As somebody whose first day working at Heroku was the day this acquisition closed, I think it’s mostly a misconception to blame Salesforce for Heroku’s stagnation and eventual irrelevance. Salesforce gave Heroku a ton of funding to build out a vision that was way ahead of its time. Docker didn’t even come out until 2013, AWS didn’t even have multiple regions when it was built. They mostly served as an investor and left us alone to do our thing, or so it seemed those first couple years.
The launch of the multi language Cedar runtime in 2011 led to incredible growth and by 2012 we were drowning in tech debt and scaling challenges. Despite more than tripling our headcount in that first year (~20 to 74) we could not keep up.
Mid 2012 was especially bad as we were severely impacted by two us-east-1 outages just 2 weeks apart. To the extent it wasn’t already, reliability and paying down tech debt became the main focus and I think we went about 18 months between major user-facing platform launches (Europe region and eventually larger sized dynos being the biggest things we eventually shipped after that drought). The organization lost its ability to ship significant changes or maybe never really had that ability at scale.
That time coincided with the founders taking a step back, leaving a loss of leadership and vision that was filled by people more concerned with process than results. I left in 2014 and at that time it already seemed clear to me that the product was basically stalled.
I’m not sure how much of this could have been done better even in hindsight. In theory Salesforce could have taken a more hands on approach early on but I don’t think that could have ended better. They were so far from profitability in late 2010 that they could not stay independent without raising more funding. The venture market in ~2010 was much smaller than a few years later—tiny rounds and low valuations. Had the company spent its pre-acquisition engineering cycles building for scalability & reliability at the expense of product velocity they probably would have never gotten successful.
Even still, it was the most amazing professional experience of my career, full of brilliant and passionate people, and it’s sad to see it end this way.
It remains the greatest engineering team I've ever seen or had the pleasure to be a part of. I was only there from early 2011 to mid 2012 but what I took with me changed me as an engineer. The shear brilliance of the ideas and approaches...I was blessed to witness it. I don't think I can overstate it, though many will think this is all hyperbole. I didn't always agree with the decisions made and I was definitely there when the product stagnation started, but we worked hard to reduce tech debt, build better infrastructure, and improve... but man, the battles we fought. Many fond memories, including the single greatest engineering mistake I've ever seen made, one that I still think about until this day (but will never post in a public forum :)).
I'm just going to chime in here and say thank you, there still really isn't in my mind a comparable offering to heroku's git push and go straight to a reasonable production
I honestly find it a bit nuts, there's offerings that come close, but using them I still get the impression that they've just not put in the time really refining that user interface, so I just wanted to say thank you for the work you and the GP did, it was incredibly helpful and I'm happy to say helped me launch and test a few product offerings as well as some fun ideas
> by 2012 we were drowning in tech debt and scaling challenges.
> the greatest engineering team I've ever seen
How do these two things reconcile in your opinion? In my view , doing something quickly is the easy part , good engineering is only needed exactly when you want things to be maintainable and scalable, so the assertions above don’t really make much sense to me.
Thanks for sharing your story. Those early days of using Heroku were really enjoyable for me. It felt so promising and simple. I remember explaining the concept to a lot of different people who didn't believe that the deployment model could be that simple and accessible until I showed them.
Then life went on, I bounced around in my career, and forgot about Heroku. Years later I actually suggested it for someone to use for a simple project once and I could practically feel the other developers in the room losing respect for me for even mentioning it. I hadn't looked at it for so long that I didn't realize it had fallen out of favor.
> That time coincided with the founders taking a step back, leaving a loss of leadership and vision that was filled by people more concerned with process than results
This feels all too familiar. All of my enjoyable startup experiences have ended this way: The fast growing, successful startup starts attracting people who look like they should be valuable assets to the company, but they're more interested in things like policies, processes, meetings, and making the status reports look nice than actually shipping and building.
Having been on a bigco team that underwent the same sort of headcount growth in a very short time I have to imagine that "more than tripling our headcount in that first year" was likely more a driver of the inability to keep up than a solution. That's not a knock on the talents of anyone hired; it's just exceedingly difficult to simultaneously grow a team that fast and maintain any kind of velocity regardless of the complexity of the problems you're trying to tackle. The culture and knowledge that enabled the previous team's velocity just gets completely diluted.
FWIW, the team that eventually created "Docker" was working at the same time on dotCloud as a direct Heroku competitor. I remember meeting them at a meet-up in the old Twitter building but couldn't tell you exactly which year that was. Maybe 2010 or 2011?
Yep, that team did great work. I remember having lunch at the Heroku office with the dotCloud team in 2011 or 2012 and also Solomon Hykes demoing Docker to us in our office’s basement before it launched. So much cool stuff was happening back then!
I worked with some of the folks from there, and honestly you make it sounds like tech debt is inevitable consequence haunting projects from year one.
I disagree, I think the folks just did a sloppy job of "let's bungee strap it all together" for speed, instead of more serious planning and architecturing. They self-inflicted the tech debt on them and got drowned in the debt interest super fast.
There's someone out there who built the scalable version of Heroku at another garage startup. But we never heard of them because Heroku beat them to market.
As far as the Salesforce acquisition goes, I'd be curious to see who made the decision to put Heroku into maintenance only mode.
I worked for a different part of Salesforce. I don't really feel like Salesforce did a ton of meddling in any of its bigger acquisitions other than maybe Tableau. I think the biggest missed opportunity was potentially creating a more unified experience between all of its subsidiaries. Though, it's hard to call that a failure since they're making tons of money.
It could be a case of post-founder leadership seeing that there's not a lot of room for growth and giving up. That happens a lot in the tech industry.
I worked at Pardot around the time Salesforce started using this same language in internal announcements about Pardot.
Our Pardot leadership translated for us and provided the necessary context: Pardot is being killed. The plan was to start building the product that would replace it, stop selling new contracts, rename Pardot in the meantime so the change wouldn't be as noticeable, and in a timeline of "by 10 years from now" Pardot wouldn't exist anymore.
This is Salesforce for "last call for the lifeboats, we're gonna capsize the boat."
I loved Heroku, but moved away a couple of years back. Tried 3 major "alternatives" (dokku, Render, Fly.io), and the big clouds, and the only thing that made me happy at the end was Coolify. I do keep Netlify for FE-only projects though.
That has been the case for a very long time at this point, the Salesforce acquisition was a death knell. The only stuff i have left on Heroku are zombie projects I don't care about.
As a former enterprise person, this clearly states “exiting growth cycle into low-staffing maintenance mode”; Salesforce must have bought them to kill a price-beating competitor to multi-year Salesforce PaaS contracts, same as Okta did with Auth0. Investors are typically-majority short-sighted and only care about growth-cycle revenue, so once they reached market saturation, they were ripe and duly reaped. So long, Heroku.
It saves face with investors to say you're shuttering a product to focus on the hot new thing as a strategic decision than to say you're shuttering it because your actions have led it to be unviable.
Was clear to me. If I was looking at using them, I wouldn’t. If I was already using them, I’d stop. They seem dedicated to supporting the slow extinction so it doesn’t have to be a fire drill exit, but how do you sleep at night knowing they’re playing with matches.
What's not to get? The product is being bumped down in terms of priority so they can focus on AI word salad solutions. They are waiting for enough customers to end their contracts before they discontinue the product altogether.
Holy crap is this underselling how poorly this announcement is structured. Not only does it not provide clarity, it words things in such a way that it just begs more questions. “There are no changes for now”....
In a company I used to work for, "sustaining engineering" was the team of developers that handled all of the bugs and issues reported by customers on old-but-still-technically-supported versions of the products. (The ones who worked on current versions of the products where just "engineering.")
So basically heroku will fix whatever is broken, but don't expect any new features or development.
From a business perspective, this means they will not be investing in innovation on the platform anymore. Instead, they will focus their efforts on maintaining the current operations and keeping the lights on.
I don't understand the dismissiveness. I think it's pretty clear. Keeping it going for the current users, but not trying to innovate. It might seem weird in an industry that prizes constant innovation and disruption, but this is a mature thing to do.
Or some kind of twisted brain with a "fake it till you make it! or continue to fake it" attitude. I think people doing that stuff for long enough almost have no other choice but to believe themselves, that they are doing net positive work, otherwise the cognitive dissonance would be too great.
Sustaining is used in Engineering to mean that it's now post-GA and there is no further development. The platform is not End of Life but there are no more features planned.
They meant what they wrote. Merriam-Webster's definition: "to support the weight of"
It means they're transitioning to the absolute minimum to keep it alive and nothing more. That could, in worst cases, mean firing everyone except one guy, or using AI to keep it alive.
This news from Heroku does not come as any surprise to the people that were there (as I was). Lots of moving parts and second guessing (that I won't share), but one thing I will say is: Incentives matter.
The seeds of this outcome were planted years ago when sales comp plans changed. When a sales rep can hit their target by simply converting the way an existing customer gets billed, none of them look for new business. Don't need new leads. Don't need to win competitive deals. But finding new customers and losing opportunities are the only things that signal/drive innovation. But from a budgeting perspective, why increase investment in a product that already hits/exceeds their sales targets?
Over time sales targets get met, but the product doesn't advance. By the time all existing customers that can convert have converted, the product is no longer competitive. Like bankruptcy, it comes gradually, then suddenly.
Most of my career, I've worked for startups and small/medium sized businesses, mostly using Ruby On Rails or Node based stuff for language/frameworks.
