Originally published on TechSaaS Cloud Originally published on TechSaaS Cloud Complete PaaS Exit Playbook: Heroku to Self-Hosted in 72 Hours We've migrated 6 startups off Heroku and Render in the past year. Average cost reduction: 87%. No client has gone back. This is the exact playbook we use. Three days, start to finish. The Economics That Force the Move Here's a real client breakdown (Series A, Rails app, ~5K DAU): Heroku Item Monthly Cost 4× Performance-M Dynos $1,000 Heroku Postgres (Standard-0) $50 Heroku Redis (Premium-0) $200 Heroku Data for Redis $200 Papertrail (logging) $230 Scout APM $120 Heroku CI $100 SSL, Scheduler, misc add-ons $900 Total $2,800/mo The replacement: Self-Hosted Item Monthly Cost Hetzner CX41 (16GB RAM, 4 vCPU) $15 Hetzner managed Postgres $25 Backblaze B2 backups $5 Domain + DNS (Cloudflare free) $0 Monitoring (Grafana + Prometheus, self-hosted) $0 CI/CD (Gitea Actions, self-hosted) $0 Uptime monitoring (Uptime Kuma, self-hosted) $0 Total $45/mo Actual client paid $240/mo…