What is the definition of a Heroku production app?

Question

I have an app running happily on Heroku, but it's registered as a 'development' app, and I can't for the life of me find any formal definition of what a 'production' app is, despite the apps dashboard and the status page making a very clear distinction between the two.

I have come across this explanation of the status of the two, which suggests that the difference is implicit (based on usage) rather than explicit (based on some configuration / setup):

Production issues are those that affect running, stable, production applications that have at least two web dynos and use a production-grade database (or no database at all). Includes dynos, database, HTTP caching, other platform components (DelayedJob workers, scheduler, etc.), and routing.

Development issues are those that affect the health of deployment workflow and tools. Includes deployment (git push, gem installation, slug compilation, etc.), general git activity, command line gem/API (scaling up/down, changing configuration, etc.), and related services (rake, console, db push/pull with TAPS, etc.). Development also includes issues specific to the operation of non-production applications such as unidling free 1-dyno apps and the operation of development databases.

Even these explanations reference a mysterious difference between development and production databases, although there is no corresponding explanation of the difference anywhere. Is the $9pcm 'Basic' Postgres plan a 'production' database?

[UPDATE]

There is now a 'Run Production Check' link on the app dashboard within your Heroku account that shows the steps to determine your app status. Screenshot attached:

Answer 1

I've been trying to find the same answer to your question.

So far from what I can glean Shared / Dev / Starter databases via Heroku Postgresql Database plans are not considered production and only Crane and higher are consider production grade database plans.

The Heroku Postgres production tier starts with Crane and extends through to the Mecha plan. Shared, Dev and Starter plans are not production databases.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/maximizing-availability

In addition, it seems that Heroku has a plugin to check to see if your app meets their guidelines:

https://github.com/heroku/heroku-production-check

I'm not sure if you scale up and down web dynos from 2 (during the day) and 1 (at night) with a Crane database if that would be considered "production" in Heroku's eyes.

Hope that helps!