A Heroku alternative with a free plan and PostgreSQL

Both build your code without a Dockerfile and run PostgreSQL next to your app. The difference is what a small app costs to run.

• Free plan: Heroku has no free plan. Its cheapest option, Eco, is $5 a month for 1,000 dyno hours shared by all your Eco apps, and an Eco app sleeps after 30 minutes without traffic (Heroku Eco dyno hours). A ProductEcho Free-plan app keeps running, at $0.
• An app and its database: on Heroku, an app that never sleeps starts at Basic, $7 a month for 512 MB, and the smallest Heroku Postgres plan, Essential-0, is $5 a month for 1 GB (Heroku pricing). ProductEcho's Free plan includes both.
• 1 GB of memory: Heroku's Basic and Standard-1X dynos have 512 MB, and the first dyno with 1 GB is Standard-2X at $50 a month. ProductEcho's 1 GB size costs about $15.78 a month on Pro.

Heroku facts from Heroku's own pages, checked on 14 November 2026.

If your team relies on Heroku's pipelines and add-ons and the bill isn't a problem, stay where you are. ProductEcho fits best for small apps: an app and its database for $0, or a 1 GB app for about $15.78 a month.

1. Connect your coding agent to ProductEcho. Claude Code, Cursor and Codex all work.
2. Run heroku config --shell > .env to copy your config vars into a file, and delete the DATABASE_URL line. Then give your agent the prompt below from the project folder. ProductEcho sets a new DATABASE_URL when it creates the database, builds the code and returns an HTTPS address.
3. Back up your Heroku database and restore it into ProductEcho with pg_restore, version 17 or newer.

Deploy this project to ProductEcho with the environment variables in .env, and create a PostgreSQL database for it.

For step 3, replace your-app with your Heroku app name, and get the new URL from your ProductEcho PostgreSQL database:

heroku pg:backups:capture --app your-app
curl -o latest.dump "$(heroku pg:backups:url --app your-app)"
pg_restore --no-owner --no-acl --dbname "$PRODUCTECHO_DATABASE_URL" latest.dump