Heroku to AWS Migration

Migrating from Heroku to AWS: Postgres and Beyond

Practical guide for engineering teams migrating off Heroku — covering Postgres to RDS, Dynos to EC2 or Fargate, buildpack-to-Docker conversion, and CI/CD re-plumbing on AWS. From FactualMinds, an AWS Select Tier Services Partner specializing in AWS migrations.

Last updated: June 16, 2026

Ask AI:ChatGPT Claude Perplexity Gemini

Quick Answer: Migrate when the AWS-native feature depth, governance controls, and long-term cost profile justify the transition effort.

Freshness Check (June 2026)

Use this page as a decision framework, then validate the latest pricing, quotas, and region-level feature parity in AWS documentation before final sign-off.

This page was refreshed against official AWS announcements and service documentation published in the last 12 months. Confirm region support, quotas, and pricing before final architecture sign-off.

AWS What’s New

Heroku changed the developer experience permanently when it launched in 2007. git push heroku main deploying a production application was genuinely magical. For over a decade, Heroku was the default answer for teams that wanted to ship fast without managing infrastructure.

The calculus shifted in late 2022 when Heroku retired its free tier and shortly after discontinued its cheapest database plans. Teams that had been staying on Heroku for cost or inertia reasons suddenly had a concrete reason to evaluate AWS. The cost and feature gap with AWS has only widened in the years since, which is why we still see this migration in the FactualMinds pipeline every quarter. This guide is for those teams.

We are an AWS Select Tier Services Partner. We will be direct about what Heroku does better — and what makes AWS the stronger long-term platform for most teams.

Heroku to AWS Service Mapping

Heroku Service	AWS Equivalent	Notes
Dynos (web)	ECS Fargate or EC2	Fargate for containers; EC2 for lift-and-shift or simpler setup
Dynos (worker)	ECS Fargate tasks or Lambda + SQS	Lambda for event-driven workers; Fargate for long-running processes
Heroku Postgres	Amazon RDS (PostgreSQL)	RDS adds Multi-AZ, read replicas, automated snapshots
Heroku Redis	Amazon ElastiCache for Redis	ElastiCache adds cluster mode and Global Datastore
Heroku Scheduler	Amazon EventBridge Scheduler + Lambda	EventBridge Scheduler provides cron-based invocation of Lambda functions
Heroku Pipelines	AWS CodePipeline or GitHub Actions	GitHub Actions is the simpler starting point for most teams
Heroku Review Apps	No direct equivalent	Approximated with ECS task-per-branch or Lambda function URLs
Heroku Add-ons	AWS Marketplace or native services	Many Heroku add-on vendors also have AWS Marketplace listings
Config Vars	AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store or Secrets Manager	Secrets Manager for sensitive values; Parameter Store for non-sensitive config

Cost Comparison

Heroku’s pricing after the 2022 changes is no longer competitive for most workloads at scale. The plan prices below are reference points (Heroku publishes the current list on their site — confirm before quoting them in a migration proposal); the AWS estimates assume on-demand pricing in us-east-1 and will be lower with Savings Plans or Reserved Instances.

Compute

Plan	Heroku	AWS Equivalent	AWS Monthly Cost
512 MB / 1x CPU	Standard-1X — $25/month	EC2 t3.small (2 vCPU, 2 GB)	~$15/month
1 GB / 2x CPU	Standard-2X — $50/month	EC2 t3.medium (2 vCPU, 4 GB)	~$30/month
Container-based	Eco Dynos at $5/month each	ECS Fargate (0.25 vCPU, 0.5 GB)	~$8/month

Add an Application Load Balancer (~$16/month) to the AWS side — Heroku’s routing tier is included. At 2+ Dynos, AWS pulls ahead on cost.