In every single company I've worked for in the past 15-20 years in this capacity the biggest focus was to exit heroku as quickly as possible. The reason: Price. You don't get to charge a premium for tooling, especially not when open source tooling exists that lets you use cloud providers without paying "the Heroku Tax".) Is Heroku still using AWS/any cloud provider? They should have rolled their own infrastructure decades ago. Alas, they got bought by a shit show of a company.
(Note: I stopped working in 2023 due to health, and much of my early career was ASP/PHP/.NET)
This is my experience, too. Heroku didn’t stay competitive price-wise with alternatives. And scaling even slightly from the basic dynos quadrupled (or whatever) the price.
Feature and experience-wise, we were always really happy with heroku.
I don’t know if this fits with the “salesforce purchased and let stagnate” narrative that nearly everyone here is pushing.
> Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.
This is a common misconception, but it's actually not true. The reality is even more bizarre.
Most of Heroku's successful years came after the acquisition, not before. Heroku was acquired extremely early in its lifecycle, and Salesforce does actually bear responsibility for investing in it and making it the powerhouse it became. Most of what people remember as the glory days of Heroku came long after the acquisition. And in fact, at the time of acquisiton, Heroku was nowhere near as competitive as a product as it later became.
It was only much later on that Salesforce began to pull the supports out from underneath it, leaving it to fall behind and become what it is today.
The narrative of "BigCo™ acquires startup, then leaves it to wither and die" is a trope because it is very commonly true, but it's actually not what happened in this particular case.
Nothing to study. A common scenario when a mega corp acquires an incredibly successful startup and then lets it die. Happens more often than not. This is why I chuckle when I see an acquisition and the founders claim "Nothing is changing. We are not going anywhere" . There may be exceptions but the moment a hugely successful company like heroku gets acquired, you know it's most likely game over. To their credit, they survived 15 years after acquisition but barely.
Often "nothing is changing" ends up being more literal than the founders realize or intend. Acquisitions by big companies tend to slow the development to a crawl as development bureaucracy takes over. When a great product is practically frozen in time it stops being great in 5-15 years as the rest of the world passes them by.
They had lightning in a bottle because they had an amazing developer experience… and gave everyone free compute and data transfer.
So much of the value was already delivered in that simple `git push heroku master` which gave you a container + load balancer + a database. The vast majority of people didn’t need more. And of those that were left that did far too few of them were willing to suddenly start paying $32/mo per dyno (you just gave me one for free! I only want one more!) or make the jump to multiple hundreds of dollars for a database.
Read any of the threads about Heroku over the years. The biggest complaint is always “it’s too expensive”. Even when a large percentage of what was on people’s bills were add-ons like databases, new relic, redis, logging, etc (i.e., not Heroku).
And the company I worked for hired a full devops team to save us like 5 grand per month on Heroku, only to end up with a much worse developer experience.
I remember feeling the same way about Slicehost back in the day after Rackspace acquired them. Loved Slicehost. Not too long after though, Digital Ocean appeared with everything I loved about Slicehost and has kept getting better ever since.
I feel like that's Fly.io now. They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities...while improving on pricing, particularly for lower traffic stuff. Love Fly.
I was working for Slicehost at the time, we were a tiny team working our butts off in a loft office in downtown St. Louis, with a few remote employees.
To my understanding there was a runway-growth problem. Could the founders raise and spend (efficiently) enough money quickly enough to keep the business viable? It would be a big gamble and the alternatives were to shut down (no way!) or sell. So they sold.
Rackspace wanted to take Matt’s and Jason’s know how (plus customer base) and go big, really big! That defocused our efforts a bit, plus there were corporate integration headaches (though not too bad). Eventually Linode, already a competitor, and later Digital Ocean filled the void.
Not sure why people love fly.io over all the other competitors so much. I myself prefer render.com, for the simplicity and predictability of their billing, and their deployment model is so intuitive
> They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities
I also love Fly, but they were missing easy managed databases (which always seemed like the main reason to use Heroku to me). And now they have them they're very expensive (even compared to Heroku). Which is a shame because their compute is very cheap.
What is there to be studied? Once a company is acquired you bounce. There is usually a two year grace period before you start feeling the pain as a customer, which should give you the time to migrate.
I've had a zombie project running on this for many years now. I used to charge people about $25 for 'lifetime', but there's only about ~10 regular users on it, so I try to keep it alive.
Decided this is the time to make the switch over to AWS. They've been rather painful with cancellation. They required all dynos be downgraded to "Eco". Fine.
But this downgrade also incurred another $5 charge which they now required me to pay to remove the credit card. It's not much, but this is shady af.
The billing language has become increasingly shady over the years. Basic is "~$0.010/hour, Max of $7 per month". Eco is "~$0.005/hour, Flat fee of $5.00/month". But in reality, you're just being charged a flat $7 or $5 either way. Eco is visually shown as the "free" option, except it's not free at all.
I'd love to just keep using Heroku and paying some flat rate; we were talking about putting some more work & funding into the project and maybe scaling it up to thousands of users. But I have no idea what Heroku can actually scale to and how much it costs. AWS etc are also not that clear on costs, but at least their specifications is a little more detailed than "Superior performance for your very large-scale, high traffic app"
Salesforce, like every large enterprise software company, has a formal (and strict) End of Life process. It starts with an announcement like this indicating End of Sales, then once the contract obligations are met, they can end support, then EoL.
There is no way they can avoid this kind of public notice.
Heroku (YC W08) was acquired by Salesforce all the way back in 2010 [0], a little over 15 years ago. A lot of people forget that, and assume the acquisition was somewhat recent.
Pretty illuminating reading the thread from 2010, it was big news at the time.
Wow, I have to admit that I have not heard anyone in the past 2 years or so to be on Heroku so it makes sense. I think they handled it quite well knowing that there most likely have been a steady decline of users.
Generally I would avoid promoting myself but in this situation I think it fits the topic. I'm co-founder of a Platform-as-a-Service based in Europe named Ploi Cloud [0]. We focus on web applications working on NodeJS and PHP but would be open to other platforms if people need it. Heroku has always been a source of inspiration to me so if you are looking for an alternative and care about it having a strong European presence please check it out. (We do have a US location too!)
Tiny nitpick but you may want to localize the pricing page, in the UK we use . as a separator instead of , - thought you were changing €1000/month for one 1 vCPU!
I used to be a fan of Heroku when I started working web apps... The deployments were so easy, but I became numb to the actual task of dealing with the complexities of a deployment, when they killed the free tier I struggled for a while... I work with Rails, and I used to bitch a lot about how hard it was to deploy an app, but in retrospective I kind of thank Salesforce for murdering their own product.
Now I deploy at my leisure with stuff like Dokku, or Kamal, directly on a 5 bucks VM on a fresh Linux box in 10 minutes flat. I wrote a nice web app that wraps around Dokku and manage the stack much in the same way I did before with Heroku... I'm much happier and I learned a ton on the way.
This literally says nothing - are we supposed to infer that they are putting the product into maintenance mode and will no longer be developing new features for it? This is a masterpiece of corporate nullspeech.
Seems strange not to just... say nothing and merely remove any mentions of an enterprise offering from the website.
All this blog post can do is make people nervous and lead to customers moving elsewhere. Revenue will drop, and further compound their desire to not invest in the platform. What's the benefit/upside in publishing such an article?
Back in the day, Heroku, Stripe, and GitHub were iconic engineering organizations. They had this culture rooted in Unix ethos with a sprinkle of modern minimalism and style that was outstanding. You could really see people give a damn in the careful design and polish of their APIs, docs, primitives, and overall output.
Now Heroku and GitHub have been gutted in spirit by their acquirers, which is such a damn shame for our field. We still have Stripe and Apple to some extent, and maybe some new places, but I personally feel a real sense of loss from Heroku and GitHub exiting their status as places you could admire.
Amongst the people opting for just plain Linux servers Linode was the big name back then. They later got supplanted by DigitalOcean, and both are of course also run into the ground by now.
Digital Ocean is run into the ground? I've been with them for a long time and recently just launched new stuff. Still a pretty nice experience and a pretty decent price.
I really like Railway, and have deployed many sites with them, but got worried by their recent funding round. At some point those investment bills are going to come due.
We've had a bunch of people migrate over from Heroku in the last couple years, especially after they killed the free tier.
The main difference from other alternatives is that you don't write any infrastructure config - you just declare what you need in your code (databases, cron jobs, pubsub, etc) and Encore handles provisioning it in your AWS/GCP account (works locally as well where local is 1:1 to your prod env). So there's no Terraform to maintain or Docker setup to mess with.
If you're looking to move off Heroku it's pretty straightforward, most folks get their app running in an afternoon. Happy to help if you run into anything: https://encore.cloud
> helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted way
> Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers
Seems contradictory or I just don't understand how they do product management.
My opinion: Heroku had its time but then stagnated heavily in keeping up with what was going on around it. With the rise of Container as a Service platforms there now were a multitude of more cost-efficient and flexible alternatives which were comparable to the service Heroku offered.
It's such a shame, because they had one of the best services out there. Being able to push via Git and end up with a running deployment was a killer feature. It may not have been the first (Elastic Beanstalk was way older but when it first came out it was Java only iirc, ick) but it was incredibly popular.
Seeing them now chasing AI as a "me too" after being acquired by Salesforce just shows that huge companies will acquire something then sit on it for years and let it rot.
Yup, their Git Push Deployment was really a killer concept and a huge gateway for people just writing good apps not needing to care about infra and still being able to get a production-ready setup.
Disclaimer: Founder of northflank.com here so very clearly biased. But if you’re looking for an alternative, reach out. If not, all good.
