How to read your monthly Heroku invoice

Issue

You've recently received a Heroku invoice and are curious how to read through its contents.

Resolution

Invoice overview

Heroku provides each Personal account and Team with interactive HTML-based invoices that provide day-to-day tracking of costs associated with applications and add-ons. Each monthly invoice goes into great detail on all charges accrued. This article serves to explain how your Heroku invoice is divided up by application.

Billing cycle

Heroku invoices Personal and Teams on a monthly basis. While the listed prices for Heroku products are given as monthly costs, we prorate all costs to the second.

For example, a Hobby dyno costs $7/month. Running 1 Hobby dyno costs roughly $0.25/day. If you use a Hobby dyno for a Review App and scale the dyno to zero (or delete the Review App) in less than a day, it would cost you less than $0.25.

The monthly price for your resources is the maximum you are charged for those resources if you run them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, since your last billing cycle.

Our Dev Center explains the billing cycle in more detail. Review the Usage & Billing article if you have questions on the billing cycle and proration-based charges.

Types of charges

Heroku offers application dynos and add-on services that are represented as separate line items on your invoice. Within each invoice, you'll be able to see a summary of charges, as well as a breakdown of charges for the given month on a per-application basis.

Each invoice will include the following summary of charges:

Summary of application dyno costs
Summary of add-on services
Credit summary (if applicable)

The following image shows the at-a-glance summary of your Heroku charges. These charges represent the total of all of your application dynos and all of your Heroku Add-on services.

Breakdown of application charges

On a per-application basis, Heroku provides a breakdown of the following types of charges:

Account details

In the following screenshot is a list of all current applications in an example account:

The line item for our_great_applicationshows the total cost of the entire application
The line item for another_awesome_application shows the total cost of a separate application
Each section can be expanded to show further detail on the associated charges per application

The following image shows a summary of the Account Details of each of your application's charges.

Application-based charges

Heroku prorates all costs to the second. The monthly price for your resources is the maximum you are charged for those resources if you run them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, since your last billing cycle.

Breakdown of dyno hours (web / worker / run)
Breakdown of Heroku Add-on costs per application
Billing period (always 1 month)
Cost per full month of usage
Amount of time per month the service was utilized (in decimal)

The following image shows a summary of a single application's costs, related to dynos and add-ons.

Viewing per-application dyno usage

Select the arrow next to the name of the application to see associated charges.

When you view your application usage in more detail, you'll see a breakdown of the days the dyno was used, and the associated dollar amount in charges
When the Avg. Dynos # is 0.0, this indicates the dyno is not running
Any usage that is above 0.0Avg. Dynos # indicates the dyno is running and usage will be accrued if the dyno is in a paid tier.

Usage

The content of this article aims to explore how to navigate your Heroku invoices. However, for deeper context on metering and billing, we recommend viewing our Dev Center article on Usage and Billing.

Pagination

Heroku invoices will display application-based charges for all applications that are live and/or deleted within the given month. Please be aware if you have hundreds of applications, this can result in invoices that are extremely lengthy.

A nice alternative to housing many applications in one Personal account is to create Heroku Teams, to organize applications in smaller chunks. This results in smaller invoices that are more readily navigatable.

If you transfer applications from Personal accounts to Teams, your Free dynos will be automatically upgraded to Hobby dynos. Hobby dynos are priced at $7.00 per month; Free dynos are not an option on Heroku Teams.

Information on Heroku's pricing and usage
[How do I manage billing multiple clients with separate apps?]https://help.heroku.com/T8Q2N4SV/how-do-i-manage-billing-multiple-clients-with-separate-apps