3 Alternatives for Heroku's Free Tier - Full Stack & API Hosting

Heroku is getting rid of its free tier. In this video, we will look at 3 really good alternatives that offer a similar service. We will deploy a simple Node.js API to each one.
- Render - render.com
- Railway -railway.app
- Cyclic - cyclic.sh
💻 Node API Github Repo:
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📽️ Node API Video:
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Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro & Chat About Heroku & Free Hosting
3:16 - Project Intro
3:47 - Render
5:24 - Railway
6:40 - Cyclic
7:35 - Render Deployment
9:53 - Railway Deployment
11:30 - Cyclic Deployment

[@TraversyMedia]

Let us know if you have any other suggestions. Some of the requirements to be considered a Heroku alternative (imo) are ease of use, no credit card, backend services (not just serverless).

[@felicytatomaszewska2934]

I have a question does any of these have CLI because I love using CLI … It’s just personal preference

[@dgloria]

Hi Brad, I am looking for a free LAMP server for a very small app. If the app will be successful one day, I'm happy to pay for it, but now, until the first working app is finished I find DigitalOcean's £7 a month a bit too much for using the server less than 1 hour a month.

[@ryanstevens869]

I am trying to add your latest mern app to render. the goal list and I keep getting a fail. would love if you could do a quick video on that. specifically it cant find the middleware

[@danishfaisal2618]

Please let me know how can I deploy an app like your MERN Expense Tracker in which we add a "heroku-postbuild" script to run the client?

[@JasonJA88]

Do you know any good unmetered VPS

[@amjad-se]

The bro all developers have but didn't know they needed 👊

[@urten6460]

What? 😂

[@jumamuhombolage7473]

🤯

[@thy_minimalist]

Brad, you are truly concerned about our well-being as developers. We are so grateful to have you. You do not know how much you have saved me. When I saw the email from heroku about ending their free tiers, I didn't know where else to go or what to do because as a self taught developer and a student, before using heroku I had tried netlify and it gave me a hard time to use smoothly, so I settled with heroku. But now, you have just given me alternatives. Thank you so much!!!!

[@ntigirishari]

Man, you're not the only one feeling that way😀 I was actually going to use Netlify when I stumbled on Brad's video! @TraversyMedia, thanks so much🙏🙏

[@junog5552]

Much love, brad! I got into MERN recently and I've been learning new things along the way. But when I went to host my micro practice projects to get feedbacks from others, I was limited to enter my credit card in Heroku. I wasn't sure what to do. This video helped me a lot. Keep up the good work. God bless you.

[@hattietavares2923]

So useful to see how easy deployment is with these, thank you!

[@Julio860JVL]

Happy birthday Brad! Thank you for all these years of content. You have changed a lot of lives for the better. Thank you.

[@zombiefacesupreme]

Thank you so much, Brad. All 3 of these look fantastic!

[@brucelee7782]

Omg I was just looking a few weeks ago to host my fullstack app and you released this, thank you so much!

[@whereIsJerome]

Brad, thank you for this. Your videos are life savers. I can't count the number of times your tutorials pulled me out of a downward spiral of frustration and confusion.

[@JamesQQuick]

Love it! So many great hosting options out there!

[@mistah_mojo]

one, thank you SO MUCH for uploading this now! two, I'm really enjoying actually seeing you more in these videos!

[@onestepwebdev]

Note to Brad: Just got my NYC Events app back and running on Railway like a dream. Thanks for the heads-up and your ongoing diligence! All the best!

[@asthanegi3908]

Can railway support hosting a project that used MERN stack ?

[@alaeeddinehajji]

I'm lucky because I enabled the notification , I was searching for this topic and you published what I want

[@michaelantoni8323]

I new it, you're going to make a video about this. Thank you Brad as always.

[@MrSeanJines]

Brad, I reviewed many of your online courses, I feel A certain trust with your videos, Thank You for all your assistance. As what would be considered as a hobbyist. I would like to communicate with on a more private basis, in order to protect my idea. These and many of your videos have been a tremendous help. Not sure if you can see my email from this content. I did not see an email address on your web site, so I figured I,would reach out here. As for all others who watch this video I would absolutely subject to follow Brad as his video’s are unbiased, and he will tell you if it is just his opinion when it is. I found an unusual amount of trust in his training videos. Prosperous Wishes!

[@asanokatana]

The thing about Heroku is, as well, that it jumps to $7 per dyno now, at a minimum. I totally am ok with charges, I’m not entitled to free hosting even for dev / test environments, but at $7 *per dyno* I might as well spin up an instance of Lightsail and host multiple apps on a single instance (dev / test only, of course). It’s such a sharp jump for Heroku. You’d think they’d transition to something like $7 for 10 dynos or something. But it’s not surprising, Salesforce isn’t really for devs, it’s for business teams and people who want “low code”. Salesforce making moves to make Heroku less attractive to devs was expected at some point.