Heroku pioneered what a PaaS could be, alongside Cloud Foundry and others, so I’m genuinely sad to see it go down like this.
We built Northflank because we saw enterprises wanting to deploy workloads in their own VPC with Heroku-level simplicity. Over the past 5 years, our mission has been solving the graduation problem where companies outgrow their PaaS and have to eventually migrate.
Northflank runs in your VPC (AWS/GCP/Azure/OCI) with the same git-push experience. We have customers ranging from small startups to governments and public companies who would've otherwise built their own internal developer platform. They either use Northflank as-is in their own cloud or use our API to build their IDP on top of it.
Most common use cases are preview environments and production workloads. Happy to answer questions and throw in some credits if you're evaluating alternatives.
I've been incredibly happy with Northflank since moving over a few years ago after Heroku got unreliable. Felt like an upgrade from Heroku and the support and reliability have been great.
Crunchy Bridge will help you migrate. They did a great job for us. We had a minute or so of downtime to let the read replica catch up and cut across. The team knows Heroku well, and some of them built it. (No affiliation, just a happy customer.)
For those not as well-versed in corporate PR....Salesforce are going to do just the bare minimum to keep the service going until the revenue dries up (or some > 0 $$ threshold where it just doesn't financially make sense to keep it running).
Pour one out for Heroku as they were truly a revelation back in the day and one of the most magical experiences ever on first run.
I remember reading The Twelve-Factor App [1] from the Heroku folks back in the day, and was blown away by how well they understood the problem. Not only that but they had great taste.
I moved things to Render a while back, and then to my own Hetzner server (I built kind of an open source Vercel clone for that reason [2]).
I'm not quite sure any of these platforms are going to be relevant 5 years from now when you can summon your own DevOps AI agent. At the very least it's going to be incredibly difficult to justify the premium on top of AWS.
Didn't you read the last line of the announcement? They have enterprise AI dollars to chase! Salesforce wants some of them billions. Gotta make up for the 42% their stock price has dipped in the last 12 months.
This blog post is peak comedy. Heroku is half abandoned, I expected the post to be something like "we're sunsetting Heroku" before clicking and what we get instead is about AI.
Why don't they just spin off the company or sell it? Heroku is a well-established brand (despite Salesforce's best efforts) and there are still plenty of customers and hobbyists relying on it today. Its value to the parent company is clearly 0. Give it away and let someone else have a run at it. Keep an ownership stake in case someone does manage to turn it around. Literally zero downside in it.
It supports all the quality of life features like opening a shell via a cli, which I found was one of my favorite parts of Heroku (canine run —myproject /bin/bash)
Been fortunate enough to get a sponsorship from the Portainer folks, which allows me to maintain and develop full time!
I have moved all Rails apps away from Heroku in the last years. It was great 10 years ago, but then became expensive, full of bugs and with terrible support. All our Rails apps (Pushpad, Newsletter.page, etc) are running on Cuber gem + DigitalOcean Kubernetes... In the last years we achieved 100% uptime (five nines), zero subtle bugs and huge cost savings.
They shot themselves in the foot a long time ago and never recovered from that, I guess. I remember back in 2012-13 they made some changes that ghosted their primary ICP - indie devs and startup owners. They made the platform incredibly expensive to run. A lot of us panicked and had to move to other vendors - I in particular chose Google's AppEngine which was hugely under-appreciated at the time and eventually became a GCP consultant. All thanks to Heroku. Some of my other friends switched to Engine Yard (for rails) and the rest just went on to learn how to self host stuff onto EC2 instances. Heroku knowingly or unknowingly made a lot of careers of the present day engineers in AWS and GCP (including myself). So, I am a bit sad to see them in such a situation if I'm being honest.
Yes, I know they had one truly horrible year. But, they righted the ship.
I worked for a company that ran 10bn in revenue, with thousands of users, and Heroku just hummed along. It ran our business.
The benefit to us was the lack of problems that occurred at deploy time. Heroku's orchestration of removing old dynos, adding new dynos, and their network control was spectacular. DB's were updated, or patched, without downtime. It truly was impressive.
We moved to a combination of AWS and on-prem, and the overhead of providing what Heroku previously provided is quite large.
The original Heroku often gets praised here. Rightfully so. It inspired many. We started our PHP PaaS [0] 13 years, ago. Most of the others from that area are long gone. PagodaBox, CloudControl, PhpFog …
Heroku's git-push-to-deploy was magic in 2012. Sad to see it go out like this.
I've been building Frost https://github.com/elitan/frost, open source and self-hosted. Same idea, git push to deploy, automatic SSL, custom domains, but on your own VPS. Docker-native, no vendor lock-in, no pricing surprises.
The angle that's a bit different: it's designed for AI coding agents. Simple config they write correctly, clear errors, no K8s complexity to hallucinate. You give your agent the install URL and it sets up the whole server.
It's too late. I loved Heroku, but having 5+ major outages in a single year was unacceptable. The support was abysmal, and transparency was non-existent. After the Salesforce acquisition, we watched the company culture shift, getting worse and worse over the years. We were forced to migrate to AWS. Even though we were high-spend customers, the trust is gone. This post is a nice gesture of transparency, but it's way too fluffy for my taste. Heroku is dead to me, there’s no coming back from this.
I think it's fair to say that, if not for Heroku, I would not have had a career in software. I learned how to code web apps from books, and had a breakthrough when I discovered Rails (in 2009 I think?). But for the life of me I did not understand how to deploy a Rails app.
I bashed my head against that wall for a while, then found Heroku, and it just worked. That let me ship a product when I barely knew what I was doing, which let me keep building and learning, until eventually I didn't need Heroku anymore. But I still always liked it, because I never enjoyed thinking about infrastructure.
I used Heroku extensively before AWS reached its current level of maturity. Heroku made it incredibly easy to create cool apps. When Salesforce acquired it, and knowing a lot about Salesforce, I expected tight integration to address use cases where Apex is too limited (Apex being Salesforce's native language). There were (and still are) numerous such use cases. Unfortunately, this never materialized, and Salesforce gradually shifted away from a dev-first platform toward click-based config and heavy reliance on middleware for all kind of integrations.
It's been a butchered acquisition and missed opportunities along the way. And now it ends up just like Microsoft's Skype.
I've been using DigitalOcean App Platform for a while now. It's not a 1:1 Heroku replacement, but the git-based deploys, managed DBs, and ability to move to Droplets later without a big migration have worked very well for me.
Digital Ocean App Platform is great. We switched to it from Heroku in 2021. It had some growing pains to start, but has been rock solid since. I can only think of 1 downtime incident that was their fault. They continue to improve the platform too, and are VERY responsive to requests.
I think the "Heroku story" was less about technical limitations, but everything except technical limitations. More than a decade ago, I started learning and building on Heroku and hosted all my side projects and client projects on Heroku. Then when they got acquired, I was naive; then they removed their free tier and that broke my trust.
I primarily worked on PoC/MVP development where I worked to bring ideas to something barely tangible. And Heroku's free tier decisions meant it was a barrier for developers to develop on their platform. Pay first, develop later. It was like the rest of the industry.
After that, I just exited containerized platform-based application development entirely because convenience and having that weird developer philosophy "I must not pay because I can find a way" was less of a reason than sustainability. For me, containerized application platforms was about POC and MVP. If there was growth then me or the client can pay for the convenience. But if there was nothing, pretty easy to delete the project.
Then I committed to replicating the Heroku experience with a small VPS, backing up via rsync, and moving from PostgreSQL to SQLite. I can even charge clients for hosting (+ maintenance) on my VPS.
I do not know, to me containerized application platforms are limited by commercial challenges rather than technical ones. I see tons of containerised application platforms, but the trust has eroded because of a single company.
I have changed my development facility and laid the groundwork to not commit to these platforms. Sustainability over convenience.
Sure, I understand and respect folks at fly.io, render, railway, and even the open source variants of these companies (Caddy etc.). But there is no sustainability guarantee for these platforms. It was not just about the "free tier", to me it transcends to a philosophical point about building applications in general. Sure, there could be a new era with AI making MVP/PoC development easy through hosting in containerised applications, but that is a tangent point.
If Heroku were doing everything right, there would not be a dozen application platforms out there, but they made mistakes and, in my opinion, made the entire containerised application platform model untrustworthy.
Just about to set up a new app to deploy to Heroku, but this does not seem promising. Render seems like the next logical move, but curious where others are looking for alternatives.
I moved to render years ago and have been very happy with the decision. It feels like heroku, if it never got acquired by salesforce and kept improving.
yes,, render feels like the most natural next step right now (similar mental model). Still kind of nostalgic about Heroku, had really good times with it.
It's nice that they would admit this, but it seems a little strange that they would. Why not just never add new features and let people figure it out on their own? A big statement like this seems more like implicitly killing the platform, which is what they say they aren't doing.
I guess the best way to interpret this is that they are killing the platform over time but they don't want to kill it right now since money is still coming in and it would make too many customers mad.
This is such a weird press release that totally obscures what it's trying to say. Just use clear and concise language and treat your customers like adults.
The simplicity it brought at the time to hand-jammed and complex processes was nothing short of exemplary. They set the bar on how streamlined application deployment can be and a great UI to go along with it.
Heroku may die but the ideas Heroku executed on and brought to life will continue to prosper... so long Heroku!
Watching their public roadmap to see what happens. Right now, it looks about the same as it has for a while: useful new features and expected maintenance, moving along at a reasonable if not blistering clip.
It sounds like there were pretty broad layoffs which impacted a lot more than just a focus on enterprise contracts. It wasn't "just" a few enterprise sales people. Engineering may have indeed been the least impacted, but this sounds like biggest round of layoffs to hit Heroku since its inception, not just some right sizing from over hiring.
