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An Update on Heroku
- valzam 8mo agoI 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
- aristofun 8mo agoWho cares about heroku in 2026? It’s a dead horse
- slices 8mo agoJust 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.
- Tankenstein 8mo agoI 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.
- guzik 8mo agoyes,, 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.
- hboon 8mo agoYes, Render if you want something similar.
- quentindanjou 8mo agoRailway for backend APIs. Render for front-end apps. That's my current go-to. Although I would consider, _when possible_, using Vercel or Netlify.
- nightpool 8mo agoWhy/when do you use Railway over Render?
- quentindanjou 8mo agoWhen bandwidth matters, when you don't want to over or under provision, when you need multiple seats: if you make a project with a small team, Render is going to be quite expensive because of the cost of each seat while Railway offers unlimited seats for they paid plans. Just the whole pricing is different, I found myself more leaning into Railway when doing calculations.
- nop_slide 8mo agowhy split, you could use railway and render for both front end and back end
- quentindanjou 8mo agoSorry, I wasn't saying you should split, I wanted to say that depending on what type of apps you are more leaning into one makes a bit more sense than the other. Render with their own CDN is quite good for frontend apps. In comparison, the whole config and auto scalling/provisioning of Railway makes it easier for backend app. Of course you can do both with both of these services.
- g8oz 8mo ago"transitioning to a sustaining engineering model". I don't care what anyone says, it takes real talent to come up with lines like this.
- sarreph 8mo agoSurely it's a typo and they meant "sustainable"? Otherwise IMO such an odd word choice. Definition: >> providing physical or mental strength or support
- sebiw 8mo agoSustaining as in sustaining their shareholders.
- shortsightedsid 8mo agoSustaining 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.
- muzani 8mo agoThey 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.
- selimthegrim 8mo agoIt's like PBS, they are going to beg for your money now with a sustaining engineering membership
- kenforthewin 8mo agoWe've been optimizing for decades to engineer the bullshit-generating super-soldiers required to craft modern PR statements.
- earless1 8mo agoFrom 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.
- BillinghamJ 8mo agoSeems 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?
- SparkyMcUnicorn 8mo ago> lead to customers moving elsewhere Since they're no longer accepting new enterprise clients, maybe this is intentional.
- BillinghamJ 8mo agoThen why mince words, and why accept new non-enterprise clients - just be clear it's maintenance-only and existing customer-only.
- CPLX 8mo agoI think they’d be happy if all the customers moved on. They just don’t want to upset enterprise customers.
- simonw 8mo agoI wonder how much money Salesforce would need to sell what's left of Heroku to a better steward.
- petcat 8mo agoMy 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.
- Trasmatta 8mo agoI don't see AWS as a PaaS at all. Heroku's selling point has always been how it makes everything way easier.
- simonw 8mo agoThere'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.
- PanMan 8mo agoHeroku 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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- wqtz 8mo agoIt 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.
- sebiw 8mo ago> 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.
- nightpool 8mo agoTranslation: We're going to reassign the engineers into Salesforce AI.
- sebiw 8mo agoHuh, so that's what they mean when using the word "we". "We" is not Heroku, it's Salesforce.
- loloquwowndueo 8mo agoI thought if you were all in on AI you wouldn’t need engineers - just swarms of agents doing everything. :)
- sc68cal 8mo agoIt'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.
- sebiw 8mo agoYup, 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.
- simonw 8mo 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.
- dmathieu 8mo agoIt means: go elsewhere, they're dead.
- an0malous 8mo agoWhat's the best alternative?
- syx 8mo agoMoved 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
- actsasbuffoon 8mo agoI had an issue with one of my Sprites (Fly.io also runs sprites.dev) and the CEO responded to me personally in less than 10 minutes. They got it fixed quickly. I was a free customer at the time. I pay for it happily now.
- an0malous 8mo agoIt didn't seem quite as fire-and-forget as doing `Heroku create` when I tried to use it 3-4 years ago, especially the database setup. Do you use their Postgres offering?
- syx 8mo agoNo my one is a simple ruby sinatra app with no DB. Yeah unfortunately it wasn’t super reliable as heroku but they’re getting better at keeping the instances up
- dainiusse 8mo agoWas this written by llm?
- sebiw 8mo agoDogfooding their future products!
- realusername 8mo agoThis 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.
- CPLX 8mo agoThey are discontinuing it, you were right.
- jcytong 8mo ago[flagged]
- gdulli 8mo agoWhy is this so cringe? That's not the typical way AI writing is bad.
