Naijacloud vs Heroku: one platform, in Naira, in Nigeria
Both take your Git repo and give you a running app. Only one of them runs it in Port Harcourt, bills you in ₦, and ships the database, object storage, transactional email and domain registration in the same product. Here is the feature-by-feature read, including the rows Heroku wins.
Heroku invented this category and most of us learned deployment on it. What it never added was a region anywhere near West Africa — the Common Runtime is US and Europe, and every Private Space region is in North America, Europe or Asia-Pacific. Naijacloud is the same shape of platform with a region in Port Harcourt, six managed database engines instead of two, and a bill in Naira. Heroku also has no free tier any more; ours is ₦2,000 of usage credit a month.
Choose Naijacloud when
Your users or your data are in Nigeria — Compute and the database in Port Harcourt. On Heroku the nearest options are Dublin or Frankfurt, and the data lives there.
The dyno bill stopped making sense — Standard-1X is $25/mo for 512 MB. The same money here buys considerably more memory, in Naira, without the FX layer.
You are tired of the add-on marketplace — Databases, object storage, email and domains are first-party here, on one invoice and one support queue, rather than five vendors with five bills.
Choose Heroku when
You need point-in-time recovery, followers or Postgres at real scale — Heroku Postgres goes to 8 TB with PITR, high availability and read followers. We have scheduled backups and restore, and none of those three.
You are already deep in the add-on ecosystem — Hundreds of add-ons provisioned and billed through one platform. We have no marketplace at all.
You need Shield or Private Spaces for compliance — Isolated networks, PCI and HIPAA-capable runtimes, SSO. We have team roles and an activity log, and no certifications.
Your users are in North America, Europe or Asia-Pacific — Ten Private Space regions covering exactly those, and two decades of operating them.
Things you get here that Heroku does not offer at all
Not cheaper versions of the same feature — capabilities that are simply not on the other platform, so today they are a second vendor, a second bill and a second support queue.
A region in Nigeria
af-west runs in Port Harcourt. Heroku’s Common Runtime is `us` and `eu`; its ten Private Space regions are Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Montreal, Mumbai, Oregon, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Virginia. None is in Africa.
A bill in Naira
Priced in ₦ and paid from a prepaid balance with a local card or bank transfer. No FX spread, no cross-border fee, no international card declined at 2am.
MySQL, MariaDB and MongoDB, managed
First-party, with scheduled backups and restore. Heroku manages Postgres and a key-value store; everything else is an add-on from a third-party vendor with its own bill and its own support queue.
Transactional email under your own DKIM
Naijamail is first-party with SDKs for five languages. On Heroku, email is SendGrid or Mailgun as an add-on.
S3-compatible object storage and the domain itself
Buckets you own in the same region as the app, and domains searched, registered and DNS-hosted here. Heroku has neither — it is S3 plus a registrar, contracted separately.
A SQL editor in the dashboard
Browse tables, run queries and export results in the browser. Heroku gives you `heroku pg:psql` and a connection string.
Platform comparison
Scored out of five on what actually changes your day.
Latency and data residency in Nigeria
Naijacloud
5/5af-west is in Port Harcourt: app, database and object storage all in-country.
Heroku
1/5No African region in the Common Runtime or in any of the ten Private Space regions. Nigerian traffic is served from Dublin, Frankfurt or Virginia.
Managed database engines
Naijacloud
5/5Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis and Valkey, each first-party with backups and a browser console.
Heroku
3/5Postgres and a key-value store, both excellent. Anything else is a third-party add-on.
Billing currency
Naijacloud
5/5Priced and paid in ₦ from a prepaid balance. Local cards and bank transfer.
Heroku
2/5USD card billing, per dyno and per add-on. You absorb the FX spread and a bill that moves with the Naira.
Transactional email
Naijacloud
5/5First-party, your own DKIM key, REST API, SDKs, webhooks and suppression lists.
Heroku
2/5An add-on. SendGrid or Mailgun, contracted and billed through the marketplace.
Entry price
Naijacloud
5/5₦2,000 of usage credit every month, which covers a small always-on service outright. No sleeping, no time limit.
Heroku
2/5No free tier since 2022. The cheapest always-on option is the Eco dyno at $5/mo, and Eco dynos sleep.
What you can deploy
Naijacloud
4/5A GitHub repo, any public Git URL, or a Docker image. The builder detects Node, Python, Go, Rust, Ruby, PHP, Java, .NET, Elixir, Deno and static sites.
Heroku
5/5The same and more: buildpacks for everything, a container registry, one-off dynos, release phase and a mature process model.