One of the worst "engineers" I've suffered working with (spent all day on Slack virtue signaling, put on a PIP) went to Heroku. A comment I made was "only a sinking ship would take them/her." This update from Heroku does not surprise me.
All I’m going to say is if your press release is titled “an update on heroku” instead if something exciting it means you aren’t delivering happy news that is good for the user.
I bet I’m right. Haven’t read the article or comments, I’m just posting this comment to see if I’m proven right or wrong.
For us, the reason is we're primarily a Salesforce company and rely on the Heroku Connect product to facilitate bidirectional syncing between Salesforce and PostgreSQL (which also requires Heroku PG).
One of the biggest benefits to this product -- aside from the syncing mechanism -- is a bypass of Salesforce's extremely limiting (and expensive) API limits.
It really surprises me there isn’t a modern heroku alternative that supports the same.. things.
Like build pipelines, routing included, multiple worker types.
AWS is way less batteries included. And none of the competitors seems to offer the same kind of service, last time I looked.
Thanks for the reply!
Most of these (also on the alternativeto) are self-hosted, which is different from having heroku do it. Also most only support webservers, while the majority of our servers aren't web..
My understanding is that Heroku is just an AWS reseller. I don't know if there's a lot of value in a PaaS piggy-backing on another PaaS anymore. Especially for Salesforce.
Heroku does lots of revenue, even if they pay AWS. I do think it would be worth.. quite a bit. And I would be very happy if a better steward would buy it.
It would be impossible to buy a company as a steward. We worked with them. In the early 2020s, their teams were as lazy as IBM boomers. Happy to hop on a call, but let's do an rain check or whatever and come back to you after 17 weeks to say no in an email CCed with 42 people playing hot potato between commercial people who try their best to sound technical. You need a mind map to know which person you were talking to and who introduced you to them.
My money is on holding companies like IAC buying the brand first through financial engineering and restructuring finances initially. They would load it up with debt like they did with the sporting goods store in Sopranos.
Afterward, they would sell it to a Euro-based caretaking company like Bending Spoons, with a focus on maintenance engineering rather than innovation engineering.
TIL Salesforce acquires Heroku in 2011, way before I was even a CS graduate. I remember enjoying using the free tier of Heroku for my school projects but also the pain of dyno cold starts.
For a little context. Salesforce changed their enterprise structure, effectively doubling their prices and my guess is many of their larger customers fled the platform. The enterprise pricing organized dynos into blocks and without notice they doubled the minimum block unit you could have. As a result, you ended up paying for dynos you weren't even using because they were now rounding up, sometimes by thousands of dollars worth of dyno blocks. So if you thought Heroku was expensive before, now it just didn't make any financial sense at all. For the other PaaS out there: don't do this.
Spinning up temporary VMs/stateful machines is going to be super valuable in the next year or 2. Heroku not jumping on this just shows the state of Salesforce. Absolutely inept. I foresee slack going down a similar path of enshittification
chatgpt translation: Heroku isn’t shutting down, but they’re basically done building new stuff.
For those who want to move and potentially save $ in process, here is a nice cost comparison: https://infraslash.com/costs/
I originally saw this on Twitter/X, the wording here is very confusing. The tl;dr version is simply they are going to be KTLO -keep the lights on- mode.
>> “ we want to be clear about what this means for customers.”
Nope, not clear.
This is a clear message “ the heroku product is cancelled but will not be shut down, will continue to operate exactly as before but no new features will be added.”
In 2018, I had to transition my org at the time from Heroku to AWS (with the org lacking any AWS experience outside of myself).
We ended up with a “Heroku-like” experience. Push to GitHub. Action triggers job. Job packages and deploys. À la carte yaml config for extras like databases and ALBs. It worked pretty well. It was an in house solution to an in house problem.
As somebody whose first day working at Heroku was the day this acquisition closed, I think it’s mostly a misconception to blame Salesforce for Heroku’s stagnation and eventual irrelevance. Salesforce gave Heroku a ton of funding to build out a vision that was way ahead of its time. Docker didn’t even come out until 2013, AWS didn’t even have multiple regions when it was built. They mostly served as an investor and left us alone to do our thing, or so it seemed those first couple years.
The launch of the multi language Cedar runtime in 2011 led to incredible growth and by 2012 we were drowning in tech debt and scaling challenges. Despite more than tripling our headcount in that first year (~20 to 74) we could not keep up.
Mid 2012 was especially bad as we were severely impacted by two us-east-1 outages just 2 weeks apart. To the extent it wasn’t already, reliability and paying down tech debt became the main focus and I think we went about 18 months between major user-facing platform launches (Europe region and eventually larger sized dynos being the biggest things we eventually shipped after that drought). The organization lost its ability to ship significant changes or maybe never really had that ability at scale.
That time coincided with the founders taking a step back, leaving a loss of leadership and vision that was filled by people more concerned with process than results. I left in 2014 and at that time it already seemed clear to me that the product was basically stalled.
I’m not sure how much of this could have been done better even in hindsight. In theory Salesforce could have taken a more hands on approach early on but I don’t think that could have ended better. They were so far from profitability in late 2010 that they could not stay independent without raising more funding. The venture market in ~2010 was much smaller than a few years later—tiny rounds and low valuations. Had the company spent its pre-acquisition engineering cycles building for scalability & reliability at the expense of product velocity they probably would have never gotten successful.
Even still, it was the most amazing professional experience of my career, full of brilliant and passionate people, and it’s sad to see it end this way.
It remains the greatest engineering team I've ever seen or had the pleasure to be a part of. I was only there from early 2011 to mid 2012 but what I took with me changed me as an engineer. The shear brilliance of the ideas and approaches...I was blessed to witness it. I don't think I can overstate it, though many will think this is all hyperbole. I didn't always agree with the decisions made and I was definitely there when the product stagnation started, but we worked hard to reduce tech debt, build better infrastructure, and improve... but man, the battles we fought. Many fond memories, including the single greatest engineering mistake I've ever seen made, one that I still think about until this day (but will never post in a public forum :)).
It was a pleasure working with you bgentry!
I'm just going to chime in here and say thank you, there still really isn't in my mind a comparable offering to heroku's git push and go straight to a reasonable production
I honestly find it a bit nuts, there's offerings that come close, but using them I still get the impression that they've just not put in the time really refining that user interface, so I just wanted to say thank you for the work you and the GP did, it was incredibly helpful and I'm happy to say helped me launch and test a few product offerings as well as some fun ideas
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> by 2012 we were drowning in tech debt and scaling challenges.
> the greatest engineering team I've ever seen
How do these two things reconcile in your opinion? In my view , doing something quickly is the easy part , good engineering is only needed exactly when you want things to be maintainable and scalable, so the assertions above don’t really make much sense to me.
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Tell us more about some of these ideas and approaches that changed you as an engineer! We'd love to hear!
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Absolutely agree and likewise buddy :)
Thanks for sharing your story. Those early days of using Heroku were really enjoyable for me. It felt so promising and simple. I remember explaining the concept to a lot of different people who didn't believe that the deployment model could be that simple and accessible until I showed them.
Then life went on, I bounced around in my career, and forgot about Heroku. Years later I actually suggested it for someone to use for a simple project once and I could practically feel the other developers in the room losing respect for me for even mentioning it. I hadn't looked at it for so long that I didn't realize it had fallen out of favor.
> That time coincided with the founders taking a step back, leaving a loss of leadership and vision that was filled by people more concerned with process than results
This feels all too familiar. All of my enjoyable startup experiences have ended this way: The fast growing, successful startup starts attracting people who look like they should be valuable assets to the company, but they're more interested in things like policies, processes, meetings, and making the status reports look nice than actually shipping and building.
The cancer of corporations: bureaucracy.
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Having been on a bigco team that underwent the same sort of headcount growth in a very short time I have to imagine that "more than tripling our headcount in that first year" was likely more a driver of the inability to keep up than a solution. That's not a knock on the talents of anyone hired; it's just exceedingly difficult to simultaneously grow a team that fast and maintain any kind of velocity regardless of the complexity of the problems you're trying to tackle. The culture and knowledge that enabled the previous team's velocity just gets completely diluted.
Thanks for a capsule tour through Heroku!
FWIW, the team that eventually created "Docker" was working at the same time on dotCloud as a direct Heroku competitor. I remember meeting them at a meet-up in the old Twitter building but couldn't tell you exactly which year that was. Maybe 2010 or 2011?
Yep, that team did great work. I remember having lunch at the Heroku office with the dotCloud team in 2011 or 2012 and also Solomon Hykes demoing Docker to us in our office’s basement before it launched. So much cool stuff was happening back then!
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> people more concerned with process than results
Sounds like something Steve Jobs observed at apple https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE?si=QOCBUqcUPWu8AsAX
Link with spyware removed: https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE
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I worked with some of the folks from there, and honestly you make it sounds like tech debt is inevitable consequence haunting projects from year one.
I disagree, I think the folks just did a sloppy job of "let's bungee strap it all together" for speed, instead of more serious planning and architecturing. They self-inflicted the tech debt on them and got drowned in the debt interest super fast.
There's someone out there who built the scalable version of Heroku at another garage startup. But we never heard of them because Heroku beat them to market.
Sure, but that bungee strapped slop got them pretty damn far
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As far as the Salesforce acquisition goes, I'd be curious to see who made the decision to put Heroku into maintenance only mode.
