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.

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.

"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.

• paxys

  today at 9:55 PM

  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.

• altairprime

  today at 9:55 PM

  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.

• naniwaduni

  today at 10:31 PM

  Oh, they're very clear, just not explicit.

• Daviey

  today at 5:32 PM

  "sustaining engineering model"

  ie, life support.. bit rot will set in, they are dead.

• dmathieu

  today at 4:05 PM

  It means: go elsewhere, they're dead.

  • an0malous

    today at 4:15 PM

    What's the best alternative?

    • runako

      today at 10:25 PM

      Digital Ocean App Engine has the easy setup and GUI management that made Heroku popular.

    • satvikpendem

      today at 8:49 PM

      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.

      • BoorishBears

        today at 9:50 PM

        Very close to the worst alternative for people who actually need Heroku, but it won't stop people from plugging it to death and back.

        • satvikpendem

          today at 9:52 PM

          Eh, no, depends on why you used Heroku in the first place. Way back when, I used it because the UI was dead simple and it Just Worked™. If I can replicate that with a VPS and have a good UI around it that takes care of everything, it's functionally the same to me.

    • syx

      today at 4:20 PM

      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

      • actsasbuffoon

        today at 5:24 PM

        I 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.

      • mindwok

        today at 9:41 PM

        Fly.io are absolute G’s. The product is awesome and the tech blogs they write are fantastic.

      • an0malous

        today at 5:32 PM

        It 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?

    • sm123

      today at 5:20 PM

      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.

      • llIIllIIllIIl

        today at 9:37 PM

        Do you care to show prices? The true benefit of heroku for me was really predictable pricing model. Build.io website doesn’t have it on mobile site at all. I don’t want to look at demo, i want to hook up my credit card, set a monthly budget and explore

        • sm123

          today at 10:37 PM

          llIIllIIllIIl & runako give me an email on steven[at]build.io and I'll share. As mentioned, we stripped the site back while we overhaul and we certainly didn't expect this today!

        • runako

          today at 10:24 PM

          FWIW it doesn't look like pricing or details of the service offerings are available on the desktop site, either.

      • satvikpendem

        today at 8:50 PM

        Not to be confused with builder.io, or worse, builder.ai

• JamesSwift

  today at 5:21 PM

  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”....

• teaearlgraycold

  today at 9:20 PM

  > including helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted way.

  Baffling

  • Macha

    today at 10:18 PM

    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.

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.

• codegeek

  today at 9:22 PM

  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.

  • bmenrigh

    today at 9:52 PM

    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.

    • brightball

      today at 10:27 PM

      Yea, this is accurate in my experience.

• sleight42

  today at 8:45 PM

  Often seems like there's no defeat that Benioff can't steal from the jaws of Victory.

• brightball

  today at 9:14 PM

  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.

  • nicoburns

    today at 10:12 PM

    > 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.

    • tptacek

      today at 10:33 PM

      If there was one thing we would all decide differently here at Fly.io, like if you gave us a time machine, is how we did databases. Someday Kurt and I will write the post about how those decisions came to pass and how they played out.

      We're doing Managed Postgres now (MPG), which is what we should have done to begin with, but it took us for-ev-er to get here.

    • brightball

      today at 10:22 PM

      For what it's worth, I've been very happy using Crunchydata PostgreSQL with Fly.

  • prmph

    today at 10:20 PM

    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

  • michaelsbradley

    today at 9:34 PM

    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.

    • brightball

      today at 9:39 PM

      All I can say is thank you. I learned to manage servers because of Slicehost and the articles on it back then.

      I remember being excited by the merger because well, Rackspace had such a fantastic reputation at the time. People still tell stories about their service. The Rackspace Cloud was just up against an absolute monster in AWS and never really became competitive.

      • michaelsbradley

        today at 9:45 PM

        Thank you for the kind words, brought back some fun and interesting memories. I spent a lot of time helping to write and edit those articles, as did my coworkers, glad they helped you!

• o_m

  today at 8:55 PM

  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.

  • anamexis

    today at 8:56 PM

    Salesforce acquired Heroku 15 years ago.

    • cpursley

      today at 9:58 PM

      And Heroku has stagnated for at least 13 of those years...

    • carimura

      today at 9:03 PM

      Time flies. I do think the vision lasted pretty long post acquisition, maybe 5 years or so, but then the inevitable seemed... inevitable.

