I'm pretty sure you can use cloudflare's free ssl with heroku at this point.
yeah, but I wanted SSL for the complete trip, free SSL would terminate at Cloudflare leaving the connection from Cloudflare to Heroku not-protected (which would be questionable from a PCI perspective). And then for some reason, I couldn't get the connection from Cloudflare to Heroku to work under the *.herokuapp.com ssl cert.
@matthewarkin You may want to use letsencrypt.org for SSL and save further on costs
the ssl itself was only $10/year, the $20/month heroku charges you to use a custom ssl cert.