Salesforce-owned Heroku announced it will eliminate all free plans, citing the cost involved in combating “fraud and abuse.”

Heroku is a cloud application platform that helps developers “build, deliver, monitor and scale apps.” The company was one of the first cloud platform as a service (PaaS) companies and was snapped up by Salesforce in 2010. Heroku has allowed developers to maintain free accounts, but is now discontinuing them.

Bob Wise, Heroku General Manager and Salesforce EVP, outlined the change in a blog post:

Our product, engineering, and security teams are spending an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans. In order to focus our resources on delivering mission-critical capabilities for customers, we will be phasing out our free plan for Heroku Dynos, free plan for Heroku Postgres, and free plan for Heroku Data for Redis®, as well as deleting inactive accounts.

Starting October 26, 2022, we will begin deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year. Starting November 28, 2022, we plan to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data services. We will be sending out a series of email communications to affected users.

Wise points out that Heroku’s plans start at just $7/mo and include additional certificate management and better app responsiveness than the free plans.