Heroku's marketing price is $5-$7/month for a basic dyno. Almost nobody's real bill looks like that, because a real app needs more than one dyno.
What a typical small SaaS actually costs on Heroku
- Web dyno (Basic): ~$7/mo
- Worker dyno for background jobs: ~$7/mo
- Postgres (Standard-0, once you outgrow the free/mini tier): ~$50/mo
- Redis (Premium-0): ~$15/mo
- A second environment for staging: roughly doubles the above
That's easily $80-$150/month for a genuinely small app — before you add a second web dyno for redundancy, which Heroku's own reliability guidance recommends.
What the same app costs on a VPS
A single $20-$40/month VPS (4-8GB RAM, a few vCPUs) from Hetzner or DigitalOcean comfortably runs the app container, Postgres, Redis, and a background worker, all in Docker containers on the same box, with room to spare. That's a 3-5x cost difference for equivalent capacity, and it only widens as the app grows — Heroku's managed add-ons scale in price much faster than raw compute does.
What you give up
This is the part cost comparisons usually skip. Heroku buys you:
- Zero server maintenance (OS patches, Docker updates — someone else's problem)
- Instant horizontal scaling via the dashboard
- A mature add-on marketplace
- No SSH keys to manage, no firewall rules to think about
A VPS gives you the cost savings, but you're now responsible for the box. That trade only makes sense if something automates away the operational burden — provisioning, HTTPS, zero-downtime deploys, backups, monitoring — because manually replicating what Heroku does behind the scenes is a real time cost, and your time isn't free either.
The middle ground
This is exactly the gap tools like DeployOS target: VPS-level pricing with Heroku-level workflow. Git push (or a GUI click) to deploy, automatic HTTPS, one-click database provisioning, scheduled backups, and monitoring — running on infrastructure that costs a fraction of Heroku's, without you hand-writing the automation yourself. If your Heroku bill has crept past $100/month, it's worth pricing out what the same app costs on a VPS with the operational parts handled for you.