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Really sad end for Heroku. They never could find a balance between the free tiers they offered and their overly-expensive paid tiers. Now they're entering purga

Really sad end for Heroku. They never could find a balance between the free tiers they offered and their overly-expensive paid tiers. Now they're entering purgatory before they are ultimately shut down for good. They had the markings of a long-lasting company in this space but corporate mismanagement has led to this drawn out death for the company. Salesforce buying the company made a few rich, but it really did turn out to be the nail in the coffin everyone said it would be. :(

clairity 4y ago
heroku was great but their free pricing was almost too good. and once you were out of the free range, their pricing jumped too steeply. they should have had a much more gradual ramp-up as your app got bigger and needed more resources, more of a geometrically rising pricing curve rather than a discontinuous one (but not like the overly complicated aws pricing, by the nanosecond on 15 different dimensions).
no_wizard 4y ago
Counter point seems to be Slack, which has become better (in my opinion) after the Salesforce Acquisition. I think the struggle is that Salesforce has never historically offered a platform as a service business that is agnostic to its end goal. I imagine the idea of acquiring Heroku was to make it easy to spin up new Salesforce apps, but I don't know that ever materialized in the way they were hoping.
- ubertaco 4y ago
  > Counter point seems to be Slack, which has become better (in my opinion) after the Salesforce Acquisition. ...which was only finalized about a year ago, and "phase one" of Salesforce's several-steps-plan that culminates in screwing up an acquisition is usually needlessly tinkering with pricing and packaging, which just happened recently [0]. The next step, if past patterns are predictors, will be an attempt to bundle Slack into their existing SKUs, then work on integrating Slack with their nightmare CRM codebase/dev-env, and then from there it's all downhill as velocity abruptly halts, the ratio of time spent doing meaningful work vs. time spent doing compliance busy-work stalls out completely, and the brain-drain begins. [0] https://slack.com/blog/news/pricing-and-plan-updates https://slack.com/blog/news/pricing-and-plan-updates
  - no_wizard 4y ago
    MuleSoft might also be a good analogy here, and they've owned that much longer, and by all accounts, was a successful acquisition.
    - ubertaco 4y ago
      By all accounts I heard internally, life at MuleSoft has become a death march now as they've gotten more integrated with the company at large. MuleSoft is an ancient player that has a long history of doing enterprise software long enough that they were early adopters of SOAP. It is taking time for Salesforce to ruin it, but the process _is_ underway.

clairity 4y ago

heroku was great but their free pricing was almost too good. and once you were out of the free range, their pricing jumped too steeply. they should have had a much more gradual ramp-up as your app got bigger and needed more resources, more of a geometrically rising pricing curve rather than a discontinuous one (but not like the overly complicated aws pricing, by the nanosecond on 15 different dimensions).

no_wizard 4y ago

Counter point seems to be Slack, which has become better (in my opinion) after the Salesforce Acquisition. I think the struggle is that Salesforce has never historically offered a platform as a service business that is agnostic to its end goal. I imagine the idea of acquiring Heroku was to make it easy to spin up new Salesforce apps, but I don't know that ever materialized in the way they were hoping.

ubertaco 4y ago
> Counter point seems to be Slack, which has become better (in my opinion) after the Salesforce Acquisition. ...which was only finalized about a year ago, and "phase one" of Salesforce's several-steps-plan that culminates in screwing up an acquisition is usually needlessly tinkering with pricing and packaging, which just happened recently [0]. The next step, if past patterns are predictors, will be an attempt to bundle Slack into their existing SKUs, then work on integrating Slack with their nightmare CRM codebase/dev-env, and then from there it's all downhill as velocity abruptly halts, the ratio of time spent doing meaningful work vs. time spent doing compliance busy-work stalls out completely, and the brain-drain begins. [0] https://slack.com/blog/news/pricing-and-plan-updates https://slack.com/blog/news/pricing-and-plan-updates
- no_wizard 4y ago
  MuleSoft might also be a good analogy here, and they've owned that much longer, and by all accounts, was a successful acquisition.
  - ubertaco 4y ago
    By all accounts I heard internally, life at MuleSoft has become a death march now as they've gotten more integrated with the company at large. MuleSoft is an ancient player that has a long history of doing enterprise software long enough that they were early adopters of SOAP. It is taking time for Salesforce to ruin it, but the process _is_ underway.