. I’ve worked extensively with Kubernetes and even wrote a DSL that builds YAML files for it. Blossom works more similarly to Kamal: your app is deployed consistently across your server fleet. But it also layers on modern conveniences so you don’t have to configure everything by hand.
The goal is to give you Heroku-like ease without hiding what’s going on under the hood. You get the simplicity you want — but also the transparency and control that many platforms obscure.
Over the years, I’ve internalized a lot of DevOps pain. Blossom is a reflection of those lessons — built for those who want simplicity, clarity, and affordability.
When Blossom Makes Sense
Blossom isn’t trying to be the right tool for everyone. If you want a fully hands-off platform where you don’t think about infrastructure at all, some of the Heroku-like services above might be a better fit — just know they come with pricing and scaling tradeoffs.
But if you’re comfortable choosing a server and want more control, simplicity, and meaningful cost savings, Blossom might be exactly what you’re looking for.
Ultimately, you can research endlessly. The quickest way to know if it’s right for you? Try it and see. Get started here