This isn't really an apples-to-apples comparison — Heroku is a managed PaaS, DeployOS automates your own VPS. The honest framing: Heroku buys convenience at a real markup; DeployOS gets you most of that convenience at VPS pricing, in exchange for owning a server.
| DeployOS | Heroku | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | A VPS you own (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, any Ubuntu box) | Heroku's own multi-tenant infrastructure |
| Pricing model | One-time app purchase + your own ~$5-40/mo VPS | Per-dyno + per-addon, monthly, scales up fast |
| Typical small-app cost | $0-79 once + ~$20/mo VPS | $80-150+/mo once you add Postgres, Redis, a worker dyno |
| Server maintenance | Handled by DeployOS's bootstrap + doctor diagnostics | None — fully managed by Heroku |
| HTTPS | Automatic, Let's Encrypt via Traefik/Caddy | Automatic |
| Zero-downtime deploys | Yes — health-checked rollout, one-click rollback | Yes |
| Scaling | Manual — resize your VPS or add another | Instant, dashboard-driven horizontal scaling |
Not deeply — DeployOS auto-detects most repos (via Railpack) and builds a container for you even without a Dockerfile. Some baseline comfort with the idea of "my app runs in a container" helps, but you don't hand-write Dockerfiles for a typical app.
DeployOS supports multiple servers and one-click migration of apps between them. It's manual compared to Heroku's instant dashboard scaling — the tradeoff for VPS-level pricing is that scaling is a deliberate action, not automatic.
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