I worked for a different part of Salesforce. I don't really feel like Salesforce did a ton of meddling in any of its bigger acquisitions other than maybe Tableau. I think the biggest missed opportunity was potentially creating a more unified experience between all of its subsidiaries. Though, it's hard to call that a failure since they're making tons of money.
It could be a case of post-founder leadership seeing that there's not a lot of room for growth and giving up. That happens a lot in the tech industry.
"We know changes like this can raise questions, and we want to be clear about what this means for customers."
Proceeds to not be clear about what this means for customers.
I worked at Pardot around the time Salesforce started using this same language in internal announcements about Pardot.
Our Pardot leadership translated for us and provided the necessary context: Pardot is being killed. The plan was to start building the product that would replace it, stop selling new contracts, rename Pardot in the meantime so the change wouldn't be as noticeable, and in a timeline of "by 10 years from now" Pardot wouldn't exist anymore.
This is Salesforce for "last call for the lifeboats, we're gonna capsize the boat."
If any Heroku customer is reading this and not immediately going "we need to move off Heroku ASAP" all future problems are their own fault.
I loved Heroku, but moved away a couple of years back. Tried 3 major "alternatives" (dokku, Render, Fly.io), and the big clouds, and the only thing that made me happy at the end was Coolify. I do keep Netlify for FE-only projects though.
I get what you're saying but the onus is (and should) definitely be on the company to inform customers - and there's many laws to that effect.
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That has been the case for a very long time at this point, the Salesforce acquisition was a death knell. The only stuff i have left on Heroku are zombie projects I don't care about.
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Honestly if you're still using Heroku today it's because you haven't really caught up with what's going on around you
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"sustaining engineering model"
ie, life support.. bit rot will set in, they are dead.
It means: go elsewhere, they're dead.
What's the best alternative?
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As a former enterprise person, this clearly states “exiting growth cycle into low-staffing maintenance mode”; Salesforce must have bought them to kill a price-beating competitor to multi-year Salesforce PaaS contracts, same as Okta did with Auth0. Investors are typically-majority short-sighted and only care about growth-cycle revenue, so once they reached market saturation, they were ripe and duly reaped. So long, Heroku.
You are saying the plan was to buy a "price-beating competitor", invest in them for 16 years, and then finally pull the rug out now?
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Absolutely none of this is true. What was the PaaS Heroku was apparently beating at the time of the acquisition?
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> including helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted way.
Baffling
It saves face with investors to say you're shuttering a product to focus on the hot new thing as a strategic decision than to say you're shuttering it because your actions have led it to be unviable.
Reminds me of when blockchain was in literally everything. So the wheel turns.
Was clear to me. If I was looking at using them, I wouldn’t. If I was already using them, I’d stop. They seem dedicated to supporting the slow extinction so it doesn’t have to be a fire drill exit, but how do you sleep at night knowing they’re playing with matches.
What's not to get? The product is being bumped down in terms of priority so they can focus on AI word salad solutions. They are waiting for enough customers to end their contracts before they discontinue the product altogether.
Holy crap is this underselling how poorly this announcement is structured. Not only does it not provide clarity, it words things in such a way that it just begs more questions. “There are no changes for now”....
Oh, they're very clear, just not explicit.
"transitioning to a sustaining engineering model". I don't care what anyone says, it takes real talent to come up with lines like this.
In a company I used to work for, "sustaining engineering" was the team of developers that handled all of the bugs and issues reported by customers on old-but-still-technically-supported versions of the products. (The ones who worked on current versions of the products where just "engineering.")
So basically heroku will fix whatever is broken, but don't expect any new features or development.
From a business perspective, this means they will not be investing in innovation on the platform anymore. Instead, they will focus their efforts on maintaining the current operations and keeping the lights on.
Heroku has been running in this mode for a long time. The only difference is they made it official.
From a business perspective the have brought it out to the field with a shotgun.
As opposed to the relentless innovation they have demonstrated in the past 5+ years? /s
I don't understand the dismissiveness. I think it's pretty clear. Keeping it going for the current users, but not trying to innovate. It might seem weird in an industry that prizes constant innovation and disruption, but this is a mature thing to do.
Could have just said we will Keep the Lights on
This reads more like "we won't deliberately turn the lights off… but they're probably gonna break on their own eventually".
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Or some kind of twisted brain with a "fake it till you make it! or continue to fake it" attitude. I think people doing that stuff for long enough almost have no other choice but to believe themselves, that they are doing net positive work, otherwise the cognitive dissonance would be too great.
I am sure that the guy whose name is on the Post didn't even write this himself. Probably some corporate writer using LLM :).
I would love to see the prompt that led to that word salad
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We've been optimizing for decades to engineer the bullshit-generating super-soldiers required to craft modern PR statements.
Surely it's a typo and they meant "sustainable"?
Otherwise IMO such an odd word choice. Definition:
>> providing physical or mental strength or support
Sustaining is used in Engineering to mean that it's now post-GA and there is no further development. The platform is not End of Life but there are no more features planned.
They meant what they wrote. Merriam-Webster's definition: "to support the weight of"
It means they're transitioning to the absolute minimum to keep it alive and nothing more. That could, in worst cases, mean firing everyone except one guy, or using AI to keep it alive.
Sustaining as in sustaining their shareholders.
It's what CA/Broadcom does to literally every software product they own.
It's like PBS, they are going to beg for your money now with a sustaining engineering membership
This news from Heroku does not come as any surprise to the people that were there (as I was). Lots of moving parts and second guessing (that I won't share), but one thing I will say is: Incentives matter.
The seeds of this outcome were planted years ago when sales comp plans changed. When a sales rep can hit their target by simply converting the way an existing customer gets billed, none of them look for new business. Don't need new leads. Don't need to win competitive deals. But finding new customers and losing opportunities are the only things that signal/drive innovation. But from a budgeting perspective, why increase investment in a product that already hits/exceeds their sales targets?
Over time sales targets get met, but the product doesn't advance. By the time all existing customers that can convert have converted, the product is no longer competitive. Like bankruptcy, it comes gradually, then suddenly.
Most of my career, I've worked for startups and small/medium sized businesses, mostly using Ruby On Rails or Node based stuff for language/frameworks.
In every single company I've worked for in the past 15-20 years in this capacity the biggest focus was to exit heroku as quickly as possible. The reason: Price. You don't get to charge a premium for tooling, especially not when open source tooling exists that lets you use cloud providers without paying "the Heroku Tax".) Is Heroku still using AWS/any cloud provider? They should have rolled their own infrastructure decades ago. Alas, they got bought by a shit show of a company.
(Note: I stopped working in 2023 due to health, and much of my early career was ASP/PHP/.NET)
This is my experience, too. Heroku didn’t stay competitive price-wise with alternatives. And scaling even slightly from the basic dynos quadrupled (or whatever) the price.
Feature and experience-wise, we were always really happy with heroku.
I don’t know if this fits with the “salesforce purchased and let stagnate” narrative that nearly everyone here is pushing.
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The downfall of Heroku should be studied, they had lightning in a bottle and blew it.
Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.
> Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.
This is a common misconception, but it's actually not true. The reality is even more bizarre.
Most of Heroku's successful years came after the acquisition, not before. Heroku was acquired extremely early in its lifecycle, and Salesforce does actually bear responsibility for investing in it and making it the powerhouse it became. Most of what people remember as the glory days of Heroku came long after the acquisition. And in fact, at the time of acquisiton, Heroku was nowhere near as competitive as a product as it later became.
It was only much later on that Salesforce began to pull the supports out from underneath it, leaving it to fall behind and become what it is today.
The narrative of "BigCo™ acquires startup, then leaves it to wither and die" is a trope because it is very commonly true, but it's actually not what happened in this particular case.
Nothing to study. A common scenario when a mega corp acquires an incredibly successful startup and then lets it die. Happens more often than not. This is why I chuckle when I see an acquisition and the founders claim "Nothing is changing. We are not going anywhere" . There may be exceptions but the moment a hugely successful company like heroku gets acquired, you know it's most likely game over. To their credit, they survived 15 years after acquisition but barely.
Often "nothing is changing" ends up being more literal than the founders realize or intend. Acquisitions by big companies tend to slow the development to a crawl as development bureaucracy takes over. When a great product is practically frozen in time it stops being great in 5-15 years as the rest of the world passes them by.
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Heroku was bought by salesforce when it was only 3 years old.
They had lightning in a bottle because they had an amazing developer experience… and gave everyone free compute and data transfer.
So much of the value was already delivered in that simple `git push heroku master` which gave you a container + load balancer + a database. The vast majority of people didn’t need more. And of those that were left that did far too few of them were willing to suddenly start paying $32/mo per dyno (you just gave me one for free! I only want one more!) or make the jump to multiple hundreds of dollars for a database.
Read any of the threads about Heroku over the years. The biggest complaint is always “it’s too expensive”. Even when a large percentage of what was on people’s bills were add-ons like databases, new relic, redis, logging, etc (i.e., not Heroku).
And the company I worked for hired a full devops team to save us like 5 grand per month on Heroku, only to end up with a much worse developer experience.
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Often seems like there's no defeat that Benioff can't steal from the jaws of Victory.
I remember feeling the same way about Slicehost back in the day after Rackspace acquired them. Loved Slicehost. Not too long after though, Digital Ocean appeared with everything I loved about Slicehost and has kept getting better ever since.
I feel like that's Fly.io now. They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities...while improving on pricing, particularly for lower traffic stuff. Love Fly.
I was working for Slicehost at the time, we were a tiny team working our butts off in a loft office in downtown St. Louis, with a few remote employees.
