The Heroku Alternative That Keeps Your Buildpacks and Procfile
Heroku invented push-to-deploy and still charges for it by the dyno: $7 for a Basic dyno with 512 MB, $25 for Standard-1X, $50 for Standard-2X with 1 GB, plus Postgres from $5 (heroku.com/pricing, 31 October 2026). Dokploy builds with the same Heroku buildpacks, reads your Procfile-style start commands and runs everything on one MassiveGRID server for a flat $9.58 a month and up, with managed MassiveGRID PaaS as the route for teams who want no server at all.
Why teams leave Heroku
Heroku's prices on 31 October 2026: Eco dynos $5 a month (they sleep after inactivity), Basic $7 with 512 MB, Standard-1X $25 with 512 MB, Standard-2X $50 with 1 GB, Performance-M $250 with 2.5 GB and Performance-L $500 with 14 GB; Heroku Postgres Essential-0 $5 (1 GB), Essential-1 $9 (10 GB), Standard-0 $50 (64 GB). The pattern is that memory is expensive and every process is a line item: a web dyno, a worker dyno, a database and a cache for one small application is four lines before any add-on, and a gigabyte of RAM costs $50. The free tier ended in November 2022, and a Standard-2X dyno buys the RAM that a $9.58 VPS gives you four times over.
What people keep from Heroku is the model: a Git push, a buildpack that detects the language, a Procfile that names the processes, config vars, logs in one place. Dokploy keeps all of it.
Dynos, add-ons and what replaces them
| On Heroku | Dokploy equivalent | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| git push heroku main | Dokploy application with Auto Deploy from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or Gitea | Included |
| Buildpacks | Dokploy build type "Heroku Buildpacks" (also Paketo, Nixpacks, Railpack, Dockerfile) | Included |
| Procfile web and worker processes | One Dokploy application per process from the same repository, with its own start command; the worker has no domain | Included |
| Config vars | Environment tab, shared variables across a project | Included |
| Heroku Postgres, Redis add-ons | PostgreSQL and Redis as Dokploy database services with scheduled S3 backups | On the same server, $0 |
| Heroku Scheduler | Dokploy Schedule Jobs (cron expressions) on any service | Included |
| Review apps | Preview Deployments per pull request | Included |
| Pipelines (staging to production) | Dokploy environments and projects; promote by deploying the same commit | Included |
| heroku logs --tail | Dokploy log viewer and web terminal per service; ship logs to Grafana Loki or Papertrail if you want retention | Included |
| Add-on marketplace | 500+ open-source templates (Plausible, MinIO, Mattermost, n8n and more) deployed next to your apps | Included |
| Dyno autoscaling | Vertical: resize the server. Horizontal: Swarm replicas across worker nodes with a registry | Manual, not metric-driven |
What Heroku still does better: a fifteen-year-old operations track record, add-ons from third parties with support contracts, and a platform you never update. If those matter more than the bill, Heroku is a fine place to stay.
Two routes off Heroku
There are two honest routes off Heroku, and the right one depends on how much operating you want to do.
Route 1: Dokploy on a VPS you own
A free, open-source dashboard on a MassiveGRID server preset for Dokploy: Git push deployments with webhooks, preview deployments for pull requests, automatic HTTPS through Traefik, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB and Redis as services with scheduled backups, scheduled jobs, rollbacks, a web terminal and a template catalogue of 500+ open-source apps. The server is the whole bill, $9.58 a month for the 2 vCPU, 4 GB Starter preset and $39.60 for the 4 vCPU, 8 GB Growth preset on dedicated cores, and MassiveGRID installs Dokploy for you on request. Coolify is the same route with a different dashboard; the self-hosted PaaS page compares the two with CapRover and Dokku.
Route 2: MassiveGRID PaaS, managed
If leaving Heroku must not mean running anything, MassiveGRID PaaS deploys from Git or a Docker image onto a platform we operate, with vertical and horizontal scaling, a 100% uptime SLA, a marketplace of one-click packages and usage billing from $2.46 per cloudlet-month. It costs more than a bare VPS and less than the managed platforms per unit of resource, and there is no server to patch.
Migrating a Heroku app to Dokploy, step by step
- Export config vars with
heroku config -s -a your-appand paste them into the Dokploy application's Environment tab, replacingDATABASE_URLandREDIS_URLafter step 3. - Create the web application in Dokploy from the repository with the Heroku Buildpacks build type (or a Dockerfile if you have one). Use your Procfile's
webcommand as the start command and set the domain's port to the one your process binds; Heroku apps read$PORT, so setPORT=8000in the environment and use 8000 in the domain. - Move the database:
heroku pg:backups:capturethenheroku pg:backups:download, create a PostgreSQL service in Dokploy, restore the dump withpg_restorefrom the web terminal, and schedule a daily backup to S3. - Create the worker as a second application from the same repository, same build type and environment, start command from the Procfile's
workerline, no domain. - Recreate scheduler jobs as Dokploy Schedule Jobs with cron expressions.
- Point DNS at the server, confirm the Let's Encrypt certificate, put the Heroku app in maintenance mode, take a final database dump, restore it, and switch.
Our Heroku to Coolify migration post covers the same steps for Coolify, and the Laravel and Django guides show full production setups on Dokploy.
Replace Four Dynos with One Server
Starter (2 vCPU, 4 GB) runs a web process, a worker, PostgreSQL and Redis for $9.58 a month, eight times the RAM of a Standard-1X dyno for less than half its price; Growth doubles everything. Switch to dedicated cores for steady builds. Dokploy is free and installed on request.
One application with a worker and a database, side by side
| Heroku | Dokploy on MassiveGRID | |
|---|---|---|
| Web process | Standard-2X dyno, 1 GB: $50 | Application on the server |
| API or second web process | Standard-1X dyno, 512 MB: $25 | Application on the server |
| Worker | Basic dyno, 512 MB: $7 | Application on the server |
| PostgreSQL | Essential-1, 10 GB: $9 | Database service, 128 GB NVMe shared with everything |
| Redis | Key-Value Store add-on (not priced on the page we fetched) | Database service, $0 |
| Monthly total | $91 plus Redis | $39.60 (Growth, dedicated cores) or $19.16 on shared cores |
Heroku figures from heroku.com/pricing on 31 October 2026. The Heroku column has 2.5 GB of RAM in total; the MassiveGRID column has 8 GB.
One Command, Full Platform
SSH into your new MassiveGRID server and run this command. Dokploy will install Docker, set up Traefik, configure SSL, and launch the dashboard automatically.
Requires a fresh server with Ubuntu 24.04 or Debian 12, at least 2 GB of RAM and 30 GB of disk, and ports 80, 443 and 3000 free. The installer needs root access and sets up Docker, Traefik and all dependencies.
4 Tier-4 Data Centers Worldwide
Deploy your Dokploy server in the region closest to your team and users for the lowest latency.
New York City
US East Coast
London
United Kingdom
Frankfurt
Germany
Singapore
Asia Pacific
Frequently Asked Questions
Questions from teams moving off Heroku.
Keep the push-to-deploy, lose the dyno math
Buildpacks, Procfile-style processes, databases and scheduled jobs on one server from $9.58 a month, on a Proxmox HA cluster with a 100% uptime SLA and a 15-day money-back guarantee. Dokploy installed on request.