- easton 8mo agoI just got some Heroku socks like two months ago at an event, they must've killed it at the start of the year. Weird.
- swader999 8mo agoThey will still raise prices when renewal time comes around.
- bluedino 8mo agoSad day. Was such an amazing product and gave a start to so many companies back then.
- xXSLAYERXx 8mo agoIt was the easiest place to host my Rails apps back in the day.
- ProfessorZoom 8mo agomore like herok-who?
- prodigycorp 8mo agoThis may be the worst piece of corporate communication that I've ever seen.
- PanMan 8mo agoIt 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.
- culi 8mo agoI think there's a couple decent alternatives out there: https://alternativeto.net/software/heroku/ https://alternativeto.net/software/heroku/ There are also a lot of cool "self-hosted Heroku" alternatives - Coolify (PHP) (2020) https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify - Dokku (Go) (2013) https://github.com/dokku/dokku https://github.com/dokku/dokku - Dokploy (TypeScript) (2024) https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy - CapRover (TypeScript) (2017) https://github.com/caprover/caprover https://github.com/caprover/caprover - Komodo (Rust) (2022) https://github.com/moghtech/komodo https://github.com/moghtech/komodo
- ezekg 8mo agoLiterally nobody who seriously uses Heroku wants to self-host their own Heroku.
- emilsedgh 8mo agoWe had an enterprise account on Heroku. We invested a little in Dokku and moved to self host it as of a few months ago. We now have a kubernetes (k3s) backed Dokku self hosted on Hetzner. Significantly cheaper but pretty robust. Just saying that it's not literally, but you are right, most people wouldn't be interested in self hosting.
- esseph 8mo agoWhat DO you want?
- PanMan 8mo agoThanks 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..
- Robdel12 8mo agoSalesforce is the worst, lol
- xnx 8mo agoNot at all surprising, but a real shame. Nothing that I know of has come close to the ease of the "Deploy to Heroku" button.
- baggy_trough 8mo agoIt'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.
- nelsonfigueroa 8mo agoThe corporate speak is crazy. I think the update boils down to this sentence: > Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers
- jbm 8mo agoYeah I agree. I saw someone say that they were not in KTLO mode, but this seems pretty bad, especially considering it happening at Salesforce.
- kristapsmors 8mo agochatgpt 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/ https://infraslash.com/costs/
- kuczmama 8mo agoThis is a sad day. I used heroku for years (in the past). A few alternatives to consider - https://render.com/ https://render.com/ - this is very close to heroku - https://coolify.io/ 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.
- swat535 8mo agoHow does render compare to fly.io? Does anyone has experience running production rails apps on these?
- ojusave 8mo agohttps://render.com/articles/render-vs-fly-io https://render.com/articles/render-vs-fly-io
- swat535 8mo agoThank you! Can't believe I missed that..
- tptacek 8mo agoHonestly, this is super fair. I went in expecting to hate-read it (not because I have any issues with Render, they're great, just these X vs. Y competitive posts). But yeah, I think this is a reasonable way to look at it.
- mcintyre1994 8mo agoI find it quite funny that they give themselves maximum marks for transparent pricing. If you go to their pricing page, everything is priced as “per user/month plus compute costs*”. Maybe it’s just because I’m on mobile and the page doesn’t seem to work super well, but reading if I have no idea what those compute costs are and therefore what the actual cost is.
- joelanman 8mo agohttps://railway.com https://railway.com is another good one
- hakanensari 8mo agoSo they are going into maintenance mode?
- mixtureoftakes 8mo agoi am impressed. no ai can ever write announements this bad
- awad 8mo agoFor 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.
- czhu12 8mo agoI’ve been developing an open source Heroku alternative so we may never again be gouged for nice deployment pipelines. https://canine.sh 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!
- Trasmatta 8mo agoThis 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.
- craigkerstiens 8mo agoIt 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 overhiring.
- singularity2001 8mo agoIt's a bit surprising, one would have thought that with the event of accessible coding through agents, such site deployment sites would prosper.
- jihadjihad 8mo agoHeroku (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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1982489
- craigkerstiens 8mo agoIt 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.
- brandonb 8mo agoSad to see what's become of Heroku. I've used Render as a good modern day alternative and have been pretty happy with it.
- pelagicAustral 8mo agoI 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.
- rubslopes 8mo agoI've been using Coolify for deploying my webapps for about 3 years, it has a good web UI.
