Fast track your startup business

Entrepreneurs focus on getting their great ideas to market swiftly, so they can start building out their business. To stay competitive, you need to deliver apps fast, iterate on apps quickly, set up to scale, and control operational costs.

Heroku is a cloud-based, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that gives startups a powerful solution for building, deploying, and operating their business-critical apps. The Heroku platform is fully-managed, meaning that we take care of servers, hardware, and infrastructure, so you can keep your team lean and focused on product. Heroku grows with your business — use a range of free services to get established and then scale up with increased usage.

Sprint from concept to delivery on Heroku

Heroku is built for speed. The platform is meticulously designed to help developers maintain a fast, highly-productive workflow. Deploy new apps and updates to Heroku within minutes, and scale your app’s resources with a couple of clicks or commands. Heroku’s ease-of-use and polyglot language support make it easier to onboard new developers with a variety of skillsets.

With Heroku’s simplified operational experience, any one of your developers can monitor and manage your apps from a central dashboard, no dedicated DevOps staff needed. Heroku helps keep your startup lean, focused on product, and delivering the highest value to your business.

Free services to prototype new ideas

The Heroku Platform enables you to easily experiment and prototype new ideas before turning them into product. A range of free services on Heroku can help keep your R&D costs as low as possible.

Fast app delivery

Heroku enables your startup to deliver apps as fast as you can build them. The platform provides an app-centric approach to software delivery, integrating familiar developer tools and workflows.

Flexible development tools

Heroku provides familiar tooling and support for popular languages and frameworks, as well as customizations. This allows you and your team to build apps using your preferred development approach.

Simplified DevOps

With a fully-managed platform, Heroku’s staff monitors uptime, performance, and infrastructure concerns. Your startup can avoid hiring dedicated DevOps staff and focus your resources on building a great product.

Seamless scalability

Anyone on your team can scale your apps with a single click or command using the Heroku Dashboard or CLI. The platform’s autoscaling feature allows your apps to seamlessly scale as your business grows.

Integrated data services

Heroku’s managed data services are optimized for developers, making it even easier to build data-driven apps. Choose Heroku Postgres, Heroku Redis, and Apache Kafka on Heroku, or third-party add-on services.

Ecosystem of add-on services

Build apps faster by extending the Heroku platform with fully-managed cloud services that can be installed in one click. Over 175+ Heroku Add-ons support every stage of app development and operation.

Easy onboarding of new developers

As your business grows, so will your engineering organization. The Heroku platform’s ease-of-use and smooth developer experience will enable new team members to ramp up quickly on your app projects.

Stay lean, efficient, and focused on development

Heroku allows startups to maximize resources and control costs while building out their business. The platform’s managed service takes care of hardware and infrastructure concerns, so your team can do their best work. Learn more by exploring Heroku’s capabilities on the following pages.

Free Services on Heroku

The Heroku platform and many of our ecosystem partners offer a range of free services to help you test new ideas before you’re ready to scale or invest further. Take advantage of free dyno hours, free data storage, or free access to third-party add-ons. All Heroku customers have access to the same free platform tools and open source elements.

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Heroku Platform

Heroku’s runtime services orchestrate and manage app execution and scale. Developers can extend the runtime with integrated data services and a powerful ecosystem of additional tools, technologies, and services. Heroku officially supports eight popular languages and frameworks, as well as many more through custom buildpacks.

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Heroku OpEx

Heroku’s operational experience supports your team with accessible, easy-to-use tools that help you monitor and and maintain the health of your apps. The Heroku platform manages all downstack components. This frees your team to focus squarely on app development and operations, without the distraction of hardware or infrastructure concerns.

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  • Heroku’s free plan allowed us to offset costs in the critical early phase of our bootstrapped startup. We could get an MVP up and running quickly on the Heroku platform and immediately demonstrate our value to customers.

    humanpredictions Elliott Garms Co-Founder, humanpredictions Read customer story →

  • Our business has very high scalability needs, and Heroku PX dynos are what make that possible. We're a startup with a seed investment and 2 engineers, and our team can handle traffic spikes from 0 to 500,000 visitors in a single afternoon, without any performance issues. We sleep well at night knowing Heroku has our back.

    Quikly Scott Meves Co-Founder & CTO, Quikly Read customer story →

  • Heroku enabled our bootstrapped startup to better control costs by avoiding the need to hire DevOps staff to manage servers. For us, Heroku has given us great value for money.

    Zenrez Arthur Hong Co-Founder, Lead Engineer, & Product Designer, Zenrez Read customer story →

  • Heroku makes it easy for us to scale in terms of user base size as well as our team size – we can easily change processes or onboard new team members as needed.

    Life.io Mike Calhoun CTO, Life.io Read customer story →

  • Deployment is a breeze on the Heroku platform. Heroku gives our team the freedom to focus on developing a great product rather than on managing infrastructure.

    Contactually John Gerhardt Lead Engineer, Contactually Read customer story →

  • Heroku Add-ons are so easy to integrate and use. They’ve really saved us the time and effort it would take to build or host those services ourselves.

    Belly Darby Frey Director of Platform Engineering, Belly Read customer story →

  • Heroku was the perfect startup friendly platform for us. It was easy to get started and we've been able to scale smoothly. Heroku makes DevOps much more manageable for our small team.

    Taskade John Xie Co-Founder & CEO, Taskade
Resources
Featured blog post

SHIFT Commerce's Journey: Deconstructing Monolithic Applications into Services

Ryan Townsend, CTO of SHIFT, provides an overview of his team's journey into building a microservices architecture with the support of Apache Kafka on Heroku.

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