// alternatives
A free Heroku alternative for small apps and bots
Heroku made deploying a small app easy, and its free dynos ran countless side projects, bots and prototypes — until the free plans ended in November 2022. Its workflow is still good; it just isn't free anymore.
When Heroku is the better choice
- You want the classic buildpack and Procfile workflow and its add-on marketplace.
- Your team already runs production on it.
When a real server is the better choice
- You want to run a small app, API or bot for free — monthly free credit covers a 512 MB server around the clock with a verified phone.
- You want root on a full Ubuntu server rather than a dyno.
- You want your coding agent to deploy it, not a Git-push pipeline you configure.
Moving a project over
you → your agent
“Fetch thevibehosting.com/SKILL.md and deploy this project there. Move the environment variables over, and give me the URL.”
The agent recreates your environment variables on the server, installs dependencies and starts the app. Your old deployment keeps working until you switch the domain. See what's free and all the hosting options.
Try it: paste this to Claude Code, Cursor or Codex.
you → your agent
“Fetch thevibehosting.com/SKILL.md and deploy it there”