• today at 10:05 PM

• chimeracoder

  today at 9:28 PM

  > 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.

• pjmlp

  today at 9:28 PM

  It is a typical acquisition by the book, always goes the same way after three to five years.

• OGEnthusiast

  today at 9:18 PM

  Downfall? The founders and VCs made tens of millions of dollars. That’s the success condition for them.

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.

• shepherdjerred

  today at 10:01 PM

  > 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

    today at 10:22 PM

    It’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

      today at 10:43 PM

      Damage control to limit the rush for the exits?

"transitioning to a sustaining engineering model". I don't care what anyone says, it takes real talent to come up with lines like this.

• bityard

  today at 8:52 PM

  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.

• earless1

  today at 4:12 PM

  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.

  • paxys

    today at 10:00 PM

    Heroku has been running in this mode for a long time. The only difference is they made it official.

  • the_real_cher

    today at 8:44 PM

    From a business perspective the have brought it out to the field with a shotgun.

  • awestroke

    today at 8:59 PM

    As opposed to the relentless innovation they have demonstrated in the past 5+ years? /s

• codegeek

  today at 9:18 PM

  I am sure that the guy whose name is on the Post didn't even write this himself. Probably some corporate writer using LLM :).

  • slices

    today at 9:38 PM

    I would love to see the prompt that led to that word salad

• throwoutway

  today at 5:03 PM

  Could have just said we will Keep the Lights on

  • ceejayoz

    today at 7:22 PM

    This reads more like "we won't deliberately turn the lights off… but they're probably gonna break on their own eventually".

    • danudey

      today at 9:12 PM

      The lights will stay on until they burn out or the power goes off, or someone bumps the light switch or steals the light bulbs.

• kenforthewin

  today at 3:59 PM

  We've been optimizing for decades to engineer the bullshit-generating super-soldiers required to craft modern PR statements.

• selimthegrim

  today at 3:58 PM

  It's like PBS, they are going to beg for your money now with a sustaining engineering membership

• sarreph

  today at 3:57 PM

  Surely it's a typo and they meant "sustainable"?

  Otherwise IMO such an odd word choice. Definition:

  >> providing physical or mental strength or support

  • shortsightedsid

    today at 4:23 PM

    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.

  • sebiw

    today at 3:58 PM

    Sustaining as in sustaining their shareholders.

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…

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

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.

This may be the worst piece of corporate communication that I've ever seen.

• wlonkly

  today at 10:17 PM

  I found myself wondering where the rest of it went.

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.

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 (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

• anyfactor

  today at 10:19 PM

  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.

• sleight42

  today at 8:47 PM

  Salesforce mostly left Heroku to do its own thing for a long time. Since that changed, dumpster fire.

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.

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.

• trvz

  today at 10:44 PM

  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.

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?

• SparkyMcUnicorn

  today at 4:08 PM

  > lead to customers moving elsewhere

  Since they're no longer accepting new enterprise clients, maybe this is intentional.

• CPLX

  today at 4:17 PM

  I think they’d be happy if all the customers moved on. They just don’t want to upset enterprise customers.

What does this even say?

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.

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.

• swat535

  today at 7:13 PM

  How does render compare to fly.io? Does anyone has experience running production rails apps on these?

  • ojusave

    today at 8:34 PM

    https://render.com/articles/render-vs-fly-io

Railway is the spiritual successor. Fly is great too. I highly recommend both.

• vintagedave

  today at 9:19 PM

  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.

  • henrypoydar

    today at 9:34 PM

    What is the concern exactly? (Product/platform enshittification?)

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

> 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.

• sc68cal

  today at 3:58 PM

  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.

  • sebiw

    today at 4:00 PM

    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.

    • sm123

      today at 5:27 PM

      Couldn’t agree more. That “git push and you’re live” moment removed a huge amount of accidental complexity, and it’s been the guiding experience behind what we’re building at Build.io.

• nightpool

  today at 3:54 PM

  Translation: We're going to reassign the engineers into Salesforce AI.

  • loloquwowndueo

    today at 7:32 PM

    I thought if you were all in on AI you wouldn’t need engineers - just swarms of agents doing everything. :)

  • sebiw

    today at 3:55 PM

    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.

• ezekg

  today at 7:58 PM

  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.

  • decidertm

    today at 8:16 PM

    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...