[@bearcountrypublishing5303]

My thought.. That just seems counter productive. Wouldn't you think that those devs who had to move to light sail or elsewhere, would be paying those places instead of heroku, when the build is bigger and needing scaled. I think they will stay where they developed it. It kinda sounds like heroku wants to give away their business to all the competition, or no?

[@itamarribeiro8865]

I've made those tests and what worked better at least for me was Cyclic, I'll make a couple more tests with it, thanks for the tips Brad

[@nickstaresinic9933]

Thanks for the super & timely content, Brad.

[@kgarun]

Thanks for the suggestions. I was trying to host a fastapi website and railway was quick&easy.

[@winstonmhango3437]

Just in time....thank you very much Brad.

[@GuiltyGamingJay]

Thank you very much , been coding for a while and i needed a place to host my projects

[@n3cro2012]

Ayyyeee. Brad always coming in clutch. Keep up the good work.

[@ItsSumitSharma921]

Thank You Sir. It helped me i am wondering for it for a long time ❣❣

[@arnoldtvisagie]

Thanks man. This is a really helpful video. I'm new to all of this and your video really gave me a better understanding.

[@georgestatefield]

Thanks Brad for sharing the video!

[@successezeh2009]

Thank you so much Brad for this tutorial. You are such a lovely big brother.😊

[@dugsiiye]

Absolutely Amazing Thanks Man .

[@danishpinjari6037]

my all 3 servers are running thank you sir for such a great explanation

[@mohammedbannamamohammed8324]

The Best Dev Channel of our generation Kudos Brad

[@yashwantsahu3198]

Your such life saver for me thanks. Actully, heroku got down my all free hosted app on it.

[@abdoulkarimbalde2802]

Thank you for this tutorial, it's really helpful.

[@ravikjha07]

Thank You For The Alternatives !!!! I will try it today only !!!

[@williamsbolu9829]

Thanks brad. This really helped a lot😊

[@programminem]

Thanks you so much Brad! 😀 Without you I never would have been a developer. Thanks for saving self-taught developers like me

[@derrickayitsey8984]

Thank you so much for the tutorial. very great video

[@zambianyoutuberx]

This is very very helpful! Thank You!

[@pavel4415]

Dude, thank you for the video, it's really helpuf!

[@nextleveltech267]

Sir you really helped me.... Thanks a lot❤

[@GarryThakur07]

Very helpful stuff!!!

[@fredianriko5648]

all my concern was said by you sir, Thank you, truly Thank you

[@chukwukagodwill7457]

Always count on you bro thanks 👍

[@zlackbiro]

My vote goes for Cyclic! Its direct just like heroku but even better, easier to use, no spin down, everything is unlimited up an running.

[@antoniofuller2331]

Whoa!!!

[@shaun374]

But you only get 3 projects on it. That's the downside

[@enaholoakhere4068]

This is the comment i was looking for

[@0xTRellyx0]

does railway have spin down?

[@vivekkoul4428]

@@shaun374 after 3 what?

[@tjay5644]

Thank you Much needed

[@cairink2110]

Perfect Timing 👍👍

[@rudrapratap3303]

Thank you so much for this valuable video!

[@mphumelelierrolntetha2103]

Thanks my brother bringing this to my attention. I wasn't aware of this and my APIs are deployed in Heroku too.

[@beomseok5957]

Helpline📲📥⬆️ Question can come in⬆️..

[@craiggazimbi]

As always thank you so much Brad, I have become a better developer all thanks to you. Thank you for your educational content and guidance. I would love to discuss something with u left a message.

[@sskdev5116]

Awesome video!!! Needed this as I too have to now move from Heroku. I was wondering what were your thoughts on Digital Ocean App deployment. They seem to have simplified that version a bit. Even thought its not exactly free

[@nesafarm]

Thanks for this Brad!

[@dreamisover9813]

Great video idea! I have some apps on the heroku free tier as well atm

[@justhooman4682]

Thank you. I'm grateful for this.

[@ermiasasmare9995]

You are the reason of my software developer carrier thankyou so much u are the best there is

[@2gain]

I deployed my Strapi service easily in Render but Cyclic is failing to build it. In Render all I had to do is set the build command to yarn; yarn build. But Cyclic does not provide the option to change commands. I noticed it gets the commands from the projects package.json, but even after changing the build command from there, Cyclic still fails on build :(

[@aryamitra.chaudhuri]

Thank you Brad!

[@realcodeninja]

Awesome, Thanks traversy

[@Salah-YT]

thank u so much my best teacher, Mr Brad 👍👍👍👍👍

[@morahstephen5548]

Was literally waiting for this

[@Hacking-NASSA-with-HTML]

Thank you so much, Brad🤝! Just one more comment to boost the signal of your videos✅!

[@serhatzaferulgur4805]

Brad is very good work and I saw on Twitter the question you asked. Well, I have a question. I wrote a backend using NodeJS and MSSQL. Can this code I have written be distributed on the three sites you have shown?

[@abdullahsoomro6238]

Thank you Brad 🤗

[@minor12828]

Great content dude keep it up 💪

[@CvetaMobi]

Thank you for information!

