The git-push you know, on a bill that never surprises you
Heroku made deploying a repo feel effortless, and that legacy still shapes how a lot of us ship. Ruust keeps the connect-a-repo simplicity but swaps per-process dynos and separately billed add-ons for one flat price per Egg in GBP, with egress that is never metered and apps that stay warm around the clock.
Flat price per Egg, in GBP · unmetered egress · no cold starts
Both let you push a repo and get a live URL, so the real differences are the shape of the bill and what happens when nobody is looking. Here is how Ruust and Heroku line up on the things that actually show up on your invoice.
| Ruust | Heroku | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat per Egg per month in GBP: Nano £3, Small £6, Standard £12, Large £24. No plan fee to start. | Priced in USD; dynos billed per running process, with add-ons billed separately on top. |
| Egress | Unmetered on every tier. No egress bill, ever (fair-use rate caps only, no volume cap). | Bandwidth usually counts against your account, so heavy traffic tends to add to the total. |
| Cold starts | Every Egg kept warm 24/7. No cold starts, no scale-to-zero, no spin-up lag. | The cheapest dynos can sleep after inactivity and wake on the next request. |
| Databases | Managed Postgres and Redis as database Eggs with a persistent volume, private to your Coop. | Managed Postgres, Redis and more via the add-ons marketplace, each billed as its own line. |
| Private networking | Eggs in a Coop reach each other privately by hostname, deny-by-default with explicit peering. | Private networking is available, though it tends to depend on the plan you are on. |
| Deploys | Connect a repo (Nixpacks or your Dockerfile), live on HTTPS in about two minutes, TLS in ~90s. | The original git-push-to-deploy experience, with a large ecosystem of buildpacks. |
| Own hardware | Bring Your Own Host: run the open-source agent on your Linux boxes, £2/Egg capped £20/host. | Fully managed only; you run on the provider's platform, not your own metal. |
| Regions | eu-west (London) and us-east (Virginia) live, Frankfurt and Singapore next. Same price everywhere. | Established regions across a mature global platform, chosen per app. |
Heroku details are as we understand them and can change. Always check Heroku's current pricing and features for the latest.
What you get by switching.
One flat price, in pounds, per Egg
A Standard Egg is £12 a month whatever your traffic does, and every region costs the same. There are no per-process dyno multipliers and no separately metered add-ons stacking up, so the number you agree to on day one is the number you keep paying.
Unmetered egress, so traffic is never a bill
Egress is unmetered on every tier, including Nano. A busy launch day or a viral weekend will not produce a bandwidth line on your invoice. Fair-use rate caps keep abuse in check, but there is no metering or cap on the volume you serve.
Always-on, so nothing goes cold
Every Egg is kept warm 24/7 with no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag. The first visitor after a quiet night gets the same response as the last one, which matters for small always-on apps that would otherwise sit on a dyno that sleeps.
Batteries included without the marketplace
Managed Postgres and Redis run as database Eggs inside your private Coop, and Eggs reach each other by hostname with deny-by-default peering. You get databases, private networking, custom domains, health checks and zero-downtime rolling deploys without assembling a basket of separately billed pieces.
Where Heroku is the better fit.
A deep, mature ecosystem
Heroku has years of buildpacks, tooling and community knowledge behind it. If your workflow already leans on a specific buildpack or a well-trodden Heroku recipe, that accumulated ecosystem is a genuine advantage that a newer platform cannot match overnight.
The add-ons marketplace
The add-ons marketplace makes it easy to bolt on managed services from many third parties in one place, with billing rolled into your account. If you want a broad menu of provisioned extras beyond databases and caches, that breadth is a real strength.
A proven, battle-tested platform
Heroku defined the modern PaaS and has operated at scale for a long time. For teams that value a long operational track record and a large hiring pool of engineers who already know it, that maturity carries real weight.
Ruust vs Heroku, the common questions.
Is Ruust cheaper than Heroku?
It depends on your traffic and shape, but Ruust is designed to be predictable rather than simply cheap. You pay one flat price per Egg in GBP (Standard is £12 a month) with unmetered egress and no separately billed add-ons, so the total does not drift upwards as usage grows. Heroku is priced in USD and tends to bill dynos per process with add-ons on top, which can be very reasonable or can add up depending on what you provision.
Can I move a Heroku app to Ruust?
Usually yes. If your app runs from a git repo it is a good candidate: connect the repo, and Ruust autobuilds it with Nixpacks or your own Dockerfile. You set a start command, root directory for monorepos and build-time env vars much as you would elsewhere. Managed Postgres and Redis run as database Eggs, and you can also connect any external Postgres or MySQL by connection string during a transition.
Do apps sleep or cold-start on Ruust?
No. Every Egg is kept warm 24/7 with no scale-to-zero and no cold starts, so there is no spin-up lag on the first request after a quiet period. That is a deliberate contrast with the cheapest Heroku dynos, which can sleep after inactivity and wake on the next visit.
Will heavy traffic increase my bill?
Not through egress. Bandwidth is unmetered on every tier, so serving more traffic never produces an egress charge. Per-Egg fair-use rate caps exist to stop abuse, but there is no metering or cap on egress volume. If you need more compute you can move up a size or add replicas, and those sizes stay at their flat monthly price.