There's nothing free on Heroku,especially when your app is freezed after 1 hour of inactivity. Heroku is quite expensive, while it helps for ruby devs or node devs, i dont see the point for python devs especially when python deployement is as easy as php.

I personally use alwaysdata for my python apps,it support Django/Flask/Bottle... through Wsgi and has SSH access for around 9€. (supports perl/php/ruby too). On the rdbms side mysql/postgres/couchdb/mongodb included. You can do git deployement.

I tried AppFog but frankly the service sucks,deploying large apps doesnt work , no ssh whatsoever and i find it strange to have to do tunneling to access a db server from the outside ...

And you can create 1 free account on alwaysdata to test stuff out.

You could. Not sure if Heroku offers a full fledged linux environment. Also there are unlimited databases (MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB, CouchDB or Redis ) included in the 1€ fee.

The free database on Heroku is limited to 10K rows and $9/month gets you 10 million rows.