In short, there's a free tier, and then it's $0.05/hour. There isn't really a concept of what you get for that (process/memory/disk/io/bandwidth...). At that

In short, there's a free tier, and then it's $0.05/hour. There isn't really a concept of what you get for that (process/memory/disk/io/bandwidth...). At that hourly price, it's ~40% the cost of an small EC2 instance, ~170% the price of a micro instance and ~5% the cost of an extra large. If you aim for approx 15 apps on 1 extra large, that gives 1gb per app and somewhere around 1/2 EC2 CU instance. Redundancy can be added by replicating the apps to a fallback server but not routing any traffic to them when everything is ok. If you had 15 EL servers and distributed each app's fallback server randomly, having 1 EL server go down would mean your 14 remaining instances would be handling 16, instead of 15, apps - not unreasonable. Drop the EC2 prices to reserved instances, and there's suddenly room to grow+profit. Without knowing what you are actually getting (EBS? LB? S3?) it's impossible to tell if this is a good or bad value. Personally, deployment through git/mercurial isn't worth an even minute price premium over straight up EC2. Heroku had autoscaling, varnish and reverse proxy, possibly on higher margins - which I think is a large part of what makes Heroku, well, Heroku.