- barkerja 8mo agoJust please don't sunset Heroku Connect
- decidertm 8mo agoDisclaimer: 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.
- ezekg 8mo agoDo 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.
- decidertm 8mo agohey! 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-heroku https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/migrate-from-hero... 2/ https://northflank.com/blog/how-to-migrate-from-heroku-a-step-by-step-guide https://northflank.com/blog/how-to-migrate-from-heroku-a-ste...
- ezekg 8mo agoSorry, but telling people to take a logical backup of their database, and then download it onto their local work station is insane for a production application. First, a logical backup at any decent scale will fail, and second, I don't even have enough local storage to do that -- even ignoring the compliance issues with downloading a full copy of production data onto a work station. For a company like Northflank, I'd expect actual production-grade documentation for migrating, not instructions that are only applicable to a toy app.
- bobbyiliev 8mo agoI'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.
- realkf 8mo agoYeah, I moved a while back to DO's App Platform. I've not had any issues with them so far. Recommend them a lot.
- codegeek 8mo agoI am considering DO App Platform for a new project. Would you be open to sharing any lessons learned ?
- pgm8705 8mo agoDigital 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.
- bearjaws 8mo agoThe downfall of Heroku should be studied, they had lightning in a bottle and blew it. Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.
- sleight42 8mo agoOften seems like there's no defeat that Benioff can't steal from the jaws of Victory.
- o_m 8mo agoWhat 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.
- brightball 8mo agoI 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.
- WildGreenLeave 8mo agoWow, 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 https://ploi.cloud
- TechnicalParrot 8mo agoTiny 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!
- WildGreenLeave 8mo agoAppreciate the suggestion, thank you! Definitely not charging that much :-)
- sreekanth850 8mo agois this linked with Ploi.io?
- WildGreenLeave 8mo agoSeparate companies but Dennis (founder of Ploi.io) is the other co-founder, so indirectly linked. :)
- dluan 8mo agoso 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.
- uxcolumbo 8mo agoWhat are some good alternatives? Anyone any experience with https://sevalla.com/ https://sevalla.com/ ?
- cssanchez 8mo agoDokku. The self hosted alternative.
- lpellis 8mo agoI've been very happy with https://render.com/ https://render.com/ , seems the closest to what heroku was
- brightball 8mo agoFly.io is incredible.
- mcapodici 8mo agoAnything that can host Kubetnetes. If you are going to fo devopsy deployments might as well use the standard.
- fwejn3k 8mo agowell, this is the only alternative which has exactly the same pipeline
- davidhariri 8mo agoRailway is the spiritual successor. Fly is great too. I highly recommend both.
- vintagedave 8mo agoI 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.
- henrypoydar 8mo agoWhat is the concern exactly? (Product/platform enshittification?)
- betteryet 8mo agoBack 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.
- trvz 8mo agoAmongst 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.
- bjt 8mo agoDigital 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.
- re-thc 8mo agoYes, they haven’t updated their infrastructure in a long time. Pricing hence isn’t competitive. With each new generation they fall behind.
- bjt 8mo agoMaybe? I could see that happening. I could also see them being compared with companies still using venture capital to give stuff away for free. In that case, I'm OK with that tradeoff. I'm not really excited about changing my infrastructure every few years to keep getting a free lunch. The Digital Ocean app platform I recently migrated to is a lot newer than the "rent a VPS" model that they've had forever. Yes, it's not free like the Vercel and Cloudflare Workers I've also used recently. But it also doesn't force my app into a weird shape or to use their preferred language. On a continuum where AWS sits at one boring+expensive end of the spectrum, and all the subsidized-pricing "we might not be here tomorrow" PaaSes sit at the other, I like the in-between spot where DO sits.
- nubg 8mo agoTitle should be updated to "Sunsetting Heroku".
- ChrisArchitect 8mo agoOne 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
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- andrewstuart 8mo ago>> “ 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.”
- andrew-ld 8mo agoslopification is the new enshittification
- davepeck 8mo agoWatching 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 https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130
- chris_marino 8mo agoThis 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.
- eek2121 8mo agoMost 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)
- ryantgtg 8mo agoThis 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.
- hnmullany 8mo ago
- windowshopping 8mo agoThis 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.
- shepherdjerred 8mo ago> with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational excellence rather than introducing new features it sounds pretty clear that it's in maintenance mode
- dwaltrip 8mo agoIt’s clear enough but they aren’t going out of their way to make it obvious. It’s definitely fluffed up / corporately sanitized.
