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As somebody whose first day working at Heroku was the day this acquisition closed, I think it’s mostly a misconception to blame Salesforce for Heroku’s stagnation and eventual irrelevance. Salesforce gave Heroku a ton of funding to build out a vision that was way ahead of its time. Docker didn’t even come out until 2013, AWS didn’t even have multiple regions when it was built. They mostly served as an investor and left us alone to do our thing, or so it seemed those first couple years.

The launch of the multi language Cedar runtime in 2011 led to incredible growth and by 2012 we were drowning in tech debt and scaling challenges. Despite more than tripling our headcount in that first year (~20 to 74) we could not keep up.

Mid 2012 was especially bad as we were severely impacted by two us-east-1 outages just 2 weeks apart. To the extent it wasn’t already, reliability and paying down tech debt became the main focus and I think we went about 18 months between major user-facing platform launches (Europe region and eventually larger sized dynos being the biggest things we eventually shipped after that drought). The organization lost its ability to ship significant changes or maybe never really had that ability at scale.

That time coincided with the founders taking a step back, leaving a loss of leadership and vision that was filled by people more concerned with process than results. I left in 2014 and at that time it already seemed clear to me that the product was basically stalled.

I’m not sure how much of this could have been done better even in hindsight. In theory Salesforce could have taken a more hands on approach early on but I don’t think that could have ended better. They were so far from profitability in late 2010 that they could not stay independent without raising more funding. The venture market in ~2010 was much smaller than a few years later—tiny rounds and low valuations. Had the company spent its pre-acquisition engineering cycles building for scalability & reliability at the expense of product velocity they probably would have never gotten successful.

Even still, it was the most amazing professional experience of my career, full of brilliant and passionate people, and it’s sad to see it end this way.

"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.

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.

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

I've had a zombie project running on this for many years now. I used to charge people about $25 for 'lifetime', but there's only about ~10 regular users on it, so I try to keep it alive.

Decided this is the time to make the switch over to AWS. They've been rather painful with cancellation. They required all dynos be downgraded to "Eco". Fine.

But this downgrade also incurred another $5 charge which they now required me to pay to remove the credit card. It's not much, but this is shady af.

The billing language has become increasingly shady over the years. Basic is "~$0.010/hour, Max of $7 per month". Eco is "~$0.005/hour, Flat fee of $5.00/month". But in reality, you're just being charged a flat $7 or $5 either way. Eco is visually shown as the "free" option, except it's not free at all.

I'd love to just keep using Heroku and paying some flat rate; we were talking about putting some more work & funding into the project and maybe scaling it up to thousands of users. But I have no idea what Heroku can actually scale to and how much it costs. AWS etc are also not that clear on costs, but at least their specifications is a little more detailed than "Superior performance for your very large-scale, high traffic app"

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I originally saw this on Twitter/X, the wording here is very confusing. The tl;dr version is simply they are going to be KTLO -keep the lights on- mode.

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

it would be too easy to just outright say "we are shutting this down over the next x years, right?

It was such a great product.

Yes, I know they had one truly horrible year. But, they righted the ship.

I worked for a company that ran 10bn in revenue, with thousands of users, and Heroku just hummed along. It ran our business.

The benefit to us was the lack of problems that occurred at deploy time. Heroku's orchestration of removing old dynos, adding new dynos, and their network control was spectacular. DB's were updated, or patched, without downtime. It truly was impressive.

We moved to a combination of AWS and on-prem, and the overhead of providing what Heroku previously provided is quite large.

I'll remember it fondly, and miss it a bit too.

It's too late. I loved Heroku, but having 5+ major outages in a single year was unacceptable. The support was abysmal, and transparency was non-existent. After the Salesforce acquisition, we watched the company culture shift, getting worse and worse over the years. We were forced to migrate to AWS. Even though we were high-spend customers, the trust is gone. This post is a nice gesture of transparency, but it's way too fluffy for my taste. Heroku is dead to me, there’s no coming back from this.

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

> 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.

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.

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

Heroku's git-push-to-deploy was magic in 2012. Sad to see it go out like this.

I've been building Frost https://github.com/elitan/frost, open source and self-hosted. Same idea, git push to deploy, automatic SSL, custom domains, but on your own VPS. Docker-native, no vendor lock-in, no pricing surprises.

The angle that's a bit different: it's designed for AI coding agents. Simple config they write correctly, clear errors, no K8s complexity to hallucinate. You give your agent the install URL and it sets up the whole server.

Here is an article that explains it better - https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-shuts-down-heroku-e...

Stolen from https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/s/6U8jJJRzBC

They shot themselves in the foot a long time ago and never recovered from that, I guess. I remember back in 2012-13 they made some changes that ghosted their primary ICP - indie devs and startup owners. They made the platform incredibly expensive to run. A lot of us panicked and had to move to other vendors - I in particular chose Google's AppEngine which was hugely under-appreciated at the time and eventually became a GCP consultant. All thanks to Heroku. Some of my other friends switched to Engine Yard (for rails) and the rest just went on to learn how to self host stuff onto EC2 instances. Heroku knowingly or unknowingly made a lot of careers of the present day engineers in AWS and GCP (including myself). So, I am a bit sad to see them in such a situation if I'm being honest.

