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Comprehensive Guide to Judoscale Pricing Plans and Billing
Judoscale has different pricing tiers (we like to call them “belts”) depending on the platform and autoscaling needs.
The Free Plan: White Belt
Judoscale will always have a free plan that includes all of our features on all platforms. It is only going to be limited by how many scale events will be issued every month for the team or app. For smaller apps that just want protection against “going viral” or that just need occasional scaling, this plan will cover you.
If your app needs to scale dynamically more than 20 times per month, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Direct Sign-up Billing & Pricing
Judoscale integrates with multiple platforms by creating a separate team for each new integration. You can have as many teams on as many platforms as you need, and each team will be billed separately. Billing is managed by Stripe.
We have several monthly plans based on your maximum scale needs across all services with autoscaling enabled on each team. Services without autoscaling enabled do not count toward your maximum scale.
To see all plans and determine which one is right for your team, use the calculator for your hosting platform:
- Amazon ECS
- Heroku (more details below)
- Fly.io
- Railway
- Render
- Custom Platform
👀 Note
Regardless of your plan limits, you can always manually scale your application higher through your platform UI or CLI, but Judoscale will not let you configure autoscaling ranges that bring you over your plan limit.
An Example
Let’s take a team with two apps and the following services setup:
| App | Service | Autoscale Range |
|---|---|---|
| my-app-1 | web | 1–2 instances |
| my-app-1 | worker | 1–5 instances |
| my-app-2 | web | 1–3 instances |
| my-app-2 | worker-1 | 2–5 instances |
| my-app-2 | worker-2 | 1 instance (not autoscaled) |
This team setup has a total of 15 max instances (2 + 5 + 3 + 5), so the team would need the “Green Belt” plan which supports up to 15 max instances.
Note that my-app-2 -> worker-2 is not counted since autoscaling is not enabled. Enabling autoscaling on worker-2 would bring max instances to 16, exceeding the 15 instances limit of the “Green Belt” plan. This would require either an upgrade to the “Teal Belt” plan or reducing the max instances of another service.
Heroku Pricing
Heroku teams can either sign-up through judoscale.com directly, or integrate by installing the Judoscale add-on.
Same product, same features, different pricing. Our Heroku pricing plans are based on the maximum number of Standard and Performance dynos you need to run at any given time. We also support Private and Shield dynos, which are priced the same as Performance dynos.
Use our pricing calculator to determine the right plan for your team.
Add-on Billing & Pricing
Our Judoscale and Rails Autoscale Heroku add-ons are billed automatically via Heroku. Each app has their own add-on plan, and they are billed separately.
You can view the current plans & pricing in the Heroku add-on page.
Add-on vs Direct Billing
One key difference between the add-on and direct sign-up is how billing is managed: while Judoscale will still group your add-on apps under the same “team” for organization purposes just like Heroku, each app has their own plan & billing (managed by Heroku), rather than a single plan & billing for the whole team (managed by Judoscale & Stripe).
To unlock team-level billing for multiple apps under one plan and slightly lower pricing, you can migrate your Heroku add-on app(s) to a direct team. If you’re capped by Heroku add-on limits or want to consolidate billing across apps, reach out to our support team and we can onboard you to Heroku Direct.
Legacy Heroku Plans
Some customers may still be on a legacy add-on plan such as “bronze-std” or “silver-perf”. These plans will continue to work, but if you need to upgrade or downgrade, you will need to choose one of the “belt” plans.
Upgrading your Heroku add-on plan
You can upgrade directly in the Heroku dashboard or via the CLI:
heroku addons:upgrade judoscale:purple -a your-app-name
Swap purple for the belt plan you need (blue, purple, etc.). Upgrading only adjusts the plan validation on the Judoscale side so you can select more dynos in your Scale Range—your app keeps running with no dyno restarts.
Heroku Example
Let’s take an app that has three processes:
| Process | Dyno Type | Autoscale Range |
|---|---|---|
| web | Perf-L | 1–3 dynos |
| worker-1 | Std-2X | 2–20 dynos |
| worker-2 | Std-2X | 1 dyno (not autoscaled) |
This setup has 20 max Standard dynos and 3 max Perf dynos. The app would need the “Green Belt” plan, which supports up to 20 Standard dynos and 7 Performance dynos.
Note that worker-2 is not counted since autoscaling is not enabled. Enabling autoscaling on worker-2 would bring max Standard dynos to 21, exceeding the 20 Standard dyno limit of the “Green Belt” plan. This would require either an upgrade to the “Blue Belt” plan or reducing the max dynos of another process.