Heroku's $7 instances and the $25 instances are not very different. There is also the free instance that sleeps for 6 hours. You have to factor in that you get

Heroku's $7 instances and the $25 instances are not very different. There is also the free instance that sleeps for 6 hours. You have to factor in that you get free tiers of many things, all managed together like docker would help with, such as: 30 MB Redis memory cache compute instance for free 500mb Mongo database compute instance for free External logging compute instance for free and a whole marketplace of all these managed services, with the grouping of containers further managed by heroku. A Linode VPS at $5/month does not give you all that. If you like configuring all the above (and of course, assuming your use case calls for it at all), then the $5 plan with 1 GB RAM would let you put in a bunch of 256MB containers if you really wanted. The $10 plan with 2 GB RAM would let you put in comparable 512MB containers, but then you should have just been paying $7/month for Heroku already. Hope that helps! For a long time I struggled with inability to understand my potential costs for server-side projects, and occasionally read horror stories about other devs who got it wrong.