[@dameriandark1485]

Thanks for the video. The backend api I created I would push through the heroku cli. Are you able to do something similar with these three since my github repo for my api is set to private.?

[@abdullahmanafikhi4438]

you are a life saver! thanks alot

[@jonkatabg8934]

Thank you so much!

[@deejaydev]

Yeah BabaBard , I got that email too, I was freaking out but... thanks Brother for sharing!

[@mrashad_com]

As always, dedicating time to watch your videos proves to be a valuable and worthwhile investment of my time. Many thanks!

[@chimex1149]

Thanks a lot Brad!!

[@dror-krief]

thank you brad! is it good to deploy my project in two services? backend in one service and the front in the other?

[@abdisiraj7060]

You are a good man. You should be proud of yourself. God bless you.

[@Gpassinho]

my favorite youtube channel

[@shoneUTD]

great, just what I need, thanks Brad!

[@empiregaming3675]

Thanks man You give very good options

[@Valyssi]

I've also seen Fly being recommended by FullStackOpen as an alternative to Heroku at least for that course. It's been working for me so far but haven't compared it to the others yet

[@bessimboujebli1076]

thx for the great content as usual

[@yogeshc7241]

Great video! Thankyou so much for this

[@priyankaroberts1093]

Hey Yogesh Do you usually learn through these online tutorials? Would you be interested in exploring internship/job opportunities in web development?

[@bigfoot_ke]

Right on time Brad💪🏽

[@christianmarvinorsua3079]

So glad you made this video

[@mohitsaud2071]

Thank You, Brad.

[@chaswards]

I looked into all three of these myself, as I am just now trying to migrate my projects over from Heroku, and I think Railway was the easiest to set up from my experience. Super easy if you are like me and are trying to push a full stack app with database

[@yodkwtf]

yep I tried render and railway for multiple projects and railway the easiest of them all to set up.

[@asthanegi3908]

Can It support a project which was made using MERN stack

[@durgesh-chaudhary]

@@asthanegi3908 yeah if you set up your commands right

[@lydstyl]

Thank you, you solved my problem.

[@robster5able79]

Thank you dude!

[@akobirnarzullaev2850]

Thank you bro! You saved my day!

[@beomseok5957]

Helpline📲📥⬆️ Question can come in⬆️..

[@khalidelgazzar]

Thank you, Brad. Seems that railway (option 2) is simple and straightforward to the extent that you can directly place your custom domain during the deploy process As for cyclic (option 3) it seemed to be the fastest in deployment

[@asthanegi3908]

Can railway support hosting a project that used MERN stack ?

[@khalidelgazzar]

​@@asthanegi3908I suppose yes. Haven't tried, but it looks like it does so flawlessly

[@geminicoding]

I plan to build my own product that might scale someday. Is it worth it to study AWS or just go with these free tier options?

[@muhammadidrees6650]

Thanks Brad :)

[@jasonhusain570]

Hi, Brad. How do I hide my API key before deploying to Cyclic?

[@konstantingromov6485]

Thanks a lot. Brad, I know that it's probably not your stack, but do you know if there is any alternative to Heroku for Java-based application (e.g. it spring-boot backend server)?

[@some_tools3095]

really need this thanks!

[@simbapfaira1340]

Thank you Brad.

[@user-zn6cv1jf8e]

Exactly just what i need!

[@clipstube7691]

Thank you brad

[@oualidsenina]

greate content thanks man

[@pratikdesai9255]

This channel need more supporters. Just support them guys.✌❤

[@abhishekwanve1519]

Railway is Best, deployed in less than 5 min. In Render, you have to deploy the frontend, backend separately is not a good option because it can cause problems in cookie token formation. Versel host only serverless sites also in the free version there is a time limit for server request.(my learning by trying all these options) Like if find helpful👍👍🎉 EDIT: railway has a Limit per month will work 22 days. Cyclic is better it hasn't any limit on time but it has a build limit ie build folder limit(around 256MB).this limit is fair enough if your project is not too too complex it will get deployed

[@Josh_DoesStuff]

Hey man, appreciate all you do. I would like to build a website / wep app for a restaurant. I know html css, and js. I do know a bit of php but not really fluent with it. What would you or anyone reading recommend? Is it still good to use php? Or are there any other alternatives? Also how would you host them / link them how would that go about? Unfortunately I don't have a lot of knowledge if hosting stuff as sadly everything I've done is local and it was very hard for me to host things back in the when I was studying

[@LAVISHGOYAL]

Brilliant video! Was finding alternatives for my various small projects hosted on Heroku's free tier, especially for testing purposes. Also, if you don't mind can I write a blog post for Heroku alternatives referencing your video and adding some additional alternatives that I found on my own?

[@TraversyMedia]

Thanks. Yeah, a blog post would be great :)

[@electricimpulsetoprogramming]

link it

[@JohnMitchellCalif]

super useful! Subscribed

[@oscarfelix7244]

Thats a Dope Underdogdevs Tee. Represent 🤘🏼

[@plbader3714]

you are a life saver ro thank you