Heroku's free tier ended in 2022, and developers are still looking for somewhere simple to put a small app. The good news is that the platform-as-a-service market has matured, and in 2026 several hosts offer a genuinely free tier that covers a side project without a credit card or a surprise bill. The bad news is that every free tier has a different limit, and picking the wrong one means migrating in three months. Here is how the real options compare for a small app in 2026.

Render, Railway and Fly.io: The Closest to Heroku

Render is the closest spiritual successor to Heroku: push code, get a URL, add a free Postgres database, and stop thinking about servers. Its free tier covers a web service that sleeps after inactivity, which is fine for a side project and annoying for anything that must answer instantly. Railway offers a similar push-to-deploy experience with a small monthly credit allowance, generous enough for a small app and its database, and its interface is the friendliest of the three. Fly.io takes a different approach, running your app in lightweight virtual machines close to your users, with a free allowance that covers a small app and a small database, plus excellent documentation. All three deploy from Git in minutes, and all three will happily take your money when you outgrow the free tier, which is exactly how a free tier should work.

Cloudflare Workers, Vercel and the Serverless Route

If your app is mostly an API or a static site, the serverless free tiers are even more generous. Cloudflare Workers gives a large daily request allowance for free with global edge deployment, and pairs with D1 for a small database and R2 for storage, all inside one free account. Vercel and Netlify remain the best free hosts for frontend apps, with automatic previews, custom domains and generous bandwidth. The trade-off is architecture: serverless platforms suit stateless workloads and need a different design for anything with long-running processes or persistent connections. For a Discord bot, a background worker or a websocket app, the container platforms above are the better fit.

How to Choose Without Migrating Later

Migrating From Heroku Without the Pain

If you still have an app on Heroku, migration is simpler than it looks, and most of it is mechanical. Start by exporting your code and your database: use pg_dump for Postgres and download any uploaded files from your storage add-on, because those are the two things that cannot be recreated from Git. Next, pick the new host based on the app's shape, not its brand, and deploy a test copy before you touch the production app. Move the environment variables across one by one, and test the app end to end on the new host, including background jobs and scheduled tasks, which are the parts most people forget. When the test copy works, point your domain at the new host during a quiet hour, watch the logs for thirty minutes, and only then delete the Heroku app. Keep the old database backup for a month. A careful migration takes an afternoon, and the app usually runs better on the new host than it did on the old one.

Match the host to the app, not to the hype. A simple web app with a database: Render or Railway. An app that must respond instantly around the world: Fly.io or Cloudflare Workers. A static site or frontend: Vercel or Netlify. Before committing, check three limits that cause most migrations: whether the free tier sleeps, how much database storage is included, and what happens when you exceed the free allowance. Set a billing alert even on a free account, keep your app portable with a standard Dockerfile or build command, and you can move hosts in an afternoon if a better free tier appears. Heroku's free tier is gone, but the idea behind it is alive and well.