To my understanding there was a runway-growth problem. Could the founders raise and spend (efficiently) enough money quickly enough to keep the business viable? It would be a big gamble and the alternatives were to shut down (no way!) or sell. So they sold.
Rackspace wanted to take Matt’s and Jason’s know how (plus customer base) and go big, really big! That defocused our efforts a bit, plus there were corporate integration headaches (though not too bad). Eventually Linode, already a competitor, and later Digital Ocean filled the void.
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Not sure why people love fly.io over all the other competitors so much. I myself prefer render.com, for the simplicity and predictability of their billing, and their deployment model is so intuitive
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> They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities
I also love Fly, but they were missing easy managed databases (which always seemed like the main reason to use Heroku to me). And now they have them they're very expensive (even compared to Heroku). Which is a shame because their compute is very cheap.
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What is there to be studied? Once a company is acquired you bounce. There is usually a two year grace period before you start feeling the pain as a customer, which should give you the time to migrate.
Salesforce acquired Heroku 15 years ago.
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It's just a case of an innovative product that got commodified over time. Not much you can do about that.
Huh? I'm no fan of Salesforce, but they bought Heroku in 2010. That's not "just letting it die."
Downfall? The founders and VCs made tens of millions of dollars. That’s the success condition for them.
It is a typical acquisition by the book, always goes the same way after three to five years.
It was 16 years...
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I've had a zombie project running on this for many years now. I used to charge people about $25 for 'lifetime', but there's only about ~10 regular users on it, so I try to keep it alive.
Decided this is the time to make the switch over to AWS. They've been rather painful with cancellation. They required all dynos be downgraded to "Eco". Fine.
But this downgrade also incurred another $5 charge which they now required me to pay to remove the credit card. It's not much, but this is shady af.
The billing language has become increasingly shady over the years. Basic is "~$0.010/hour, Max of $7 per month". Eco is "~$0.005/hour, Flat fee of $5.00/month". But in reality, you're just being charged a flat $7 or $5 either way. Eco is visually shown as the "free" option, except it's not free at all.
I'd love to just keep using Heroku and paying some flat rate; we were talking about putting some more work & funding into the project and maybe scaling it up to thousands of users. But I have no idea what Heroku can actually scale to and how much it costs. AWS etc are also not that clear on costs, but at least their specifications is a little more detailed than "Superior performance for your very large-scale, high traffic app"
It took me several reads to distill their post to this one sentence: "Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers"
I'd be glad to stand corrected but AFAICT this is the only sentence that describes the change. All other say "nothing is changing in [some area]".
Trying to downplay something to that extent immediately raises suspicious that this something (the change) is much more profound that what is stated.
Salesforce, like every large enterprise software company, has a formal (and strict) End of Life process. It starts with an announcement like this indicating End of Sales, then once the contract obligations are met, they can end support, then EoL.
There is no way they can avoid this kind of public notice.
This may be the worst piece of corporate communication that I've ever seen.
I found myself wondering where the rest of it went.
The balance sheet write-off.
Heroku (YC W08) was acquired by Salesforce all the way back in 2010 [0], a little over 15 years ago. A lot of people forget that, and assume the acquisition was somewhat recent.
Pretty illuminating reading the thread from 2010, it was big news at the time.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1982489
This is surprising to me. I actively used Heroku during the early to mid 2010s. I do not remember ever seeing the Salesforce logo there much later.
Salesforce mostly left Heroku to do its own thing for a long time. Since that changed, dumpster fire.
Wow, I have to admit that I have not heard anyone in the past 2 years or so to be on Heroku so it makes sense. I think they handled it quite well knowing that there most likely have been a steady decline of users.
Generally I would avoid promoting myself but in this situation I think it fits the topic. I'm co-founder of a Platform-as-a-Service based in Europe named Ploi Cloud [0]. We focus on web applications working on NodeJS and PHP but would be open to other platforms if people need it. Heroku has always been a source of inspiration to me so if you are looking for an alternative and care about it having a strong European presence please check it out. (We do have a US location too!)
0: https://ploi.cloud
Tiny nitpick but you may want to localize the pricing page, in the UK we use . as a separator instead of , - thought you were changing €1000/month for one 1 vCPU!
Appreciate the suggestion, thank you! Definitely not charging that much :-)
is this linked with Ploi.io?
Separate companies but Dennis (founder of Ploi.io) is the other co-founder, so indirectly linked. :)
I used to be a fan of Heroku when I started working web apps... The deployments were so easy, but I became numb to the actual task of dealing with the complexities of a deployment, when they killed the free tier I struggled for a while... I work with Rails, and I used to bitch a lot about how hard it was to deploy an app, but in retrospective I kind of thank Salesforce for murdering their own product.
Now I deploy at my leisure with stuff like Dokku, or Kamal, directly on a 5 bucks VM on a fresh Linux box in 10 minutes flat. I wrote a nice web app that wraps around Dokku and manage the stack much in the same way I did before with Heroku... I'm much happier and I learned a ton on the way.
I've been using Coolify for deploying my webapps for about 3 years, it has a good web UI.
This literally says nothing - are we supposed to infer that they are putting the product into maintenance mode and will no longer be developing new features for it? This is a masterpiece of corporate nullspeech.
> with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational excellence rather than introducing new features
it sounds pretty clear that it's in maintenance mode
It’s clear enough but they aren’t going out of their way to make it obvious. It’s definitely fluffed up / corporately sanitized.
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Seems strange not to just... say nothing and merely remove any mentions of an enterprise offering from the website.
All this blog post can do is make people nervous and lead to customers moving elsewhere. Revenue will drop, and further compound their desire to not invest in the platform. What's the benefit/upside in publishing such an article?
> lead to customers moving elsewhere
Since they're no longer accepting new enterprise clients, maybe this is intentional.
Then why mince words, and why accept new non-enterprise clients - just be clear it's maintenance-only and existing customer-only.
I think they’d be happy if all the customers moved on. They just don’t want to upset enterprise customers.
This is a sad day. I used heroku for years (in the past).
A few alternatives to consider
- https://render.com/ - this is very close to heroku
- https://coolify.io/ - My personal favorite. It's slightly more involved, but you can run it on any hardware like hetzner and save a boatload.
How does render compare to fly.io? Does anyone has experience running production rails apps on these?
https://render.com/articles/render-vs-fly-io
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https://railway.com is another good one
Back in the day, Heroku, Stripe, and GitHub were iconic engineering organizations. They had this culture rooted in Unix ethos with a sprinkle of modern minimalism and style that was outstanding. You could really see people give a damn in the careful design and polish of their APIs, docs, primitives, and overall output.
Now Heroku and GitHub have been gutted in spirit by their acquirers, which is such a damn shame for our field. We still have Stripe and Apple to some extent, and maybe some new places, but I personally feel a real sense of loss from Heroku and GitHub exiting their status as places you could admire.
Amongst the people opting for just plain Linux servers Linode was the big name back then. They later got supplanted by DigitalOcean, and both are of course also run into the ground by now.
Digital Ocean is run into the ground? I've been with them for a long time and recently just launched new stuff. Still a pretty nice experience and a pretty decent price.
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The corporate speak is crazy. I think the update boils down to this sentence:
> Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers
Yeah I agree. I saw someone say that they were not in KTLO mode, but this seems pretty bad, especially considering it happening at Salesforce.
Railway is the spiritual successor. Fly is great too. I highly recommend both.
I really like Railway, and have deployed many sites with them, but got worried by their recent funding round. At some point those investment bills are going to come due.
What is the concern exactly? (Product/platform enshittification?)
I work at Encore so I'm biased.
We've had a bunch of people migrate over from Heroku in the last couple years, especially after they killed the free tier.
The main difference from other alternatives is that you don't write any infrastructure config - you just declare what you need in your code (databases, cron jobs, pubsub, etc) and Encore handles provisioning it in your AWS/GCP account (works locally as well where local is 1:1 to your prod env). So there's no Terraform to maintain or Docker setup to mess with.
If you're looking to move off Heroku it's pretty straightforward, most folks get their app running in an afternoon. Happy to help if you run into anything: https://encore.cloud
> helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted way
> Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers
Seems contradictory or I just don't understand how they do product management.
My opinion: Heroku had its time but then stagnated heavily in keeping up with what was going on around it. With the rise of Container as a Service platforms there now were a multitude of more cost-efficient and flexible alternatives which were comparable to the service Heroku offered.
It's such a shame, because they had one of the best services out there. Being able to push via Git and end up with a running deployment was a killer feature. It may not have been the first (Elastic Beanstalk was way older but when it first came out it was Java only iirc, ick) but it was incredibly popular.
Seeing them now chasing AI as a "me too" after being acquired by Salesforce just shows that huge companies will acquire something then sit on it for years and let it rot.
Yup, their Git Push Deployment was really a killer concept and a huge gateway for people just writing good apps not needing to care about infra and still being able to get a production-ready setup.
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Translation: We're going to reassign the engineers into Salesforce AI.
I thought if you were all in on AI you wouldn’t need engineers - just swarms of agents doing everything. :)
Huh, so that's what they mean when using the word "we". "We" is not Heroku, it's Salesforce.
Disclaimer: Founder of northflank.com here so very clearly biased. But if you’re looking for an alternative, reach out. If not, all good.
Heroku pioneered what a PaaS could be, alongside Cloud Foundry and others, so I’m genuinely sad to see it go down like this.
We built Northflank because we saw enterprises wanting to deploy workloads in their own VPC with Heroku-level simplicity. Over the past 5 years, our mission has been solving the graduation problem where companies outgrow their PaaS and have to eventually migrate.
