Moving from Heroku to DigitalOcean
Heroku's pricing has crept up, and you're wondering if there's a better option. DigitalOcean offers significantly lower costs with managed services that feel familiar, but you'll take on more infrastructure responsibility. Here's an honest breakdown of what you'd gain, what you'd lose, and whether the switch makes sense for your team.
Cost Comparison
Estimated Monthly Savings
~$44/month
That's approximately 22% less per month
Your actual costs depend on traffic patterns and data transfer. DigitalOcean's managed databases include daily backups and point-in-time recovery at no extra cost.
What You'll Gain
Meaningful cost savings with managed services
Unlike bare-metal providers, you can get 20-25% savings while still using managed PostgreSQL and Redis with no database administration required.
More resources per dollar
A droplet with dedicated vCPUs starts at $42/month. Compare that to a single Standard-2x dyno at $50/month with 1 GB RAM.
Managed databases that actually work
DigitalOcean's managed PostgreSQL includes automatic daily backups, point-in-time recovery, and automated failover that are similar to Heroku's database add-on but at lower cost.
Global data center coverage
13 data centers across North America (NYC, SFO, Toronto), Europe, Asia, and Australia. Unlike some budget providers, full capacity is available in US regions.
Transparent, predictable billing
Per-second billing with no surprise charges for IPv4 addresses or NAT gateways. Data transfer overage is only $0.01/GB, dramatically cheaper than hyperscalers.
Performance visibility
Built-in monitoring, alerting, and the ability to SSH into your droplet when you need to debug issues directly.
What You'll Lose
Integrated logging and metrics
Heroku's dashboard shows logs and metrics by default. You'll configure your own observability stack or use DigitalOcean's basic monitoring.
Built-in autoscaling
You'll monitor and scale manually, or build automation yourself.
Review apps and pipelines
Heroku's PR-based review environments don't have a direct equivalent, so you'd need to build something similar.
Add-on ecosystem
Need to send emails? Monitor errors? You'll provision and configure these services yourself rather than clicking "add" in a marketplace.
Hands-off server maintenance
OS updates, security patches, and firewall configuration are your responsibility. Heroku handles this invisibly.
Smaller Redis option
The minimum managed Valkey tier is 1 GB ($15/month), more than you need if Heroku's 25 MB tier was sufficient, though you could self-manage Redis on your droplet to save this cost.
Should You Switch?
- You're paying $150+/month on Heroku and want meaningful savings without giving up managed databases
- You value good documentation and a clean interface over rock-bottom prices
- Your team has (or wants to develop) basic deployment and server skills
- You want more control over your infrastructure without going full bare-metal
- Global data center availability matters for your users
- Your time is worth more than the cost savings
- Git-push deployment is essential to your workflow and you don't want to set up alternatives
- You heavily depend on Heroku add-ons that don't have easy replacements
- You need features like review apps for your development workflow
- Zero infrastructure management is a hard requirement
Ready to Make the Switch?
Want help with the migration? I offer a done-for-you Heroku Exit Plan service that handles the entire transition—infrastructure setup, deployment configuration, database migration, and ongoing support.
Learn more about the Heroku Exit Plan