Heroku Postgres Alternatives in 2026: Prices and Trade-offs

The best Heroku Postgres alternative depends on which Heroku plan you are replacing. For Essential plans ($5 to $20 a month), StitchDB, Neon, Supabase and Render give you more storage, more connections or point-in-time recovery at a similar price. For Standard and Premium plans, DigitalOcean, Render, AWS RDS and dedicated servers on StitchDB are the usual landing spots. Heroku Postgres itself remains a working, supported product, so the question is mostly about value and direction.

This guide maps each Heroku Postgres tier to what the same money buys elsewhere, with prices as of November 2026 from each vendor's own page.

#What changed at Heroku

Two facts from Heroku's own blog are worth knowing before you decide:

• On February 6, 2026, Heroku announced it is moving to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability and support rather than new features. It says there is no change for existing customers and credit-card pricing stays the same. Enterprise Account contracts are no longer offered to new customers.
• In October 2025, Heroku announced Heroku Postgres Advanced as a pilot, a new tier meant to eventually replace Standard, Premium, Private and Shield.

Neither is a reason to panic. Your database is not going away. But if you are starting a new app, or your bill is growing, it is a good moment to compare.

#Heroku Postgres plans today

From heroku.com/pricing, as of November 2026:

There is no free Heroku Postgres plan. Essential plans allow up to 4 hours of downtime a month; Standard up to 1 hour; Premium up to 15 minutes.

#Replacing Essential-0 to Essential-2

These plans are for small apps and side projects. The limiting factors are usually the 20 connections and the missing rollback.

StitchDB Pro sits between Essential-1 and Essential-2 in price and includes things Heroku Essential doesn't: daily backups, 7 days of point-in-time recovery, read replicas as an add-on, and an Auth service, REST API and file storage if you want them. The connection pooler gives you a session port (5432) for long-running servers and a transaction port (6543) for many short connections; see Connection pooling modes.

#Replacing Standard-0 and up

At $50 a month and above, you are paying for dedicated resources and longer rollback. Alternatives:

• DigitalOcean Managed PostgreSQL: from $15.15 a month for 1 GiB RAM and 10 GiB storage, 7 days of PITR, PgBouncer pools, regions including Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London. Larger nodes and standby nodes cost more. You don't get superuser access.
• Render Postgres: Pro-4gb at $55 a month, storage at $0.30 per GB, read replicas and high availability on larger instances.
• AWS RDS: pick an instance class, pay per hour plus $0.115 per GB-month of gp3 (us-east-1). Multi-AZ doubles both.
• StitchDB Scale ($49) with a dedicated server: Scale includes 20 GB of database per project and 14 days of PITR. Per the compute docs, Scale and Enterprise projects can move onto a dedicated server sized from 4 GB RAM upward, priced hourly from prepaid credit, with no change to your connection strings.

#Heroku apps with a Postgres elsewhere

Your dynos can stay on Heroku while the database moves. Because the Heroku Postgres add-on manages DATABASE_URL itself, the least surprising approach is a config var of your own, read by your app instead of DATABASE_URL:

heroku config:set APP_DATABASE_URL="postgresql://p_<ref>_owner:<password>@<db-host>:5432/p_<ref>?sslmode=require" -a my-app

Remove the add-on only after the new database has run in production for a while. Latency matters too: every query now crosses a network to another provider, so pick a database region close to where your dynos run. StitchDB is EU-only, which suits apps running in Europe and adds noticeable latency for apps running in the US.

#Moving the data

Heroku Postgres is standard Postgres, so the simplest path is a dump and restore during a short maintenance window:

heroku maintenance:on -a my-app
pg_dump "$(heroku config:get DATABASE_URL -a my-app)" -Fc --no-owner --no-privileges -f heroku.dump
pg_restore --no-owner --no-privileges -d "postgresql://p_<ref>_owner:<password>@<db-host>:5432/p_<ref>?sslmode=require" heroku.dump
heroku config:set APP_DATABASE_URL="postgresql://..." -a my-app
heroku maintenance:off -a my-app

For larger databases, StitchDB's Import from Postgres can run a one-time copy from any Postgres 12 or newer, or a live copy when the source supports logical replication. The import checks wal_level and the REPLICATION attribute for you; if the source doesn't allow logical replication, it falls back to a one-time copy, so pause writes while it runs. The full walkthrough is in Migrate off Heroku Postgres.

#Pros and cons at a glance

StitchDB. Pros: lower price per GB than Essential plans, PITR on every plan, a full backend if you want it, spend cap on by default. Cons: EU regions only, younger platform, no Heroku add-on marketplace integration.

Render. Pros: similar git-push workflow for apps, so you can move dynos and database together. Cons: the free database expires after 30 days; storage billed separately.

Neon. Pros: free tier, branching, scale to zero. Cons: usage billing, cold starts on idle compute.

Supabase. Pros: full backend, many regions. Cons: PITR is an add-on; Free pauses after a week idle.

DigitalOcean. Pros: simple pricing, many regions, 7-day PITR. Cons: 22 connections on the 1 GiB plan without the pooler; no superuser.

AWS RDS. Pros: every size and compliance option. Cons: more pieces to configure and bill.

#When to stay on Heroku Postgres

Stay if you rely on Heroku-specific workflows such as followers and forks, Private Spaces or Shield plans, or if your team values not changing anything that works. Heroku says existing customers see no change, and that is a legitimate reason to wait.

#A quick way to estimate your next bill

Get three numbers from your current database: size (select pg_size_pretty(pg_database_size(current_database()));), peak connections (select count(*) from pg_stat_activity; at a busy hour), and how far back you have ever needed to restore. Size picks the plan, connections decide whether you need a pooler, and the restore window tells you whether rollback or point-in-time recovery is worth paying for. With those three, the tables above give you a realistic monthly number for each alternative.

#FAQ

#Is Heroku Postgres being shut down?

No. Heroku's February 2026 update describes a sustaining engineering model with continued support, and says nothing changes for existing customers.

#What is the cheapest Heroku Postgres alternative?

For a free option, StitchDB Free, Neon Free or Supabase Free. For a paid replacement of Essential-1, StitchDB Pro at $15.99 a month includes 10 GB and 7 days of point-in-time recovery (as of November 2026).

#Can I keep my app on Heroku and move only the database?

Yes. Point your app at the new connection string (with sslmode=require) through a config var and choose a region close to your dynos.

#Does Heroku Essential include rollback?

The pricing page lists rollback for Standard (4 days) and Premium (7 days), not for Essential plans.

Moving a Heroku app's database? Start a free StitchDB project and test the restore first.