On 6 October 2026 Heroku announced that Heroku Postgres Advanced is generally available, "available today". It is a genuinely new tier, built on new infrastructure, and the engineering in it is real. What the announcement page does not contain is a price. No figure, no plan table, no link to one.
That gap is worth a few minutes of your attention, because for most small teams the managed database is the line item that quietly decides the hosting bill.
What Heroku Postgres Advanced actually is
From Heroku's announcement, in its own words:
- Decoupled compute and storage. 100 GB of storage included by default, scaling "to 200+ TB".
- Compute from 4 GB RAM (2 vCPU) up to 1536 GB RAM (192 vCPU).
- PostgreSQL 16, 17 and 18, with native
pgvectorfor vector search and RAG applications. - Instance pools: up to 5 follower pools, with up to 13 follower instances per cluster to spread read load.
- Throughput: "3x to 4x higher throughput compared to similar Postgres Classic configurations". That comparison is against Heroku's own Classic tier, not against anyone else.
- Compliance: HIPAA and PCI through Heroku's Private and Shield Spaces.
Read that list again and notice the scale. The smallest compute size is 4 GB of RAM and two vCPUs; the largest is 1.5 TB of RAM. Follower pools, 200-terabyte storage and compliance spaces are built for workloads with dedicated database engineers. It is an impressive product aimed well above a typical small business, an agency's client sites, or a side project that has started earning money.
The price is the part the announcement leaves out
The announcement page names no price. Heroku may well publish pricing elsewhere, and if you are evaluating this tier you should read Heroku's own pricing pages before deciding. But the launch itself asks you to understand the product first and the cost second, and that order matters.
When a database is priced separately from your hosting, three things tend to happen:
- The database becomes its own bill. You budget for the app, then discover the database is the larger number.
- Growth changes the price, not just the load. More storage, a follower for reads, a bigger compute size: each is a separate decision with its own cost.
- The quote arrives late. If the number isn't on the page, it arrives after the architecture is chosen, which is the worst time to learn it.
None of this makes a usage- or tier-priced database wrong. For a team that needs 192 vCPUs and HIPAA compliance, it is the right shape. The question is whether your workload needs that shape, and whether you can answer "what will this cost next month?" before you commit.
A simpler shape: the database comes with the plan
DeployBase takes a structural approach rather than a performance one. This is not a performance comparison; what is different is how the database is billed.
- Managed databases are included on every plan. MySQL, PostgreSQL (version 16), Redis and MongoDB are available from the Starter plan up. You create one from your app's dashboard; there is no separate database subscription.
- The plan is priced by server size, not by traffic. You pay for the RAM, CPU and storage of the plan you chose. There are no per-request or bandwidth charges.
- Free SSL is included on every plan as well.
Our current plans, in US dollars per month:
| Plan | Price | RAM | CPU | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $5.99 | 1 GB | 0.25 | 20 GB |
| Pro | $11.99 | 2 GB | 1 | 25 GB |
| Business | $23.99 | 4 GB | 1 | 50 GB |
| Enterprise | $47.99 | 12 GB | 2 | 100 GB |
Some features are tied to a tier, and we would rather say so plainly: SSH access and Git deployment start at Pro, and staging environments start at Business. Managed databases, scheduled cron jobs and SSL are on every plan. See the pricing page for the full comparison.
To be clear about fit: if you need terabytes of Postgres storage, read replicas across follower pools, pgvector at scale, or HIPAA/PCI compliance, a specialist tier like Heroku Postgres Advanced is built for that and we are not. DeployBase is managed container hosting for developers and small businesses who want their app, its database and its SSL on one predictable bill.
Questions to ask any managed database provider
- Is the database included in my hosting plan, or billed separately?
- What, exactly, makes the price go up: storage, compute, connections, read replicas, or traffic?
- Can I see that price on a public page before I talk to sales?
- What would this cost at ten times this month's usage?
If you can answer all four before you sign up, you will not be surprised by the invoice. If the answer to the third is no, that tells you something too.
Source: Heroku, "A New Era for Managed Databases: Announcing Heroku Postgres Advanced", published 6 October 2026, read 7 October 2026: heroku.com/blog.