Heroku Migration Guide: Move to HostStack

In February 2026 Heroku moved to a sustaining-engineering model: stability and security fixes, no new features, and no new Enterprise contracts. Nothing shuts down, but the platform that invented the buildpack PaaS workflow has stopped moving — the free tier went in 2022, and dyno pricing climbs fast past a hobby app. HostStack keeps the developer experience and brings it forward: real EU residency, native managed databases beyond Postgres, and pricing per resource instead of per dyno.

Why switch from Heroku?

• Real free tier: 1 Nano web service + 1 Starter Postgres + 1 cron + 1 preview env, no time limits.
• EU data residency by default — European infrastructure with a signed DPA at signup. Heroku’s EU region runs on AWS under US-incorporated Salesforce, so the US CLOUD Act reaches it.
• Predictable per-resource pricing. No "professional dyno" tax — you pay for the CPU and RAM you use.
• Managed MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis natively, not via third-party Heroku add-ons.
• No buildpack to port: HostStack detects Node, Bun, Python, Ruby, Go, Rust, Java, PHP, .NET and Elixir from your project files and builds them itself — or ship a Dockerfile.
• Build and start commands, port, health check and env defaults in a hoststack.yaml in your repo; migrations run as a pre-deploy command before traffic switches, and a failed one leaves the old release serving.
• CLI, SDK, and MCP server included — drive deploys from any tool, including Claude / Cursor.

Price comparison

Heroku prices checked May 2026 against their public pricing page. Heroku prices are USD as published; HostStack figures are the live EUR catalog. Verify at the source before deciding.

Code migration

# Procfile
web: bun run start
release: bun run migrate

# app.json
{
  "name": "my-api",
  "stack": "heroku-24",
  "buildpacks": [{ "url": "heroku/nodejs" }],
  "addons": ["heroku-postgresql:essential-0"]
}

# hoststack.yaml -- configures the existing "my-api" service
services:
  my-api:
    install:
      command: bun install
    start:
      command: bun run start

# Not in this file -- set on the service:
#   release: -> hoststack services update svc_... --pre-deploy-command "bun run migrate"
#   heroku-postgresql -> hoststack db create --project prj_... --name my-db --engine postgres --plan micro
#                        hoststack db link db_... --service svc_...

Feature comparison

Migration gotchas

Migration steps

1. 1Sign up at hoststack.dev. Connect GitHub / GitLab / Bitbucket and import your Heroku-deployed repo.
2. 2Create one service per Procfile process type — HostStack does not read the Procfile. Put the web command in the service’s start command (or in hoststack.yaml), and set a release command as the service’s pre-deploy command with hoststack services update svc_... --pre-deploy-command.
3. 3Export config vars with heroku config --shell > .env, delete DATABASE_URL and REDIS_URL (linking the HostStack database injects its own), then run hoststack env import svc_... .env. It is a dry run that lists what would change; add --apply to write.
4. 4Take a pg_dump from Heroku (heroku pg:backups:capture, then heroku pg:backups:download) and restore into your new HostStack Postgres.
5. 5For Heroku Redis, run a one-shot dump/restore via redis-cli --rdb. For Heroku Scheduler, recreate each job as a Cron Job service with its schedule and command.
6. 6Update DNS. Run in parallel for as long as you need, then point traffic at HostStack and decommission the Heroku app.

Frequently asked questions