Originally published on TechSaaS Cloud

Originally published on TechSaaS Cloud

Complete PaaS Exit Playbook: Heroku to Self-Hosted in 72 Hours

We've migrated 6 startups off Heroku and Render in the past year. Average cost reduction: 87%. No client has gone back.

This is the exact playbook we use. Three days, start to finish.

The Economics That Force the Move

Here's a real client breakdown (Series A, Rails app, ~5K DAU):

Heroku Item Monthly Cost

4× Performance-M Dynos $1,000

Heroku Postgres (Standard-0) $50

Heroku Redis (Premium-0) $200

Heroku Data for Redis $200

Papertrail (logging) $230

Scout APM $120

Heroku CI $100

SSL, Scheduler, misc add-ons $900

Total $2,800/mo

The replacement:

Self-Hosted Item Monthly Cost

Hetzner CX41 (16GB RAM, 4 vCPU) $15

Hetzner managed Postgres $25

Backblaze B2 backups $5

Domain + DNS (Cloudflare free) $0

Monitoring (Grafana + Prometheus, self-hosted) $0

CI/CD (Gitea Actions, self-hosted) $0

Uptime monitoring (Uptime Kuma, self-hosted) $0

Total…