Heroku sells you a dyno tier. Akash sells you the hardware.
At whatever the market clears at — GPUs included.
The Core Economics
Heroku packages capacity into fixed dyno tiers. The tier is the unit, so an app that needs a little more memory buys the next size up and pays for the CPU it never asked for. That packaging is the convenience, and it's also the bill.
Akash sells what you ask for. You state the CPU, memory, and storage you actually want, providers bid on that exact shape, and you pay the winning bid. No tiers to round up into, and no platform margin riding on top of the hardware.
Here's what that costs you: nothing you can look up on a rate card. Prices move as providers compete and as more capacity joins the network. See what the market is charging right now on the GPU pricing page.
| Heroku | Akash | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Published per-dyno rate | Set by competitive bids, per deployment |
| Sizing | Fixed dyno tiers | The CPU, memory, and storage you specify |
| Build | Buildpacks and slugs | Standard Docker images |
| GPUs | Not offered | H100s, A100s, and L40s, by the hour |
| Egress | Inside the tier price | Zero |
Architectural Distinctions
Your Dockerfile, not their buildpack
Shipping to Heroku means fitting your app to a buildpack and a slug, and unpicking that work if you ever leave. If it runs in Docker, it runs on Akash. No proprietary runtime, no rewrite, no build logic that only works in one place. The SDL reads like a Docker Compose file, or you can skip it and pick a template in Akash Console.
Dedicated resources, no idle policy
Heroku's Eco dynos sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, so the first user after a quiet stretch waits on a cold start. Staying awake means paying for a higher tier. An Akash lease holds the resources you asked for as long as it's funded — there's no sleeping tier and no idle policy. It runs until you close it.
The GPU your app is about to need
Heroku has no GPU story. On Akash, adding an H100 to a deployment is a few lines in the same file as the web service in front of it. If the app you're running on a PaaS today is about to need a model behind it, that's one platform instead of two.
Service Parity Index
| Feature layer | Heroku | On Akash | How it works |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compute runtime | Web and worker dynos | Standard containers | Your image runs directly on provider hardware. |
| Build process | Buildpacks and slugs | Standard Dockerfiles | Build however you like. The network needs the image, not your repo. |
| Data persistence | Heroku Postgres and Redis | Persistent volumes, or an outside managed database | Run it as a container with a volume, or point at a managed service. |
| Process definition | Procfile | SDL | One portable YAML file describing services, resources, and ports. |
| Deployment control | Heroku CLI, git push | CLI, REST API, MCP, agent skill | An AI coding agent with an API key can deploy, inspect, and close workloads. |
| GPUs | Not supported | Requested in the same SDL | Add a GPU block naming vendor and model to any service. |
How It Works
No migration wizard. Three steps you control.
Describe the deployment
Pick a template or supply your own image. State CPU, memory, storage, any GPU, region preferences, and the maximum you'll pay.
Read the bids
Providers matching your spec bid automatically, usually within seconds. Each bid names the provider, the price, and the hardware.
Choose and deploy
Take a bid to open the lease. Your container starts with a live endpoint, moments later.
What We Are. What We Aren't.
Akash doesn't have a centralized SLA, because we aren't a centralized provider. We're a marketplace.
You choose your level of reliability by choosing your provider. The marketplace sorts them into tiers: Verified Enterprise data centers with redundant power and networking, and Community Independent operators optimized for price. Filter by tier and deploy.
What Heroku sells that we don't: managed Postgres and Redis with backups handled, git-push builds, add-ons, and one support line when something breaks. If no-ops is the product you're buying, Heroku is selling it and we aren't. We'd rather tell you that now.
FAQs
With the right setup, yes, and it asks more of you than Heroku does. Deploy on Verified Enterprise providers, run more than one lease, and put a load balancer in front. That's real operational work, and it's the honest trade for the price difference and the GPU access.
No. Deploy in dollars. Akash Console takes a credit card and bills in USD, the same as any other SaaS tool, and the Console API authenticates with a standard API key. Sign up with GitHub or email, add a card, and ship. No wallet, no seed phrase, no token.
Console Air is the self-custody path: connect your own wallet and sign every transaction yourself. The network also supports USDC and AKT for teams that want on-chain sovereignty — that's an upgrade, not an entry requirement. Protocol-powered, not crypto-complicated.
The lease ends and the container stops. Persistent volumes live with that provider, so a database on a single lease is a single point of failure. Run it on a managed service or replicate off-provider. This is the clearest place where a Heroku Postgres add-on is doing work that becomes yours here.
Start Building
Bring the container you already build, drop the tier you were rounding up into, and add a GPU when you need one.