Heroku: temporarily shut down an application

Question

I have a heroku application with a corresponding staging application to show improvements before deploying them to production.

Now the size of the database demands a non-dev database with a monthly cost for both.

My question: Is it possible to temporarily shut down the staging application so it can be quickly restarted, but avoiding paying the monthly database cost for the time it is shut down?

Answer 1

This isn't possible. Whilst you can set your dyno counts to 0 you pay for the database if it's provisioned.

It might be worth considering your staging environment as a 'throwaway' and remove it when you don't need it and then create a new one when you do, this would be simple to script so it's not too time consuming. Alternatively, do you need a full production dataset for staging? Could you reduce it down instead?