Northflank runs in your VPC (AWS/GCP/Azure/OCI) with the same git-push experience. We have customers ranging from small startups to governments and public companies who would've otherwise built their own internal developer platform. They either use Northflank as-is in their own cloud or use our API to build their IDP on top of it.
Most common use cases are preview environments and production workloads. Happy to answer questions and throw in some credits if you're evaluating alternatives.
I've been incredibly happy with Northflank since moving over a few years ago after Heroku got unreliable. Felt like an upgrade from Heroku and the support and reliability have been great.
Do you have any public docs on how y'all migrate customers out of Heroku Postgres without downtime?
Seems to be the sticking point for a lot of people, myself included.
hey!
northflank supports the same buildpacks that you run on Heroku, so it should be fairly straightforward.
we have these docs for a more detailed walkthrough:
1/ https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/migrate-from-hero...
2/ https://northflank.com/blog/how-to-migrate-from-heroku-a-ste...
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Crunchy Bridge will help you migrate. They did a great job for us. We had a minute or so of downtime to let the read replica catch up and cut across. The team knows Heroku well, and some of them built it. (No affiliation, just a happy customer.)
For those not as well-versed in corporate PR....Salesforce are going to do just the bare minimum to keep the service going until the revenue dries up (or some > 0 $$ threshold where it just doesn't financially make sense to keep it running).
Pour one out for Heroku as they were truly a revelation back in the day and one of the most magical experiences ever on first run.
I remember reading The Twelve-Factor App [1] from the Heroku folks back in the day, and was blown away by how well they understood the problem. Not only that but they had great taste.
I moved things to Render a while back, and then to my own Hetzner server (I built kind of an open source Vercel clone for that reason [2]).
I'm not quite sure any of these platforms are going to be relevant 5 years from now when you can summon your own DevOps AI agent. At the very least it's going to be incredibly difficult to justify the premium on top of AWS.
1: https://www.12factor.net/
2: https://devpu.sh
It's a bit surprising, one would have thought that with the event of accessible coding through agents, such site deployment sites would prosper.
Didn't you read the last line of the announcement? They have enterprise AI dollars to chase! Salesforce wants some of them billions. Gotta make up for the 42% their stock price has dipped in the last 12 months.
Exactly this. Missed opportunity.
Sad day. Was such an amazing product and gave a start to so many companies back then.
It was the easiest place to host my Rails apps back in the day.
This blog post is peak comedy. Heroku is half abandoned, I expected the post to be something like "we're sunsetting Heroku" before clicking and what we get instead is about AI.
They are discontinuing it, you were right.
Here is an article that explains it better - https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-shuts-down-heroku-e...
Stolen from https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/s/6U8jJJRzBC
Why don't they just spin off the company or sell it? Heroku is a well-established brand (despite Salesforce's best efforts) and there are still plenty of customers and hobbyists relying on it today. Its value to the parent company is clearly 0. Give it away and let someone else have a run at it. Keep an ownership stake in case someone does manage to turn it around. Literally zero downside in it.
> Literally zero downside in it.
Any poor valuation or negative news can tank the stock price harder than dealing with it privately.
Sometimes it's best to just let things die.
I’ve been developing an open source Heroku alternative so we may never again be gouged for nice deployment pipelines.
https://canine.sh
It supports all the quality of life features like opening a shell via a cli, which I found was one of my favorite parts of Heroku (canine run —myproject /bin/bash)
Been fortunate enough to get a sponsorship from the Portainer folks, which allows me to maintain and develop full time!
I have moved all Rails apps away from Heroku in the last years. It was great 10 years ago, but then became expensive, full of bugs and with terrible support. All our Rails apps (Pushpad, Newsletter.page, etc) are running on Cuber gem + DigitalOcean Kubernetes... In the last years we achieved 100% uptime (five nines), zero subtle bugs and huge cost savings.
Any write up on this?
so EOL announcement without saying when it will be, but eventually.
we've been loyal heroku customers for over a decade. should have switched off long ago, but as a small team, it was too valuable. such a shame.
They shot themselves in the foot a long time ago and never recovered from that, I guess. I remember back in 2012-13 they made some changes that ghosted their primary ICP - indie devs and startup owners. They made the platform incredibly expensive to run. A lot of us panicked and had to move to other vendors - I in particular chose Google's AppEngine which was hugely under-appreciated at the time and eventually became a GCP consultant. All thanks to Heroku. Some of my other friends switched to Engine Yard (for rails) and the rest just went on to learn how to self host stuff onto EC2 instances. Heroku knowingly or unknowingly made a lot of careers of the present day engineers in AWS and GCP (including myself). So, I am a bit sad to see them in such a situation if I'm being honest.
It was such a great product.
Yes, I know they had one truly horrible year. But, they righted the ship.
I worked for a company that ran 10bn in revenue, with thousands of users, and Heroku just hummed along. It ran our business.
The benefit to us was the lack of problems that occurred at deploy time. Heroku's orchestration of removing old dynos, adding new dynos, and their network control was spectacular. DB's were updated, or patched, without downtime. It truly was impressive.
We moved to a combination of AWS and on-prem, and the overhead of providing what Heroku previously provided is quite large.
I'll remember it fondly, and miss it a bit too.
The original Heroku often gets praised here. Rightfully so. It inspired many. We started our PHP PaaS [0] 13 years, ago. Most of the others from that area are long gone. PagodaBox, CloudControl, PhpFog …
[0] https://www.fortrabbit.com
Heroku's git-push-to-deploy was magic in 2012. Sad to see it go out like this.
I've been building Frost https://github.com/elitan/frost, open source and self-hosted. Same idea, git push to deploy, automatic SSL, custom domains, but on your own VPS. Docker-native, no vendor lock-in, no pricing surprises.
The angle that's a bit different: it's designed for AI coding agents. Simple config they write correctly, clear errors, no K8s complexity to hallucinate. You give your agent the install URL and it sets up the whole server.
It's too late. I loved Heroku, but having 5+ major outages in a single year was unacceptable. The support was abysmal, and transparency was non-existent. After the Salesforce acquisition, we watched the company culture shift, getting worse and worse over the years. We were forced to migrate to AWS. Even though we were high-spend customers, the trust is gone. This post is a nice gesture of transparency, but it's way too fluffy for my taste. Heroku is dead to me, there’s no coming back from this.
Sad, although I guess I'm not surprised.
I think it's fair to say that, if not for Heroku, I would not have had a career in software. I learned how to code web apps from books, and had a breakthrough when I discovered Rails (in 2009 I think?). But for the life of me I did not understand how to deploy a Rails app.
I bashed my head against that wall for a while, then found Heroku, and it just worked. That let me ship a product when I barely knew what I was doing, which let me keep building and learning, until eventually I didn't need Heroku anymore. But I still always liked it, because I never enjoyed thinking about infrastructure.
RIP Heroku, you were legendary.
I used Heroku extensively before AWS reached its current level of maturity. Heroku made it incredibly easy to create cool apps. When Salesforce acquired it, and knowing a lot about Salesforce, I expected tight integration to address use cases where Apex is too limited (Apex being Salesforce's native language). There were (and still are) numerous such use cases. Unfortunately, this never materialized, and Salesforce gradually shifted away from a dev-first platform toward click-based config and heavy reliance on middleware for all kind of integrations.
It's been a butchered acquisition and missed opportunities along the way. And now it ends up just like Microsoft's Skype.
I've been using DigitalOcean App Platform for a while now. It's not a 1:1 Heroku replacement, but the git-based deploys, managed DBs, and ability to move to Droplets later without a big migration have worked very well for me.
Digital Ocean App Platform is great. We switched to it from Heroku in 2021. It had some growing pains to start, but has been rock solid since. I can only think of 1 downtime incident that was their fault. They continue to improve the platform too, and are VERY responsive to requests.
Yeah, I moved a while back to DO's App Platform. I've not had any issues with them so far. Recommend them a lot.
I am considering DO App Platform for a new project. Would you be open to sharing any lessons learned ?
I think the "Heroku story" was less about technical limitations, but everything except technical limitations. More than a decade ago, I started learning and building on Heroku and hosted all my side projects and client projects on Heroku. Then when they got acquired, I was naive; then they removed their free tier and that broke my trust.
I primarily worked on PoC/MVP development where I worked to bring ideas to something barely tangible. And Heroku's free tier decisions meant it was a barrier for developers to develop on their platform. Pay first, develop later. It was like the rest of the industry.
After that, I just exited containerized platform-based application development entirely because convenience and having that weird developer philosophy "I must not pay because I can find a way" was less of a reason than sustainability. For me, containerized application platforms was about POC and MVP. If there was growth then me or the client can pay for the convenience. But if there was nothing, pretty easy to delete the project.
Then I committed to replicating the Heroku experience with a small VPS, backing up via rsync, and moving from PostgreSQL to SQLite. I can even charge clients for hosting (+ maintenance) on my VPS.
I do not know, to me containerized application platforms are limited by commercial challenges rather than technical ones. I see tons of containerised application platforms, but the trust has eroded because of a single company.
I have changed my development facility and laid the groundwork to not commit to these platforms. Sustainability over convenience.
Sure, I understand and respect folks at fly.io, render, railway, and even the open source variants of these companies (Caddy etc.). But there is no sustainability guarantee for these platforms. It was not just about the "free tier", to me it transcends to a philosophical point about building applications in general. Sure, there could be a new era with AI making MVP/PoC development easy through hosting in containerised applications, but that is a tangent point.
