Considering a VPS as a Heroku alternative?
A useful comparison starts with your application’s workload and response-time requirements. Choose a workload, enter your required throughput, then compare the cheapest plans that completed that load across fresh provisions.
- Rails application: Discourse — signed-in readers, search, topics and replies with PostgreSQL and Redis.
- Next.js application: Formbricks — survey submissions and authenticated application reads.
- PostgreSQL under load — durable transactions and indexed reads.
- Redis queues — persistent enqueue, consume and acknowledge operations.
- n8n workers — completed workflows through a worker queue.
Compare the complete deployment
These benchmarks measure self-hosted software on VPS plans. For a migration budget, add any separate database, backups, storage, bandwidth, monitoring and deployment services you require, along with the time spent operating them. The tables show the plan price and state which costs are included.
A successful benchmark establishes capacity for its published fixture. It does not establish feature parity, availability guarantees, or the performance of your own application. Use the recipe and observed provision range to choose candidates, then test your application before moving production traffic.