Heroku plans to stop offering free plans and shut down free services on November 28 and begin deleting inactive accounts on October 26, due to “fraud and abuse”
Heroku's free tier has been the default on-ramp for hobbyist developers for over a decade, so framing the shutdown as a fraud-and-abuse problem is a notable shift for a platform whose growth engine was free student and side-project deployments. The move lands mid-arc: it precedes Twitter's decision to end free API access in favor of a paid basic tier, and it foreshadows where Heroku itself ends up — a sustaining-engineering model aimed at enterprise-grade AI rather than broad developer self-service.
The retirement also fits a longer graveyard pattern in cloud services: Wuala went read-only before shutting down in 2015, HP killed its Helion public cloud within months of launch-era promises, and Fastly-owned Glitch stopped hosting user projects in 2025. Free hosting keeps proving to be the first casualty when a platform's unit economics tighten.
First-order effects
Hobbyists, students, and open-source maintainers running apps on Heroku's free dynos must migrate or pay before November 28, while inactive accounts start being deleted from October 26.
Paid-plan customers become Heroku's sole remaining constituency, and the support burden shifts toward them immediately.
Second-order effects
Developers priced out of Heroku push demand toward rival platforms' free tiers, raising the question of whether those competitors can absorb the influx without facing the same abuse costs Heroku cites.
Twitter's follow-on move to a paid basic API tier shows the pattern propagating: once one major platform drops its free tier citing sustainability, others gain cover to do the same.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, free developer tiers become a legacy artifact — platforms converge on paid entry points, and the pipeline that once funneled students into cloud ecosystems moves to credits programs and enterprise-sponsored access.
Heroku's own trajectory confirms the endpoint: by 2026 it is optimizing for stability, security, and enterprise AI workloads rather than volume of small deployments, suggesting free-tier abandonment is a step in repositioning around fewer, larger customers.
The trend: Cloud and developer platforms are systematically retiring free tiers as fraud and infrastructure costs mount, repositioning instead around paying enterprise customers.
Today, we're announcing important Heroku updates. These include an interactive product roadmap on #GitHub, support programs for students and nonprofits, as well as phasing out free product plans. See what the future of building on #Heroku looks like: https://blog.heroku.com/...
In a world where open source PaaS competition is heating up fast, eliminating the free tier for Heroku feels like a massive unforced error by Salesforce. https://twitter.com/...
heroku noooooo- as a ruby archaeologist this is going to destroy so many historical things not to mention many personal projects I've had over the years I'm a paying customer for several services that need it! but the free tier let me experiment please reconsider 😞 https://twitte…
Salesforce discontinues Heroku's free plan and remove inactive accounts. A bunch of cool and free internet websites and side-projects are gonna bite the dust in the next weeks https://blog.heroku.com/...
“Starting October 26, 2022, we will begin deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year. Starting November 28, 2022, we plan to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data services.”…
Definitely the end of an era. I think many saw this coming a long time ago, but still sad to see. (Obligatory: @glitch is happy to host your projects, and being in a community with others who value the open web is wonderful.) https://twitter.com/...
RIP Heroku, my aspirational devtools company. Their impact is measured in businesses created, number of people who write code turned into people running prod apps, and developers' lives made easier. This number is far greater than their lifetime revenue. https://techcrunch.com/..…
Wow. Free lunch is over! Time to pay up, kids! [Heroku] “will be phasing out our free plan for Heroku Dynos, free plan for Heroku Postgres, and free plan for Heroku Data for Redis®, as well as deleting inactive accounts.” #NewHeroku https://twitter.com/...