The thing is you scale to meet demand. But unless you have a truly amazing product then you don't have to worry about that right away. Sure, you may scale up

The thing is you scale to meet demand. But unless you have a truly amazing product then you don't have to worry about that right away. Sure, you may scale up to 4 dynos to handle a techcrunch mention (or something like that), at $0.20 an hour. But you don't have to keep using that many dynos after the initial traffic spike. So you just scale them back after 2-6 hours and you pay an extra $1-2 a month for those spikes. Now, if you make it big and have to employ 25 dynos 24/7 then you are getting into the territory of needing your own infrastructure. But that is probably a long ways off and you'll be hiring people who know that stuff by then. Google around for some performance comparisons of heroku, but I think that I saw a something where you could handle 5000 or so concurrent users with acceptable response times (i.e. not hitting the backlog too deep errors from heroku), with just 2 dynos. Don't quote me on that, but it's what I remember. If you go to heroku's pricing page you can play with the number of dynos and workers all you want to see possible costs. One other thing to remember is that if you have periods with no traffic (say overnight at launch), then you can scale down to 1 dyno and your app will still be available but it won't cost you a thing. So really that $87 is the highest possible for a 2 dyno/1 worker deploy. You could save a lot of money by scaling back to the free 1 dyno during periods of inactivity.