Database recovery and scale
Naijacloud
3/5Hourly, daily or weekly backups with the retention you choose, and restore into a new instance.
Heroku
5/5Point-in-time recovery, high availability, read followers and plans to 8 TB.
Ecosystem
Naijacloud
2/5No marketplace. What is here is what we built.
Heroku
5/5Hundreds of add-ons, provisioned and billed in one place, with two decades of documentation behind them.
Governance and compliance
Naijacloud
2/5Team roles and an activity log. No SSO, no certifications.
Heroku
5/5Private Spaces, Shield, SSO, PCI and HIPAA-capable runtimes.
Key differences
The region map
af-west in Port Harcourt, alongside eu-west in the UK and France. For a Lagos user the in-country region removes roughly a tenth of a second per round trip, multiplied by every sequential query a page makes — and if a contract says the data stays in Nigeria, it is the only thing that satisfies it.
The Common Runtime is `us` and `eu`. Private Spaces add Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Montreal, Mumbai, Oregon, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Virginia. It is a good map for most of the world and it has no entry for West Africa, which after this long is a decision rather than an oversight.
One platform or a platform plus a marketplace
Six database engines, S3-compatible object storage, transactional email under your own DKIM, domain registration and DNS are all first-party, on one bill, over one private network. The email is the unusual one: we generate the DKIM keypair and sign the message ourselves.
Heroku is a dyno runtime plus Postgres, and the marketplace is the rest of the answer. That marketplace is genuinely excellent and it is also five vendors, five bills and five support queues for one application — and each of those vendors is somewhere else again, geographically.
What the cheapest thing that stays up costs
Every workspace gets ₦2,000 of usage credit a month, which covers a small always-on service outright. It does not sleep and it is not time-limited.
The free tier ended in 2022. Eco is $5/mo and sleeps; Basic is $7/mo and does not. That is a reasonable price for what it is — it is simply no longer the platform a student or a side project starts on for nothing.
Cost of an always-on service
Compute only, before bandwidth. Our figures come from the live rate card, so they are what the meter charges. Heroku figures are converted from list USD pricing at a card rate of ₦1,560/$ — the rate you actually pay, not the interbank one.
Starter — 0.5 vCPU · 512 MB
Naijacloud
₦3,500 / monthHeroku
Basic dyno, 512 MB — $7/mo → ≈ ₦10,900Pro — 1 vCPU · 1 GB
Naijacloud
₦7,000 / monthHeroku
Standard-2X, 1 GB — $50/mo → ≈ ₦78,000The second row is the like-for-like one and it is the one worth checking: Standard-2X is 1 GB of RAM, the same as the tier beside it. Standard-1X, at $25/mo, is 512 MB — the same memory as the $7 Basic dyno, for three and a half times the price, because what the Standard tier buys is the process model rather than the memory. A Heroku Postgres is extra on top of all of these: Essential-1 is $9/mo for 10 GB, and the Standard tier starts at $50. Heroku figures are its published Cedar dyno and Postgres prices as of September 2026, converted at the card rate.
When a move is worth scoping
Migrations cost time. If two or more of these keep coming up, the move solves a constraint you already have.
Your dynos are in Dublin and your users are in Lagos.
A contract or a regulator says Nigerian customer data stays in Nigeria.
The monthly total is dynos plus Postgres plus SendGrid plus S3 plus a registrar.
The USD bill moves every month without your usage changing.
You wanted to put a side project somewhere free and found the free tier gone.
Frequently asked
Close. Connect the repo and push; the stack is detected and the build and start commands are pre-filled, the same job a buildpack does. The differences you will notice are that there is no Procfile — the start command is a field on the service — and that the equivalent of a worker dyno is a second service from the same repo with its own start command.
`pg_dump` from Heroku and restore into a Naijacloud database. Yours gets a TLS-only external endpoint, so you can drive the restore from your own machine with `psql` and then point the app at the private address.
No. Scheduled backups — hourly, daily or weekly, with the retention you choose — and restore into a new instance. If PITR or a read follower is a hard requirement today, Heroku Postgres has both and we do not.
For databases, object storage, email and domains: first-party services here. For anything else, a third-party vendor you contract directly. We have no marketplace, and if you are relying on a dozen add-ons that is a real cost of moving.
Every workspace gets ₦2,000 of usage credit a month, which covers a small always-on web service outright, plus 500 emails, 5 GB of object storage and 20 GB of egress. Free services run on the same infrastructure as paid ones, with no forced sleep.
Try it against your own workload
Deploy one service from a Git repo in Port Harcourt and compare the numbers yourself. Free tier, no card, no FX.