Comment by simonw
3 months ago
"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.
3 months ago
"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.
What laws? As long as they fulfill Heroku fulfills the obligation in any contracts they have made, no law has been broken.
If you are paying month to month and actually check the Terms of Services of those services, most of them can shut down instantly without notice as long as they stop billing you.
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.
The Salesforce acquisition closed in 2010, when Heroku was barely three years old.
A whole lot of Heroku's best features shipped after they were acquired. They had a pretty good run under Salesforce for the first few years.
It would be interesting to hear a full oral history of when and where things went wrong after that. I expect the original founders leaving was a major factor.
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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
What's a better offering that makes it easier to push projects in production?
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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?
We saw this coming (like most people) a while ago when Heroku started flaking without status updates, and moved part of our workload to Fly. We ended up moving off Fly as well (significant unreliability and just some very strange network load balancer issues that would cause us downtime) and went to Railway, and that's been fantastic so far. We've moved our whole workload onto it.
Moved from heroku to fly.io three years ago and I don’t regret it, great platform occasionally goes down and requires a bit of attention but the support forum is great
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Digital Ocean App Engine has the easy setup and GUI management that made Heroku popular.
Build.io came out of this exact problem a few years ago (I joined in 25Q4) - trying to be what Heroku could have been if it had continued to evolve.
We offer the same default simplicity/speed, but with the ability to go deeper once teams hit scale, cost, or workflow limits. Plus a pricing model that stays understandable and improves as teams scale rather than punishing them for it.
Fair warning: the website is pretty light right now. It’s mostly a placeholder while we prep a broader push over the few months. Happy to answer questions here if helpful.
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If you like VPS, Hetzner with Dokploy. It works great, the UI has essentially all the features of Fly or Render that you'd use for deployment, like preview build URLs and environments.
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Kamal works well
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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?
First of all, you and me, start workin’ at the bank
Reminds me of https://youtu.be/T2BY8zZ1CTM?si=XDroWqVD-pElN9si
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They’re not competition if you own them! Typepad continued for over a decade after it was purchased. Auth0 is still in maintenance mode afaik. It can last as long as revenue pays for the FTE to maintain it, or until corporate reallocated the FTE to higher revenue-per-FTE-hour opportunities.
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Absolutely none of this is true. What was the PaaS Heroku was apparently beating at the time of the acquisition?
Noted. Please accept my apologies and retraction.
> 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.