Heroku stated on August 25th that its immensely popular free tier plans (free Heroku Dynos, free Heroku Postgres, and free Heroku Data for Redis) will be phased out beginning November 28th this year (2022). Heroku general manager Bob Wise blamed the end of the free services on "abuse,"

Our product, engineering, and security teams are spending an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans. In order to focus our resources on delivering mission-critical capabilities for customers, we 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.

Says, Bob

While this appears to be a safeguard for the team to prevent abuse, it has raised concerns among many developers, asking themselves, What Are Heroku's Alternatives?

In the article, I want to help you answer the question with an alternative to Heroku and walk you through how you can migrate your apps from Heroku's free tier to Koyeb.

What is Koyeb?

Koyeb is a developer-friendly serverless platform that lets businesses quickly deploy reliable and scalable applications globally. It allows you to deploy various services, including full web applications, APIs, event-driven serverless functions, background workers, and cron jobs.

is Koyeb really free?

Yes, it's free of charge. In fact, you don't even need a credit card to get started. Koyeb gives you a free $5 monthly credit that you can use for any container size up to 2GB of RAM and 100GB of bandwidth. This is the same as using a nano instance(with 256 MB, 1 vCPU, and 2.5GB SSD each) for 1388 hours or a micro instance (with 512 MB, 1 vCPU, and 5GB SSD). You can even have more time to run services if you activate scale-to-zero!

Migrating from Heroku to Koyeb

Migrating from Heroku to the Koyeb App Platform is easy and requires little time. This article will walk you through the process of migrating your app from Heroku to Koyeb; I just migrated one of my pet projects hosted on Heroku to Koyeb in less than five minutes to demonstrate how simple it is to convert your app.

You can find the deployed app here

Prerequisite

• A Koyeb account (it's free, you can create one here)

Deploying an application to Koyeb only takes two steps: creating an app and a service.

Create a new Koyeb app.

Go to the Koyeb Control Panel and select the Create App button to start a new app. You will be directed to a screen where you must enter the name of your application.

When the field for the app's name is populated, proceed by clicking the Next button. The next step is for you to configure the service for Koyeb deployment.

Add Service

The first thing on the service page is to choose deployment options; Koyeb allows you to deploy from a Git repository and Docker image. For this demo, we will be deploying with the Git repository option.

If you're a new user, click the Install GitHub app button to install the Koyeb GitHub app. This will install the Koyeb app on your GitHub account and give you read and write access to the repository.

Once this is done, choose the Git repository and branch you want to deploy. Choose the app you want to migrate to Koyeb and the branch you want to deploy.

Next is adding environmental variables if your app uses one.

Adding Ports, This is where you specify the PORT you want your app to listen on; this will be used to forward requests to your app. The default is 8080, so you must change that if the defined PORT your app runs on differs.

Naming your service, This is where you give your service name, Fill in the input, and click create service.

This will redirect you to the Deployment page, where you can see the progress of the newly migrated app. After a successful build, the app is healthy after a few seconds. Copy the public URL to see your new migrated app in action.

Congratulation, You just completed migrating your app to Keyob with the free tier benefit.

We can find the link to the GitHub repository here

Conclusion

This article shows how you can migrate your application running on Heroku free dyno to Koyeb free tier.

Until next time, <3