Moving off Heroku to AWS, without slowing your deploys.
Heroku still works, and you don't have to leave this quarter. But if you're going to move, it's easier on your schedule than on someone else's. Here's the map we use, with the costs Heroku comparisons usually leave out.
What Heroku's February 2026 change means, and what it doesn't.
On 6 February 2026 Heroku moved to what it called a sustaining engineering model: no new features, and no new enterprise contracts. Existing contracts can renew, card-paying customers carry on, and no shutdown date has been announced.
So nothing breaks tomorrow. What does change is the direction of travel: new runtimes, new regions and new integrations will arrive on other platforms first. For a seed-stage team the honest advice is to plan the move for a quiet quarter, not to rush it during a launch.
Coverage: TechRadar.
A quick way to decide.
| If this is you | Our advice |
|---|---|
| Under $300 a month on Heroku, small team, no compliance asks | Stay for now. Revisit in six months. |
| Heroku bill growing past $1,000 a month | Move. The savings usually pay for the migration within a year. |
| An enterprise customer wants SOC 2 or data residency | Move, and build the controls in as you go. |
| You have AWS Activate credits sitting unused | Move. Credits can fund the new setup; they can't pay Heroku. |
| Launching something big in the next 8 weeks | Wait until after the launch. |
Where each Heroku piece goes on AWS.
- Web and worker dynosECS on Fargate
- Heroku PostgresAmazon RDS for PostgreSQL
- Heroku Redis / Key-Value StoreElastiCache
- Heroku SchedulerEventBridge Scheduler + ECS tasks
- Config varsSSM Parameter Store / Secrets Manager
- Review appsPreview environments from GitHub Actions
- Pipelines and promotionGitHub Actions + image tags
- Logplex and add-onsCloudWatch, or your existing log tool
We default to ECS on Fargate rather than Kubernetes. It's the closest thing AWS has to the Heroku experience, and a team of five shouldn't be running cluster upgrades. Our ECS vs EKS guide has the reasoning and the numbers.
List prices, us-east-1, Oct 2026. Excludes data transfer.
The monthly costs people forget to include.
| Line item | Heroku | AWS |
|---|---|---|
| One always-on web process, 2 GB | $50 (Standard-2X) | about $36 (Fargate, 1 vCPU, 2 GB) |
| Load balancer | included | about $16 + usage (ALB) |
| NAT gateway for private subnets | not applicable | about $33 + $0.045 /GB |
| Logs | add-on | CloudWatch, priced by volume |
| Your time running it | low | low, if it's built simply |
A single small app often costs about the same on both. AWS wins as you add processes, use reserved capacity (Compute Savings Plans cut Fargate by up to 66%), or have credits to spend. Sources: Fargate pricing, VPC pricing.
A migration in four weeks, without a big-bang weekend.
- Build the AWS side in Terraform.
Accounts, network, ECS, RDS, secrets and CI, alongside Heroku. Nothing is switched yet.
- Run staging on AWS.
Your team deploys to it the same way as before: merge to main, it ships.
- Rehearse the database move.
A timed dump and restore into RDS, repeated until we know the cutover window to the minute. For larger databases we look at what your Heroku plan allows for continuous copying.
- Cut over, with a way back.
DNS moves at a quiet hour. Heroku stays up for a week so rolling back is one change.