It's actually $9/month for Heroku Basic DB plan and $20/month for SSL endpoint not cert (you can use your own domain and SSL cert).
You can always piggyback on yourapp.herokuapp.com for free SSL cert.
This is probably my background in sysops talking, but $29 a month for an nginx frontend, rails daemon and PostgreSQL instance sounds like highway robbery...
certainly - I think I paid 3 bucks for my cert for a year and amazon doesn't charge me anything extra for turning on SSL with my node code. I use a micro instance ..with swap ;)