The new Crane level of the database service costs US$50 per month, with a 400MB RAM cache. Next up from there is the new Kappa tier, which costs $100 per month and has an 800MB cache.

Both include the same array of features for supporting production deployments found in Heroku's higher-cost plans, such as continuous protection, where database activity is committed to write-ahead logs for quick recovery in the event of a hardware failure; improved security; and "production-grade" monitoring.

Previously, those wishing to jump from Heroku's free version to a paid, production-ready plan had to pay $200 per month for the Ronin edition. Last week, Heroku upgraded the free edition, adding in some developer-friendly features but omitting others available in its production versions.

The Crane and Kappa tiers are now in public beta and can be used at no charge during the beta period, Heroku said.

One 1TB of storage is provided with each Heroku database, regardless of the tier.