Looking for a Heroku alternative? Try the Catalyst Free Trial today!
Tags: webdev, heroku, programming, microservices
Published: 2022-12-07 06:55:31

We've seen all the major social media channels flooded with information on Heroku ending its free trial, which would mean shutting down its free Dynos, Redis storage, and Postgres. 

If you are looking for resources to move your projects, look no further. [Catalyst by Zoho](https://catalyst.zoho.com/catalyst-free-trial.html?utm_source=third-party&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=heroku) could be the go-to solution for all your application development needs.

##  Why explore the Catalyst Free Trial?

* **A completely free, full-featured development environment** (yes, you read that right!)

The free trial gives you multiple options to explore and experiment with Catalyst. And the best part? The development cost is entirely on us; you do not have to pay a single penny to develop your applications. So, how is that possible? 

At Catalyst, we offer you two environments for your applications: the development environment and production environment.

Using the free, full-featured development environment, the applications you can build using Catalyst are endless. A few services that enable application building include:

- Compute services like functions to be scheduled at specific intervals or triggered as an event-driven action.
- Storage options like a relational database, file store, and cache.
- AI/ML capabilities like performing predictions and forecasts, face analytics, image moderation, and more.
- Services like automating workflows, authenticating users, hosting web clients, monitoring applications, and many more.

All the services mentioned above are free in your development environment!

* **Up to 125M free invocations in production**

What's a code without taking it to production and seeing your application being used live by your users? With the Catalyst Free Trial, you get up to 125M free invocations to explore Catalyst in production. You can host your application, set up SSL certificates, and map your custom domain, all while exploring the Catalyst Free Trial.

* **Build and host anything**

Whether it's a web app, a mobile app, or a microservice, you can build it using Catalyst. The Free Trial unlocks the limitless potential to build an application of your choice and push it live without worrying about your cloud costs. Kickstart your application development in the free sandbox and pay according to the app usage later.

## What can you build?

- Mobile app

Looking to build a mobile app for your business? How about integrated mobile analytics to track app usage? Catalyst by Zoho makes this effortless. Explore our Catalyst Free Trial and try it for yourself!

- Web application

Power a sales commission application that computes monthly sales for many employees involving multiple parameters like direct sales, cross-sell, up-sell, and reseller channels. Provision your expensive cloud resources to run at discrete intervals—once a day, week, fortnight, or month—using a serverless platform like Catalyst by Zoho. You can monitor and optimize your app too!

- Microservice

Pick from several prebuilt microservices to customize your application by adding capabilities like optical character recognition, face analytics, barcode scanner, and more. If you want a custom extension or an integration, you can also build it using the Catalyst Free Trial.

## Still hesitant about making a move?

Are you still unsure if [Catalyst by Zoho](https://catalyst.zoho.com/catalyst-free-trial.html?utm_source=third-party&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=heroku) could be the go-to solution when you have multiple Heroku alternatives? Here are some of the best reasons:

- Sign up for free; without a credit card. (We know how developers hate giving away these details!)
- No development cost involved. Now you can keep building all your projects for free.
- Pay as you go. Once in production, you'll be charged only based on your usage.
- Stay in control of your cloud bills by optionally cutting off your project's production environment when your budget amount is crossed.
- Budget alerts and application alerts to inform you of any breaches in your budget amount, and failure/event concurrence in any particular Catalyst component.
- Invite-by-email collaboration to work with multiple users on a project.

**Build, host, test, deploy, and monitor your applications using the powerful and unified application development platform, [Catalyst by Zoho](https://catalyst.zoho.com/catalyst-free-trial.html?utm_source=third-party&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=heroku).**