Heroku

Heroku has no intro price and no renewal price: each dyno and add-on has one monthly price, which is the most you pay if it runs all month. Usage is prorated to the second, so a Basic dyno ($7/mo) costs roughly $0.01 an hour, and each month's bill covers the month before. The Eco plan is different: a flat $5 a month for a pool of 1,000 dyno hours, charged in full even if you join mid-month. A help article says VAT and similar taxes are not included in invoiced amounts; the pricing page itself doesn't mention tax, and we didn't see a minimum term.

The additional terms for credit card customers say you contract with Heroku, Inc., a Delaware corporation, alongside the Salesforce Main Services Agreement. The About page says Heroku was founded in July 2007 by James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins and Orion Henry, and is now a business unit of Salesforce. The contact page gives Salesforce's address at 415 Mission Street, Suite 300, San Francisco. We didn't see a company registration number, or which entity customers outside the US sign with, on the pages we read.

Heroku's incidents and maintenance are posted on the Salesforce Trust status site, with the older status.heroku.com still posting during a changeover. The Dev Center explains that the site shows each Heroku region, the services in it, a History tab of past statuses and incidents, and a Maintenance tab, with email and SMS alerts you can filter by service and severity. Both status pages load with JavaScript, so we couldn't read the current incidents ourselves. The Postgres plans list downtime tolerance per tier, from under 4 hours a month (99.5% expected uptime) on Essential to under 15 minutes on Premium; we didn't see a contractual SLA for dynos.

Support runs 12×5, from 9am to 9pm Eastern time, Monday to Friday, excluding US holidays, through tickets on help.heroku.com; email is only for people locked out of their account. Technical support is for paid dynos and paid add-ons, while billing and account help is open to everyone. The free level gets "best effort" replies. Paid Success plans give stated response times: 2 business days on Standard, 1 hour for business-stopping issues on Premier, and updates every 15 to 30 minutes on Signature, with phone access on the top two. Prices for these plans aren't on the page.

We didn't see a money-back period. A help article says Heroku doesn't refund for incidents, maintenance or outages, and does refund after an approved tax exemption. Card customers are invoiced monthly in arrears, and must raise any billing dispute within 60 days of the charge. A help article walks through closing an account from Account Settings, and says you can't close it mid-billing period once paid usage has built up. The terms let Heroku suspend or end access for any reason, without prior notice, and change the terms over time; we didn't see a notice period for price changes.

Every Heroku Postgres plan can take free daily scheduled backups, kept for 7 days, plus weekly backups kept 1 to 8 weeks depending on the tier, and 12 monthly backups on Premium. You can also make manual backups (5 kept on Essential, 25 on Standard, 50 on Premium) and restore or download any of them yourself. Standard and Premium add continuous protection with rollback to any point in the past 4 or 7 days. The docs say scheduled backups send no failure alerts, and suggest another method for databases over 20 GB. Dynos have an ephemeral filesystem, so files on the app itself aren't backed up.

Automated Certificate Management gives every app free Let's Encrypt certificates for custom domains, renewed automatically a month before they expire. Multi-factor login is required for all customers, using Salesforce Authenticator, an authenticator app, a security key, a built-in authenticator such as Touch ID, or recovery codes. The security policy describes DDoS mitigation, penetration tests and required SSL for Postgres connections, and Postgres data is encrypted at rest. We didn't see malware scanning on the pages we read.

Standard apps run in one of two regions, United States or Europe, without a named city. Private Spaces add 10 named cities: Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Montreal, Mumbai, Oregon, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Virginia. You choose the region when you create an app and can't move a standard app later. The docs say a region doesn't guarantee all data stays there, and logical Postgres backups are stored in the US wherever the database is. The GDPR article links the Salesforce data processing addendum, with binding corporate rules and standard contractual clauses.

Every dyno lists its memory and a compute figure next to its price, from 0.5 GB for Eco and Basic up to 126 GB on Performance-2XL. CPU on standard dynos is given as a relative share (1x to 4x or 2x to 8x), not as cores; the newer Fir dynos list vCPUs. Postgres plans list storage and connections, starting at 1 GB and 20 connections for $5/mo. The limits page sets a 2 TB soft bandwidth limit per app a month and 100 apps per account. "Unlimited" is used only for process types and background workers on Standard and Performance dynos.

You can download any Postgres backup with one command, or get a download link that works for 60 minutes. The Git docs say Heroku's Git remote isn't meant as a stable repository and suggest keeping your code on GitHub or similar, so your code stays with you. Heroku doesn't sell domains, so there is no domain to transfer out. A help article explains how to close an account and suggests downloading your invoices first. We didn't see a fee for leaving.