Managed Postgres

Plan	Heroku	AWS RDS Equivalent	AWS Monthly Cost
Mini / Hobby (100K rows)	$5/month	RDS db.t3.micro, 20 GB (dev only)	~$14/month
Basic (10M rows, no HA)	$9/month	RDS db.t3.micro, 20 GB	~$14/month
Standard-0 (64 GB RAM)	$50/month	RDS db.t3.small, 20 GB	~$28/month
Standard-2 (61 GB RAM, 400 conn limit)	$200/month	RDS db.m6g.large, 100 GB	~$120/month
Premium-0	$200/month	RDS db.r6g.large Multi-AZ, 100 GB	~$185/month
Premium-4	$800/month	RDS db.r6g.2xlarge Multi-AZ, 500 GB	~$580/month

Note: Heroku Postgres Standard and Premium plans include one free follower replica for read scaling. For equivalent read scaling on RDS, add a read replica (~50% of primary instance cost). Heroku’s multi-region support would require additional replicas.

Explore other technical comparisons:

Why Choose FactualMinds for Your AWS Migration

FactualMinds is an AWS Select Tier Services Partner specializing in cloud platform migrations. We have executed GCP, DigitalOcean, Heroku, and MongoDB migrations to AWS and know the pitfalls.

Migration architects — assessment-first methodology mapping your current state before execution
Zero-downtime cutover — we execute migrations with minimal business impact
AWS Select Tier Partner — verified on AWS Partner Network
AWS Marketplace Seller

Related Comparisons

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why should I migrate from Heroku to AWS?

Heroku ended its free tier in late 2022 and retired several entry-level database plans, and the gap with AWS has only widened in the years since as AWS has expanded compliance, regions, and managed-service coverage. At any non-trivial scale, AWS is cheaper. Beyond cost, the migration makes sense when you need compliance certifications (Heroku covers SOC 2; AWS covers SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, and more), want to use other AWS services (SES, SQS, Lambda, Bedrock), or want more control over your infrastructure. Teams migrating often find that AWS is more complex upfront but provides significantly more flexibility as their application grows. Verify current Heroku plan prices in their dashboard before treating this guide as a final cost decision — Heroku has continued to adjust pricing since the 2022 changes.

How do I migrate Heroku Postgres to RDS?

The standard path is pg_dump and pg_restore. Export your Heroku Postgres database with `heroku pg:backups:capture && heroku pg:backups:download`, then restore into RDS using `pg_restore`. For larger databases or near-zero-downtime migrations, AWS DMS supports Heroku Postgres as a source (it is standard PostgreSQL) and can replicate ongoing changes while you validate your application against RDS. Plan for connection string updates — your app will need to point to the new RDS endpoint.

Is AWS cheaper than Heroku?

For most workloads at any meaningful scale, yes. A Heroku Standard-1X Dyno costs $25/month; an AWS EC2 t3.small with comparable specs costs around $15/month. Heroku Postgres Standard-0 is $50/month; RDS db.t3.small (PostgreSQL) runs around $28/month. The gap widens with scale. The trade-off is operational overhead — Heroku is faster to deploy and requires less DevOps knowledge. AWS requires managing VPCs, security groups, and deployment pipelines, but those one-time costs amortize quickly.

What replaces Heroku Dynos on AWS?

It depends on your workload. For web processes with variable traffic, ECS Fargate is the closest equivalent — you define container resources and Fargate handles the underlying infrastructure. For simple single-instance applications, EC2 is simpler to reason about. For event-driven or background worker processes, Lambda is often a better fit than Dynos. The Heroku worker Dyno type maps naturally to ECS Fargate tasks running in the background or Lambda functions triggered by SQS queues.

How do I move my Heroku app to AWS?

The migration has four main steps: (1) Convert your Heroku buildpack app to a Docker container image; (2) Migrate your Postgres database to RDS using pg_dump/restore or AWS DMS; (3) Provision ECS Fargate, EC2, or Lambda on AWS with equivalent compute resources; (4) Re-plumb your CI/CD pipeline from Heroku auto-deploy to GitHub Actions pushing to ECR and deploying to ECS or Lambda. Expect 2–6 weeks depending on application complexity and team familiarity with AWS.

Ready to Migrate to AWS?

FactualMinds is an AWS Select Tier Services Partner. We run assessment-first migrations — mapping your current architecture, estimating risk, and executing with zero-downtime cutover strategies.

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