If Heroku were doing everything right, there would not be a dozen application platforms out there, but they made mistakes and, in my opinion, made the entire containerised application platform model untrustworthy.
Reading the blog post, I thought I wasn't good at English. Well, I am a non-native English speaker.
Reading the comments, it turns out the blog post says nothing.
Reading the between lines, Heroku is being deprecated.
Just about to set up a new app to deploy to Heroku, but this does not seem promising. Render seems like the next logical move, but curious where others are looking for alternatives.
I moved to render years ago and have been very happy with the decision. It feels like heroku, if it never got acquired by salesforce and kept improving.
Railway for backend APIs. Render for front-end apps. That's my current go-to.
Although I would consider, _when possible_, using Vercel or Netlify.
Why/when do you use Railway over Render?
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why split, you could use railway and render for both front end and back end
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Yes, Render if you want something similar.
yes,, render feels like the most natural next step right now (similar mental model). Still kind of nostalgic about Heroku, had really good times with it.
It's nice that they would admit this, but it seems a little strange that they would. Why not just never add new features and let people figure it out on their own? A big statement like this seems more like implicitly killing the platform, which is what they say they aren't doing.
I guess the best way to interpret this is that they are killing the platform over time but they don't want to kill it right now since money is still coming in and it would make too many customers mad.
This is such a weird press release that totally obscures what it's trying to say. Just use clear and concise language and treat your customers like adults.
Why do they not sell it? Why do companies just close down products and services without ever exploring a sale possiblity?
The simplicity it brought at the time to hand-jammed and complex processes was nothing short of exemplary. They set the bar on how streamlined application deployment can be and a great UI to go along with it.
Heroku may die but the ideas Heroku executed on and brought to life will continue to prosper... so long Heroku!
Watching their public roadmap to see what happens. Right now, it looks about the same as it has for a while: useful new features and expected maintenance, moving along at a reasonable if not blistering clip.
https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130
There's very little written history about Heroku but there is this podcast
The Story Of Heroku With Adam Wiggins, co-founder and former CTO of Heroku.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3nEwB6apkvUpwk8W9KgzEF
It sounds like there were pretty broad layoffs which impacted a lot more than just a focus on enterprise contracts. It wasn't "just" a few enterprise sales people. Engineering may have indeed been the least impacted, but this sounds like biggest round of layoffs to hit Heroku since its inception, not just some right sizing from over hiring.
Not at all surprising, but a real shame. Nothing that I know of has come close to the ease of the "Deploy to Heroku" button.
One of the worst "engineers" I've suffered working with (spent all day on Slack virtue signaling, put on a PIP) went to Heroku. A comment I made was "only a sinking ship would take them/her." This update from Heroku does not surprise me.
Comment adds nothing valuable to the discussion. Hope you at least feel better now.
Comment adds nothing valuable to the discussion. Hope you at least feel better now.
All I’m going to say is if your press release is titled “an update on heroku” instead if something exciting it means you aren’t delivering happy news that is good for the user.
I bet I’m right. Haven’t read the article or comments, I’m just posting this comment to see if I’m proven right or wrong.
As someone that migrated off of Heroku back in 2023 for a monitoring start-up - why were you still on Heroku?!
For us, the reason is we're primarily a Salesforce company and rely on the Heroku Connect product to facilitate bidirectional syncing between Salesforce and PostgreSQL (which also requires Heroku PG).
One of the biggest benefits to this product -- aside from the syncing mechanism -- is a bypass of Salesforce's extremely limiting (and expensive) API limits.
When I was young, the startup company I was at used heroku for fast deploys.
We eventually migrated to AWS directly, because Heroku basically exploits you.
Now I'd probably use Fly IO if not just a lambda with AWS gateway.
I don't like building backends and will avoid doing so if possible.
So they are going into maintenance mode?
It really surprises me there isn’t a modern heroku alternative that supports the same.. things. Like build pipelines, routing included, multiple worker types. AWS is way less batteries included. And none of the competitors seems to offer the same kind of service, last time I looked.
I think there's a couple decent alternatives out there: https://alternativeto.net/software/heroku/
There are also a lot of cool "self-hosted Heroku" alternatives
- Coolify (PHP) (2020) https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify
- Dokku (Go) (2013) https://github.com/dokku/dokku
- Dokploy (TypeScript) (2024) https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy
- CapRover (TypeScript) (2017) https://github.com/caprover/caprover
- Komodo (Rust) (2022) https://github.com/moghtech/komodo
Literally nobody who seriously uses Heroku wants to self-host their own Heroku.
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Thanks for the reply! Most of these (also on the alternativeto) are self-hosted, which is different from having heroku do it. Also most only support webservers, while the majority of our servers aren't web..
northflank comes close
I wonder how much money Salesforce would need to sell what's left of Heroku to a better steward.
My understanding is that Heroku is just an AWS reseller. I don't know if there's a lot of value in a PaaS piggy-backing on another PaaS anymore. Especially for Salesforce.
I don't see AWS as a PaaS at all. Heroku's selling point has always been how it makes everything way easier.
There's a ton of value right now in the existing customers. None of them want to put effort into migrating away from Heroku if they can avoid it.
Heroku does lots of revenue, even if they pay AWS. I do think it would be worth.. quite a bit. And I would be very happy if a better steward would buy it.
It would be impossible to buy a company as a steward. We worked with them. In the early 2020s, their teams were as lazy as IBM boomers. Happy to hop on a call, but let's do an rain check or whatever and come back to you after 17 weeks to say no in an email CCed with 42 people playing hot potato between commercial people who try their best to sound technical. You need a mind map to know which person you were talking to and who introduced you to them.
My money is on holding companies like IAC buying the brand first through financial engineering and restructuring finances initially. They would load it up with debt like they did with the sporting goods store in Sopranos.
Afterward, they would sell it to a Euro-based caretaking company like Bending Spoons, with a focus on maintenance engineering rather than innovation engineering.
TIL Salesforce acquires Heroku in 2011, way before I was even a CS graduate. I remember enjoying using the free tier of Heroku for my school projects but also the pain of dyno cold starts.
One wonders about the damage caused by putting this vague mess of a post out vs not.
Also feel like many are still trying to recreate the Heroku experience all these years laters tbh
Title should be updated to "Sunsetting Heroku".
I just got some Heroku socks like two months ago at an event, they must've killed it at the start of the year. Weird.
I still haven't used a system as nice as Ruby on Rails and Heroku circa 2014.
my heroku app has been crashing since 2 days with the link to amazon rds db. is this part of it ?
> Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model
sustaining == maintanence mode
it would be too easy to just outright say "we are shutting this down over the next x years, right?
At Google we call it KTLO ("Keep The Lights On")
What does this even say?
What does this mean in non-corpo speak?
Headline includes the term “update” == always bad news.
They will still raise prices when renewal time comes around.
i am impressed. no ai can ever write announements this bad
So, Andreas killed Heroku, with Coolify?
For a little context. Salesforce changed their enterprise structure, effectively doubling their prices and my guess is many of their larger customers fled the platform. The enterprise pricing organized dynos into blocks and without notice they doubled the minimum block unit you could have. As a result, you ended up paying for dynos you weren't even using because they were now rounding up, sometimes by thousands of dollars worth of dyno blocks. So if you thought Heroku was expensive before, now it just didn't make any financial sense at all. For the other PaaS out there: don't do this.
Spinning up temporary VMs/stateful machines is going to be super valuable in the next year or 2. Heroku not jumping on this just shows the state of Salesforce. Absolutely inept. I foresee slack going down a similar path of enshittification
Thanks for reminding me that slack is owned by Salesforce. What are we going to use when slack turns to shit, IRC again maybe?
type.com (full disclosure I am one of the cofounders)
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Just please don't sunset Heroku Connect
What are some good alternatives?
Anyone any experience with https://sevalla.com/ ?
I've been very happy with https://render.com/ , seems the closest to what heroku was
Dokku. The self hosted alternative.
well, this is the only alternative which has exactly the same pipeline
Anything that can host Kubetnetes. If you are going to fo devopsy deployments might as well use the standard.
Fly.io is incredible.
garden of ideas now blossoms dancing with wind still creating, still
garden of ideas
now blossoms dancing with wind
still creating, still
chatgpt translation: Heroku isn’t shutting down, but they’re basically done building new stuff. For those who want to move and potentially save $ in process, here is a nice cost comparison: https://infraslash.com/costs/
I originally saw this on Twitter/X, the wording here is very confusing. The tl;dr version is simply they are going to be KTLO -keep the lights on- mode.
Why not use LLMs to maintain Heroku?
Was this written by llm?
Dogfooding their future products!
more like herok-who?
Imagine being the Chief Product Officer Since Aug 2025, and in Feb 2026 you are effectively killing your own product.
Who cares about heroku in 2026? It’s a dead horse
>> “ we want to be clear about what this means for customers.”
Nope, not clear.
This is a clear message “ the heroku product is cancelled but will not be shut down, will continue to operate exactly as before but no new features will be added.”
I mean I know what it means but how can you corpo speak so hard that it's pretty much unclear what the change even is
slopification is the new enshittification
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Why is this so cringe? That's not the typical way AI writing is bad.
Salesforce is the worst, lol
RIP Heroku.
It was good before SalesForce…
In 2018, I had to transition my org at the time from Heroku to AWS (with the org lacking any AWS experience outside of myself).
We ended up with a “Heroku-like” experience. Push to GitHub. Action triggers job. Job packages and deploys. À la carte yaml config for extras like databases and ALBs. It worked pretty well. It was an in house solution to an in house problem.
Still, it wasn’t quite Heroku…