Heroku Postgres

Reliable and powerful database as a service based on PostgreSQL. Starting at ~$0.007/hour.

Connect, Use, and Develop

Databases are multi-ingress: use them from any cloud, PaaS, or your local computer. It is easy to connect from common languages & frameworks including Rails, Django, PHP, and Java: configuration strings are generated for them automatically. The starter tier provides expected up time of 99.5% and is well suited for development and hobby applications, with the production tier offering an expected up time of 99.95% for serious production applications.

Scale and Grow

Scale vertically by choosing from a range of plans . Plans differ based on the size of their hot-data-set, the portion of data available and optimized on-the-fly in high speed RAM. When the time comes, scale horizontally by adding read-only followers that stay up-to-date with the master database.

Heroku Postgres Advanced is in limited general availability. To start creating and using Advanced databases, open a ticket with Heroku Support to request access. Subscribe to our changelog to stay informed of when Heroku Postgres Advanced is generally available.

Highlights

Decoupled storage and compute

Scale your cluster's storage and compute independently to perfectly match your workload.

Elastic, usage-based storage

Storage capacity automatically adjusts up or down—so you only pay for exactly what you use.

Zero-downtime scaling

Scale compute instances horizontally or vertically on the fly, without restarting your application.

Dedicated follower pools

Isolate specific workloads (like heavy analytics) using dedicated, read-only pools behind a single load-balanced endpoint.

Extreme query performance

Leverage state-of-the-art infrastructure for memory optimization and significantly faster QPS.

Production-ready, Heroku-simple

Skip the complex database configuration. Just provision and go live.

Pricing Estimator

Networking

Architecture

The Heroku Postgres Advanced tier introduces a new cluster and instance pool architecture. Each cluster requires one Leader Pool (which handles all write capabilities) and supports up to five optional, read-only Follower Pools. Follower pools allow you to isolate specific workloads, such as running heavy analytics without impacting your primary app's performance. All instances within a pool must share the same compute level (e.g., 128G-Performance). To optimize your operation, you can seamlessly scale your pools horizontally (adding/removing instances) and vertically (upgrading/downgrading compute levels) as your traffic demands change.

Heroku Postgres Advanced Features and Components (opens in new tab)

Leader
Follower 1
Follower 2
Follower 3
Follower 4
Follower 5
Pools with a ⚡️ indicator have high availability.
Total

Storage

With Heroku Postgres Advanced, you pay only for the storage you actually use (first 100GB-mo is included for every cluster). There is no need to pre-provision or guess your limits upfront—the storage amount you enter here is strictly to help you estimate your monthly costs.

The first 100 GB is included; additional storage is billed at $0.20 per GB.

GB
Included

Total

Pay only for what you use. This estimate reflects your selected configuration, not a fixed monthly fee. Heroku Postgres Advanced is designed to be flexible and elastic.

Instance(s)
Storage
Estimated Total

Levels & Pricing

Networking
4G-Performance
2
4 GB
400
8G-Performance
2
8 GB
800
16G-Performance
2
16 GB
1,600
32G-Performance
4
32 GB
3,200
64G-Performance
8
64 GB
5,000
128G-Performance
16
128 GB
5,000
256G-Performance
32
256 GB
5,000
384G-Performance
48
384 GB
5,000
512G-Performance
64
512 GB
5,000
768G-Performance
96
768 GB
5,000
1536G-Performance
192
1,536 GB
5,000

Highlights

Cost-effective starting point

Launch small projects, proofs of concept, or staging apps with predictable, budget-friendly pricing.

Next-gen infrastructure

Benefit from the latest high-performance cloud database technology to start your journey.

AI-ready and fully managed

Start building modern applications with pgvector support, while Heroku handles all underlying maintenance

Highlights

Predictable performance

Handle production traffic confidently with dedicated resources that won't compete with noisy neighbors.

High Availability (HA)

Keep your application online and resilient with automatic failover to synchronized standby instances (Premium and above).

Continuous protection

Every transaction is backed up. Restore your database to any exact point in time, or fork for safe testing.

Enterprise-grade security

Meet strict compliance requirements, including HIPAA and PCI with Shield.

Actionable observability

Monitor query performance, connection limits, and database health directly from the Heroku Dashboard or CLI.

Proven, pioneering platform

Rely on a mature, highly refined architecture that has powered millions of applications for over a decade.

Postgres Advanced Features

High Availability

Postgres Extensions

Database Forks

Direct SQL Access

Database Followers

Dataclips

Continuous Protection

Rollback

Non-burst Performance

PrivateLink

Heroku Private Spaces

HIPAA Compliance

Get Started with Postgres Advanced

Run one command and follow the interactive prompts to configure your database.

Pro: Step-by-step plan selection
Pro: Configure followers and high availability interactively
Pro: Automatic network context detection
Pro: Ideal for first-time setup

Provision Heroku Postgres Advanced

Heroku Postgres Advanced is in limited general availability. To start creating and using Advanced databases, open a ticket with Heroku Support to request access. Subscribe to our changelog to stay informed of when Heroku Postgres Advanced is generally available.

Provision using the CLI

$ heroku data:pg:create -a $APP_NAME

The CLI will prompt you to select a plan, configure followers, and set high availability options.

Provision Heroku Postgres Essential

Provision an Essential Heroku Postgres database by selecting a plan below.

Plan

Provision using the CLI

$ heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:essential-0 -a $APP_NAME

Provision Heroku Postgres Classic

Provision a Classic Heroku Postgres database by selecting a plan type and plan below.

Networking

Plan

Provision using the CLI

$ heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:Standard 0 -a $APP_NAME

Documentation