Their Pitch
The AI PaaS for deploying, managing, and scaling apps
Our Take
It's a cloud service that runs your web apps without dealing with servers. You push code via Git, it handles everything else — hosting, scaling, keeping it alive.
Deep Dive & Reality Check
Used For
- +**Your weekend deploys break production and wake you up at 3am** → Git push deploys in seconds, auto-scaling handles traffic spikes, built-in monitoring catches issues
- +**You're manually running daily social media bots and cron jobs** → Heroku Scheduler runs scripts at midnight automatically, no server setup required
- +**Your React scraper breaks when dynos restart and lose temp files** → Ephemeral disk means downloaded images vanish, but databases persist between restarts
- +Review Apps spin up entire staging environments in 30 seconds for every pull request
- +Private Spaces isolate sensitive data with Terraform configs for compliance requirements
Best For
- >Building prototypes and side projects that need to be live tomorrow, not next month
- >Small dev teams who want to ship features instead of babysitting servers
- >Startups that hit product-market fit and need something running 24/7 immediately
Not For
- -High-traffic apps — dyno costs explode beyond 100k+ users, cheaper to move to AWS or Fly.io
- -Control freaks who need root access — Heroku abstracts everything, you can't SSH into boxes or customize the OS
- -Penny-pinchers — no free tier anymore, and add-ons stack up fast once you need Redis, databases, and monitoring
Pairs With
- *Git (where you push code to deploy — the core workflow that makes Heroku magical)
- *PostgreSQL (Heroku's managed database add-on that actually persists data between dyno restarts)
- *Redis (for caching and preventing duplicate scheduler jobs with tokens)
- *GitHub (for Review Apps that auto-deploy every pull request to separate URLs)
- *Node.js/Ruby (the most popular runtime languages that work best with Heroku's buildpacks)
- *Salesforce (Heroku's parent company, used for data integration and enterprise features)
- *Fly.io or Render (where you migrate when Heroku gets too expensive)
The Catch
- !Dynos go to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity and lose any files you saved to disk
- !Memory leaks require manual profiling with 5-minute heap dumps through Chrome DevTools
- !Most teams migrate off after 12-18 months when scaling costs hit $300-500/month and alternatives become worth the migration pain
Bottom Line
Git push to production in 30 seconds, but you'll migrate off when the dyno bills hit $500/month.