Heroku

Heroku arrived in 2007 with a genuinely radical idea: push your code to a git remote and let someone else figure out the servers. That workflow — `git push heroku main`, watch the build logs stream by, hit a working URL — lowered the bar for shipping web applications in a way that shaped how a generation of developers learned to deploy. Ruby on Rails first, then Python, Node.js, Java, and a growing list of official buildpacks followed.

For over a decade, Heroku ran a generous free tier that made it the default recommendation in tutorials and bootcamp curricula everywhere. That changed in November 2022 when Salesforce — which acquired Heroku in 2010 — retired all free dynos and free add-on tiers. The lowest entry point is now the Eco dyno at around $5 per month, but real production workloads typically stack multiple dyno types, a data store add-on, and a scheduler, and the bill climbs accordingly.

The trade-off Heroku offers has always been the same: pay a premium to avoid thinking about infrastructure. That works well for early-stage products where developer time is scarcer than money. It becomes harder to justify once a team's Heroku bill crosses what a VPS with a self-hosted PaaS would cost — a threshold many teams hit faster than expected, which is why the open-source alternatives in this category exist.