Heroku, Railway, Render: Why Southeast Asia Developers Need Something Different

If you're a developer in Southeast Asia looking for a free or cheap way to deploy your app, you've probably landed on Heroku, Railway, or Render. All three are excellent products built by excellent teams. But all three were built with US and European developers as the primary audience — and it shows.

Let's go through them honestly.

Heroku was the original PaaS, and for years it was the go-to for developers who just wanted to push code and get a URL. Then in 2022, Salesforce shut down the free tier. The cheapest plan is now $5/month per dyno, and the closest region to Southeast Asia is still us-east-1. For a developer in Manila or Jakarta, that's 200-300ms round trip on a good day.

Railway is the spiritual successor to Heroku, and it's a great product. The developer experience is smooth, the pricing is usage-based ($5 credit/month free, then $0.000463/vCPU second), and the team is fast-moving. But Railway's infrastructure is US and EU only. There's no Singapore region. For SEA workloads, you're still routing traffic halfway around the world.

Render sits between Heroku and Railway in terms of positioning. Solid product, good free tier (though with cold starts), multiple US and EU regions. No SEA region. Same latency problem.

This is why we built Dockfly. Not because the other products are bad — they're not — but because the regional gap is real and nobody was filling it for Southeast Asia specifically.

Dockfly runs in Singapore. Our free tier gives you 1 project, 3 services, 0.5 vCPU, and 1 GB RAM with no cold starts and no credit card required. The Hobby plan is $4/month — less than a single Heroku dyno. And we support Bahasa Indonesia alongside English because a lot of our users think in Indonesian.

If you're building for SEA users and you want your API to feel fast to them, try Dockfly. Your first deploy takes about 60 seconds.