To cancel a Heroku subscription, delete the paid resources that are generating charges (your apps and any add-ons), settle the final prorated invoice, and then close your account if you want to leave the platform entirely. Heroku bills dynos and add-ons prorated to the second, so charges stop the moment a resource is removed. How far you need to go depends on whether you want to shut down one app, trim costs on an app you’re keeping, or walk away completely.
Save Anything You Want to Keep First
Deleting a Heroku app is permanent and irreversible. Support cannot recover it. Before you touch anything, pull copies of what matters.
If your app uses Heroku Postgres, capture and download a backup through the CLI: heroku pg:backups:capture --app your-app-name, then heroku pg:backups:download --app your-app-name.1Heroku Dev Center. Importing and Exporting Heroku Postgres Databases That gives you a dump file you can restore to any PostgreSQL database later. Make sure your application code lives in a Git repository outside Heroku too, because the platform’s Git remote disappears with the app.
Download any invoices you want for your records from the Billing page. Once an account or team is deleted, invoice history is gone with it.2Heroku Help. How Do I Close My Heroku Team?
Find What’s Actually Billing You
Charges come from two places: dynos (the containers that run your code) and add-ons (databases, caching, monitoring, and similar services). Add-ons keep billing even if your app is idle, which catches people out. You scale dynos down to zero, assume the meter stopped, and then get an invoice for a Postgres database still humming along in the background. Check both the Resources tab on each app and the Billing page in your dashboard to see everything running on your account.
All charges are prorated to the second, so the published monthly price is the ceiling you’d hit only if a resource ran the whole billing cycle.3Heroku Help. Information on Heroku’s Pricing and Usage Deleting mid-month means you pay for the hours and seconds the resource was active, nothing more.
Delete an App
In the dashboard, open the app, click the Settings tab, and scroll to the bottom. Heroku asks you to type the app’s name to confirm, which guards against accidental deletion.4Heroku Help. How Do I Delete/Destroy a Heroku Application? Once you confirm, the app and all its data are gone immediately.
From the command line, run heroku apps:destroy -a your-app-name -c your-app-name. The -c flag supplies the confirmation inline, which is useful if you’re tearing down several apps in sequence.5Heroku Dev Center. Heroku CLI Commands The outcome is identical to the dashboard method.
Deleting an app automatically removes its add-ons, so you don’t need to clean those up separately.
Transfer Instead of Delete
If someone else needs the app, transfer ownership rather than destroying it: heroku apps:transfer recipient@example.com -a your-app-name, or use a team name instead of an email address.5Heroku Dev Center. Heroku CLI Commands Billing responsibility moves to the new owner, which stops charges on your account without ending the app.
Keep the App, Cut the Cost
If you want the app alive but cheaper, work through the Resources tab. Click the three-dot menu next to any add-on to remove, upgrade, or downgrade it.6Heroku Dev Center. Managing Add-ons Billing for a removed add-on stops immediately, and your final invoice reflects only prorated usage.7Heroku Help. How to Read Your Monthly Heroku Invoice
You can downgrade dynos the same way. Dropping from a Standard or Performance tier to Basic at $7 per month per dyno keeps the app online for light traffic at a fraction of the price.8Heroku. Heroku Dynos – Managed Application Containers for Compute
Remove Your Credit Card
You can strip your card off the account from the Billing page without closing the account itself, but there are conditions. You have to remove any resources that require a verified account first (paid dynos and add-ons). If there are unpaid invoices, Heroku charges them against the card before letting it go; if that charge fails, the card stays.9Heroku Help. How Can I Remove My Credit Card
Once the card is removed, the account becomes unverified, and you cannot add a new card or re-verify for up to 30 days.9Heroku Help. How Can I Remove My Credit Card If there’s any chance you’ll want to come back soon, factor that cooldown in before you remove it.
Close a Personal Account
Go to dashboard.heroku.com/account and scroll to the bottom, where the link to close the account lives.10Heroku Dev Center. Account Management Two conditions must be true before Heroku will let you proceed: every app you own has to be deleted or transferred, and all outstanding invoices have to be paid.
You can’t close a personal account mid-billing-period if paid usage has accrued on it. The workaround: delete or transfer every app, then use the “Remove Credit Card” button on the Billing page. That triggers an expedited charge for the partial period. Once it clears, the close-account option unlocks.11Heroku Help. How Do I Close My Personal Heroku Account? Clicking it permanently removes your account, revokes dashboard access, and ends all future billing.
Close a Team
Teams take more care. Before you can delete one, every app, pipeline, and add-on belonging to the team has to be deleted. All prior-month invoices must be paid in full, and the current month’s charges have to be settled manually through a Heroku Billing support representative.2Heroku Help. How Do I Close My Heroku Team?
Two mistakes do real damage here. Don’t remove yourself from the team before deleting it; leaving strips the admin access you need to finish the job. And don’t close your personal account first, because that locks you out of ever logging back in to delete the team you still manage.2Heroku Help. How Do I Close My Heroku Team? Team first, personal account second.
With everything cleared and the final charges settled, open the team’s Settings tab and select Delete Team.
Don’t Just Stop Paying
Ignoring invoices is not a cancellation. After a declined payment, Heroku retries up to two times over several business days. If those fail, you get roughly seven more days to resolve the balance before the account is suspended and apps go offline.12Heroku Help. What Happens If I Have Unpaid Heroku Invoices
After suspension, you have about 10 more days to pay the oldest past-due invoice. Miss that window and Heroku permanently deletes the account along with every application and all data, with no possibility of recovery. Overdue balances can also accrue interest at 1.5% per month, or the maximum rate allowed by law, whichever is lower.13Heroku. Your Agreement with SFDC for Heroku Services You lose the data and still owe the money. Go through the proper steps instead.