We are happy to announce that our new line-up of database plans are being released on August 1st. The dev, basic, crane, and kappa plans make many of the most exciting features of our fully-managed database service available to a wider audience. They are now ready for all users.
We will also begin billing for these plans as of August 1st. If you have been beta testing one of these databases and do not wish to incur charges for it going forward, please remove it immediately via the web interface or the command line:
heroku addons:remove HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_COLOR --app app_name
If you have been waiting to use these plans because they have been in beta, then your wait is (almost) over. They can be provisioned now by all users via the web interface or the command line:
heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:[dev | basic | crane | kappa]
Starter Tier
The Essential 0 plan brings many of the best features of our production database plans to development users. This includes Postgres 9.1, data clips, hstore schemaless SQL, direct psql access, support for most pg commands from the Heroku client, a web interface, support for multiple databases connected to a single application, and Continuous Protection. For users that need to store more data, the Essential 1 plan ($9 / month) raises the storage capacity but does not increase availability or add any additional features.
The Essential 0 and Essential 0 plans both belong to our Starter tier. These plans are designed to provide 99.5% availability and are ideal for trial, development, testing, and other basic usage. For serious production applications, we recommend using one of our Production plans, designed for 99.95% availability. Please note that these are design parameters, not SLAs, and availability can be further increased by taking advantage of followers.
Production Tier
With this release, the Production tier is expanded to include Standard 0 ($50 / month) and Standard 2 ($200 / month). These will also be released on August 1st. They offer all of the same features as our other production databases at an incredible price point. These benefits include production-grade monitoring and operations, as well as support for fork, follow, auto backups, and fast changeovers / upgrades.
Migration From Legacy Shared Databases
For those users that are still using the legacy shared-database plan, we encourage you to upgrade as soon as possible. We will be announcing a deprecation and migration schedule for these plans shortly. We will be working to migrate all users onto these new plans, but we encourage you to move as soon as possible to enjoy the advantages of these improvements. You can also opt-in to creating the dev plan by default for all new applications by enabling the Heroku Labs flag.
If for any reason the scheduled release of these plans causes hardship for your business, please open a support ticket so that we can individually address your needs.