    • caffeinated_me

      today at 9:40 PM

      Looks like that still has downtime for a Postgres migration- you're suggesting going into maintenance mode and just doing a dump/restore. I've seen that take hours once you hit the terabyte scale, depending on hardware.

      I've had pretty good luck setting up logical replication from Heroku to the new provider and having a 10-15 minute maintenance window to catch up once it's in sync. Might be worth considering.

      You might also want to add a warning about Postgres versions. There's some old bugs around primary key hash functions that can cause corruption on a migration. I've seen it twice when migrating from Heroku to other vendors.

      • nocodeguy

        today at 10:05 PM

        Bucardo would be an option: https://www.porter.run/blog/migrating-postgres-from-heroku-t...

    • ezekg

      today at 9:02 PM

      Sorry, 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.

      • decidertm

        today at 9:22 PM

        I agree, I wouldn't either. You can import directly via a DB to DB import in the platform without involving your laptop.

        https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/databases-and-per....

        Some folks want to do that, others want to import a backup directly, some want to spawn a read replica and sync their DB. Different strokes for different folks, all supported on Northflank.

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.

• codegeek

  today at 9:18 PM

  I am considering DO App Platform for a new project. Would you be open to sharing any lessons learned ?

• realkf

  today at 8:55 PM

  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.

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.

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.

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

• jbm

  today at 7:47 PM

  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.

It's a bit surprising, one would have thought that with the event of accessible coding through agents, such site deployment sites would prosper.

• sleight42

  today at 8:51 PM

  Exactly this. Missed opportunity.

• hoherd

  today at 7:16 PM

  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.

Sad day. Was such an amazing product and gave a start to so many companies back then.

• xXSLAYERXx

  today at 4:19 PM

  It was the easiest place to host my Rails apps back in the day.

> Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model

sustaining == maintanence mode

Title should be updated to "Sunsetting Heroku".

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

As someone that migrated off of Heroku back in 2023 for a monitoring start-up - why were you still on Heroku?!

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.

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!

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.

• Tankenstein

  today at 3:45 PM

  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.

• quentindanjou

  today at 3:56 PM

  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.

  • nightpool

    today at 4:01 PM

    Why/when do you use Railway over Render?

    • quentindanjou

      today at 5:38 PM

      When 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

    today at 4:11 PM

    why split, you could use railway and render for both front end and back end

    • quentindanjou

      today at 5:33 PM

      Sorry, 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.

• hboon

  today at 3:51 PM

  Yes, Render if you want something similar.

• guzik

  today at 3:46 PM

  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.

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.

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.

• culi

  today at 4:18 PM

  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

  • ezekg

    today at 4:26 PM

    Literally nobody who seriously uses Heroku wants to self-host their own Heroku.

    • esseph

      today at 7:49 PM

      What DO you want?

    • emilsedgh

      today at 5:05 PM

      We 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.

  • PanMan

    today at 5:18 PM

    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..

• airsat18

  today at 8:19 PM

  northflank comes close

I wonder how much money Salesforce would need to sell what's left of Heroku to a better steward.

• wqtz

  today at 10:30 PM

  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.

• today at 8:51 PM

• petcat

  today at 4:08 PM

  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.

  • simonw

    today at 6:38 PM

    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.

  • Trasmatta

    today at 5:41 PM

    I don't see AWS as a PaaS at all. Heroku's selling point has always been how it makes everything way easier.

What are some good alternatives?

Anyone any experience with https://sevalla.com/ ?

• lpellis

  today at 8:47 PM

  I've been very happy with https://render.com/ , seems the closest to what heroku was

• cssanchez

  today at 8:52 PM

  Dokku. The self hosted alternative.

• brightball

  today at 9:10 PM

  Fly.io is incredible.

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.

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

Just please don't sunset Heroku Connect

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.

• CPLX

  today at 4:19 PM

  They are discontinuing it, you were right.

i am impressed. no ai can ever write announements this bad

They will still raise prices when renewal time comes around.

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/

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.

Was this written by llm?

• sebiw

  today at 4:01 PM

  Dogfooding their future products!

more like herok-who?

slopification is the new enshittification

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.

>> “ 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.”

[flagged]

• gdulli

  today at 4:05 PM

  Why is this so cringe? That's not the typical way AI writing is bad.

Salesforce is the worst, lol