## Heroku Alternatives

Heroku was one one of the earliest cloud platforms to offer a PaaS (Platform as a Service) model.

It was founded in 2007 and has been a leader in the PaaS space ever since.
Heroku is a great platform for developers to deploy their applications and scale them as needed.

However, Heroku is not the only PaaS platform out there. In this article, we will look at some of the best Heroku alternatives
as it has announced to stop supporting the free tier (hobby) plan from November 28th 2022.You can read more about this [here](https://blog.heroku.com/next-chapter/).

I still remember the first time I deployed an application on Heroku, It was so easy to deploy.

It was a simple Flask application that I had cloned from [hastebin](https://hastebin.com/), I still think its deployed somewhere on Heroku. [hastebin-clone](https://haste-bin-clone.herokuapp.com/)

It literally deployed any code I threw at it that too for free. I was amazed at how easy it was to deploy an application on Heroku.It was essiential to any developer starting out.

Earlier in the days it was not easy to run code on server, it required a special set of knowledge and skills to run code on a server.

for ex;

- Have a VM hosted somewhere with a public Ip address alloted to it.
- SSH into it
- Install the necessary software/dependeices
- Ingress & Egress rules
- Firewall rules
- Reverse proxy if the server was mapped to any domain
  and the list goes on.

## What was hobby tier?

Hobby tier was a free tier that Heroku offered to developers to deploy their applications for free.
It offered 512 MB of RAM and 1 dyno. It was a great way to get started with Heroku.
we could attach any VCS (Version Control System) to our application and deploy it with a single click.
we could also get a smol database for free.

Well from that day most of my personal projects have been deployed on Heroku on hobby tier.

Now considering that they'll be stopping the free tier from November 28th 2022, I thought it would be a good idea to look at some of the best Free Heroku alternatives.

as Heroku killed the free tier they literally digged out a hole for themselves; I doubt Heroku will be able to compete with the other PaaS platforms out there.

## host a website (Frontend)

If you are looking to host a website for free free,

- Github Pages
- Netlify
- Vercel
- Render
- Surge
- Cloudflare Pages
- Firebase hosting

## Host a website (Backend)

If you are looking to host a backend for free,

- Railway.app
- Repl.it
- Render
- Cloudflare Workers

## Host a docker Image

Nowdays most of the applications are containerized and deployed as docker images across the network to facilitate for easy deployment and scaling.

- Railway.app
- Render
- Fly.in
- Digital Ocean App Platform

## Host a database

- Railway.app
- PlanetScale
- Supabase
- MongoDB Atlas
- Firebase Realtime Database
- Firebase Firestore

Any way there are endless opportunities out there, I tried to complie the most frequent services I use and the ones which offer easy deployment and scaling, you can host your application on any of the above platforms for free.

Ofc there is the 2 gaints in the market, AWS and GCP, they offer a lot of services (all of the above) for free, but they are not as easy to use as the above platforms. '
That's why I didn't include them in the list.

## Conclusion

There are **so many good** alternatives out there to deploy a full stack application.
If you are looking to deploy a full stack application for free, I would recommend you to try out [Railway.app](https://railway.app/).
It's one of the best Heroku alternatives out there.

If I missed out on any good Heroku alternatives, please let me know, [Mail Here](mailto:[email protected])