Heroku

Heroku popularized the idea that deploying an app should be easy. A developer pushes code to a Git repository, and Heroku builds it, runs it in lightweight containers called dynos, and handles routing, scaling, and logs. Add-ons provide databases, caching, monitoring, and other services with a few clicks, so a small team can run a production app without managing servers. Many Ruby, Python, Node, and Java apps started there.

Heroku has been adding AI capabilities for developers. Managed inference lets apps call hosted models through the platform, and agent features help build and run AI-powered applications alongside the regular app and database, with the aim of keeping the developer experience simple. Heroku Postgres remains a central product, with pgvector support for embeddings.

Heroku is paid, with pricing by dyno type and add-on usage. Free plans ended some years ago, and the cheapest plans cost a few dollars a month. It is more expensive at scale than running on raw cloud infrastructure. Alternatives include Render, Railway, Fly.io, Vercel and Netlify for front ends, and Google Cloud Run or AWS App Runner. Heroku suits teams that value simplicity and a mature ecosystem.