- phist_mcgee 8mo agoDamage control to limit the rush for the exits?
- wxw 8mo ago> Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model sustaining == maintanence mode
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- paxys 8mo agoWhy 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.
- CodinM 8mo agoAs someone that migrated off of Heroku back in 2023 for a monitoring start-up - why were you still on Heroku?!
- barkerja 8mo agoFor 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.
- esher 8mo agoThe 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 https://www.fortrabbit.com
- anyfactor 8mo agoI 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.
- collimarco 8mo agoI 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.
- patrickdavey 8mo agoAny write up on this?
- krashidov 8mo agoSpinning 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
- pimeys 8mo agoThanks for reminding me that slack is owned by Salesforce. What are we going to use when slack turns to shit, IRC again maybe?
- krashidov 8mo agotype.com (full disclosure I am one of the cofounders)
- mplewis 8mo agoYou gotta fix the home page. I'm not sitting through a movie trailer to find out how your chat app works.
- krashidov 8mo agohaha we actually launched it today. Point taken though! It's not a video though just an interactive widget. Instead of scrolling you press enter. Once we launch I'm sure we'll have something more traditional
- itay-maman 8mo agoIt 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.
- chris_marino 8mo agoSalesforce, 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.
- reactordev 8mo agoRIP 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…
- diqi 8mo agoWhat does this even say?
- billwashere 8mo agoHere is an article that explains it better - https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-shuts-down-heroku-enterprise-sales-for-new-customers/ https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-shuts-down-heroku-e... Stolen from https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/s/6U8jJJRzBC https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/s/6U8jJJRzBC
- bgentry 8mo agoAs 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.
- Aurornis 8mo agoThanks 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.
- WinstonSmith84 8mo agoI 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.
- ergocoder 8mo agoReading 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.
- 999900000999 8mo agoWhen 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.
- Lammy 8mo agoHeadline includes the term “update” == always bad news.
- cruffle_duffle 8mo agoAll 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.
- bschmidt900 8mo ago[dead]
- nixpulvis 8mo agoI still haven't used a system as nice as Ruby on Rails and Heroku circa 2014.
- everfrustrated 8mo agoThere'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 https://open.spotify.com/episode/3nEwB6apkvUpwk8W9KgzEF
- keithluu 8mo agoTIL 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.
- burlesona 8mo agoSad, 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.
- neya 8mo agoThey 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.
- throwawaypath 8mo agoOne 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.
- crashprone 8mo agoComment adds nothing valuable to the discussion. Hope you at least feel better now.
- throwawaypath 8mo agoComment adds nothing valuable to the discussion. Hope you at least feel better now.
- steren 8mo agoAt Google we call it KTLO ("Keep The Lights On")
- ksec 8mo agoWhy do they not sell it? Why do companies just close down products and services without ever exploring a sale possiblity?
- elondemirock 8mo agoThe 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!
- XCSme 8mo agoSo, Andreas killed Heroku, with Coolify?
- elitan 8mo agoHeroku'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 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.
- seaofclouds 8mo agogarden of ideas now blossoms dancing with wind still creating, still
- seaofclouds 8mo agogarden of ideas now blossoms dancing with wind still creating, still
- muzani 8mo agoI'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"
- seyz 8mo agoIt'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.
- kayo_20211030 8mo agoIt 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.
- andrewdubinsky 8mo agoWhat does this mean in non-corpo speak?
- kolanos 8mo agoFor 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.
- mfru 8mo agoit would be too easy to just outright say "we are shutting this down over the next x years, right?
- pvtmert 8mo agoI 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.
- Daviey 8mo agoImagine being the Chief Product Officer Since Aug 2025, and in Feb 2026 you are effectively killing your own product.
- ares623 8mo agoWhy not use LLMs to maintain Heroku?
- davidguetta 8mo agomy heroku app has been crashing since 2 days with the link to amazon rds db. is this part of it ?
- hunvreus 8mo agoI 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/ https://www.12factor.net/ 2: https://devpu.sh https://devpu.sh
- luckydev-root 8mo ago[dead]
- andout_ 8mo agoI 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 https://encore.cloud
- ktaraszk 8mo agoWe built miget.com specifically for cases like this. Free tier (no card required) with 256MB RAM should handle Spring Boot apps fine for teaching purposes. It's much simpler than Azure but still supports any JVM app. If your students need more resources later, hobby plans start at $5/mo. Happy to help get your course set up if you want to try it out.