Today, we’re introducing a suite of new dynos. These dynos introduce new capabilities and price points and reduce the cost of scaling businesses on Heroku. These new dynos enter beta today.
We’ve always provided a developer experience so you can create amazing apps, from hacking on new technologies and personal projects to building production applications and the most demanding high traffic apps. As Heroku has evolved, you’ve asked us for more choices when it comes to features and pricing to better match how you’re using the platform.
Customers with demanding production applications have asked us for professional features and prices that better support them as they scale. At the other end of the spectrum, developers have asked us for a more affordable price point for a dyno that never sleeps to run their personal projects 24x7.
To better meet these needs, today we’re excited to announce new dyno types and pricing, available immediately in public beta:
- A new
hobbydyno that never sleeps for $7 per dyno per month so you can more affordably run your personal projects 24x7 with all the ease of the Heroku developer experience. - A new
freedyno that allows you to run free apps consisting of 1 web, 1 worker andheroku run, and Heroku Scheduler. - Our
1Xand2Xdynos are now $25 and $50 per dyno per month, respectively. These dynos are now namedstandard-1Xandstandard-2Xand come with a set of professional features from the first dyno to support production applications. PXdynos are now $500 per dyno per month and are known asperformancedynos.
We believe these new dynos and pricing provide you a better set of choices when it comes to building and deploying apps. We plan to make these prices generally available next month, in June 2015. All new apps created as of that date will be on the new pricing.
While we are confident you will benefit from these new dynos, we want to provide you sufficient time to plan and adjust to these changes. As such, we will allow you to opt in any existing applications running more than a single 1X dyno at your convenience from now through the end of January 2016. Apps running only a single 1X dyno will be migrated to the new free dyno type beginning a month following GA.
We’d love for you to head over to the dashboard and try them out, or you can keep reading for more details.
Professional Dynos
Starting today, running your business on Heroku is going to get a little more affordable. That’s because we’re upgrading our dynos and reducing their prices. For an application at scale, this new pricing can amount to as much as a 30% price cut.
| Old | New | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Single-dyno apps sleep after 1hr | dynos never sleep, Heroku Metrics from first dyno, faster builds, preboot | ||
1X | $0.05/hr ($36/mo) | standard-1x | $25/mo |
2X | $0.10/hr ($72/mo) | standard-2x | $50/mo |
PX | $0.80/hr ($576/mo) | performance | $500/mo |
These new dynos are very similar to our traditional dynos with a few tweaks and changes. First, professional dynos never sleep, and always provide the detailed Heroku Metrics our users have come to trust. We’ve also upgraded git push heroku master performance, and made preboot available to all apps running professional dynos.
Hobby and Free Dynos
Heroku has always been home to a huge number of individual developers and their personal projects. Our users know how much easier it is to build software on Heroku. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an experiment with a new language, a fun weekend hack built around an API like Twilio, or a personal passion project that dreams of growing into the next big thing.
Our new free and hobby dynos are designed to give individual developers more choices about how to build applications at a more intimate scale.
The new hobby dyno is a response to several common requests from developers: a low-price dyno for under ten dollars a month, support for single dynos that never sleep, and an inexpensive option to take advantage of worker dynos. In fact, each new hobby dyno is only $7/month.
The new free dynos are a response to another common request we’ve had, which is to allow developers to write and run small, part-time applications that include web, worker, and scheduled processes for free with no surprises. These free dynos are great for experimentation, pre-release projects, or even as the final home for lightly-used properties.
| Free | Hobby | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $7 | |
| Sleeping | 30m inactivity | never | |
| Awake time | max 18hrs/day | 24x7 | |
| Max dynos | one web, one worker | one per process type, max ten types | |
Every app using free dynos can include not just a free web, but also one free worker, and free usage of heroku run and Heroku Scheduler. Free dynos can run up to eighteen hours a day, but have to “sleep” for at least the remaining six. That’s eighteen hours each of serving traffic, running a background worker, and scheduled processes. If you started working on your application bright and early at 7AM it would still be ready to hack on well after midnight. We’ve also lowered the sleep timer for free dynos to 30 minutes in order to help stretch that run time even further. Because your application doesn’t consume run time when it’s sleeping, the breaks both you and your program take during the day help keep your code working late into the night. As long as your application mostly sleeps when you do, you shouldn’t notice any difference at all.
If you’re nervous that your free application might be over the 18 hour limit, don’t worry too much. We’ve looked at the numbers, and there are very few free applications on the platform that will see any change to the way they run as a result of these new dynos. The first time your application goes over 18 hours, we’ll send you an email, and you can see how much time your application has used in the last 24 hours by checking in the dashboard or the CLI. In order to give everyone time to get used to this new system, we’ll be running with the overage notifications in “warning-only” mode for at least the next two months.
Plan for General Availability, Grandfathering and Migration
The public beta is currently scheduled to run throughout May. The new dynos are scheduled to replace traditional dynos for all new applications in June, 2015.
Paid applications running on traditional dynos on the “general availability” date will be able to migrate between new and traditional dynos at their convenience until the end of January, 2016. At this time, we are scheduled to sunset traditional dynos and migrate all remaining applications.
Applications running a single 1X dyno that don’t accumulate any other dyno charges will be migrated gradually to the new free dynos beginning on July 1.
Conclusion
We’re all really excited here at Heroku to announce these new and improved dynos. We’re delighted to introduce price cuts for our professional and business users, new and affordable price points for individual developers, and new visibility and transparency into how your application runs.