Scale down Heroku DB from production to hobby

Question

Is it possible to scale down a Heroku DB from production to hobby (the free Dev plan), as long as we stay within the row limits? A site I'm working on requires a production-grade DB for a few weeks, but then it'll be quiet for a while. Haven't been able to find any info on this.

Answer 1

It shouldn't be a problem. Heroku has a guide to upgrade with backups, so I'd recommend taking a backup of your current database, downloading it to your local computer, then spinning up a development database.

Once the development (free) DB is ready, restore from the pgbackup on your local. As long as you're under the row limit, you should be fine.

Obviously, you'd want to put the site in maintenance mode when you do all of this - but it shouldn't be down for more than 5-10 minutes.