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

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.

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.

Sad, although I guess I'm not surprised.

I think it's fair to say that, if not for Heroku, I would not have had a career in software. I learned how to code web apps from books, and had a breakthrough when I discovered Rails (in 2009 I think?). But for the life of me I did not understand how to deploy a Rails app.

I bashed my head against that wall for a while, then found Heroku, and it just worked. That let me ship a product when I barely knew what I was doing, which let me keep building and learning, until eventually I didn't need Heroku anymore. But I still always liked it, because I never enjoyed thinking about infrastructure.

RIP Heroku, you were legendary.

I’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!

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.

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

I used Heroku extensively before AWS reached its current level of maturity. Heroku made it incredibly easy to create cool apps. When Salesforce acquired it, and knowing a lot about Salesforce, I expected tight integration to address use cases where Apex is too limited (Apex being Salesforce's native language). There were (and still are) numerous such use cases. Unfortunately, this never materialized, and Salesforce gradually shifted away from a dev-first platform toward click-based config and heavy reliance on middleware for all kind of integrations.

It's been a butchered acquisition and missed opportunities along the way. And now it ends up just like Microsoft's Skype.

The simplicity it brought at the time to hand-jammed and complex processes was nothing short of exemplary. They set the bar on how streamlined application deployment can be and a great UI to go along with it.

Heroku may die but the ideas Heroku executed on and brought to life will continue to prosper... so long Heroku!

Reading the blog post, I thought I wasn't good at English. Well, I am a non-native English speaker.

Reading the comments, it turns out the blog post says nothing.

Reading the between lines, Heroku is being deprecated.

What does this mean in non-corpo speak?

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.

Why do they not sell it? Why do companies just close down products and services without ever exploring a sale possiblity?

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.

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.

One of the worst "engineers" I've suffered working with (spent all day on Slack virtue signaling, put on a PIP) went to Heroku. A comment I made was "only a sinking ship would take them/her." This update from Heroku does not surprise me.

There's very little written history about Heroku but there is this podcast

The Story Of Heroku With Adam Wiggins, co-founder and former CTO of Heroku.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3nEwB6apkvUpwk8W9KgzEF

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

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.

For a little context. Salesforce changed their enterprise structure, effectively doubling their prices and my guess is many of their larger customers fled the platform. The enterprise pricing organized dynos into blocks and without notice they doubled the minimum block unit you could have. As a result, you ended up paying for dynos you weren't even using because they were now rounding up, sometimes by thousands of dollars worth of dyno blocks. So if you thought Heroku was expensive before, now it just didn't make any financial sense at all. For the other PaaS out there: don't do this.

When I was young, the startup company I was at used heroku for fast deploys.

We eventually migrated to AWS directly, because Heroku basically exploits you.

Now I'd probably use Fly IO if not just a lambda with AWS gateway.

I don't like building backends and will avoid doing so if possible.

It sounds like there were pretty broad layoffs which impacted a lot more than just a focus on enterprise contracts. It wasn't "just" a few enterprise sales people. Engineering may have indeed been the least impacted, but this sounds like biggest round of layoffs to hit Heroku since its inception, not just some right sizing from over hiring.

Not at all surprising, but a real shame. Nothing that I know of has come close to the ease of the "Deploy to Heroku" button.

TIL Salesforce acquires Heroku in 2011, way before I was even a CS graduate. I remember enjoying using the free tier of Heroku for my school projects but also the pain of dyno cold starts.

So they are going into maintenance mode?

It really surprises me there isn’t a modern heroku alternative that supports the same.. things. Like build pipelines, routing included, multiple worker types. AWS is way less batteries included. And none of the competitors seems to offer the same kind of service, last time I looked.

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

Title should be updated to "Sunsetting Heroku".

I still haven't used a system as nice as Ruby on Rails and Heroku circa 2014.

At Google we call it KTLO ("Keep The Lights On")

So, Andreas killed Heroku, with Coolify?

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.

garden of ideas now blossoms dancing with wind still creating, still

> Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model

sustaining == maintanence mode

What does this even say?

Headline includes the term “update” == always bad news.

I mean I know what it means but how can you corpo speak so hard that it's pretty much unclear what the change even is

This blog post is peak comedy. Heroku is half abandoned, I expected the post to be something like "we're sunsetting Heroku" before clicking and what we get instead is about AI.

They will still raise prices when renewal time comes around.

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

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

What are some good alternatives?

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

Just please don't sunset Heroku Connect

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

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?

more like herok-who?

Who cares about heroku in 2026? It’s a dead horse

All I’m going to say is if your press release is titled “an update on heroku” instead if something exciting it means you aren’t delivering happy news that is good for the user.

I bet I’m right. Haven’t read the article or comments, I’m just posting this comment to see if I’m proven right or wrong.

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

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.”

slopification is the new enshittification

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Salesforce is the worst, lol

RIP Heroku.

It was good before SalesForce…

In 2018, I had to transition my org at the time from Heroku to AWS (with the org lacking any AWS experience outside of myself).

We ended up with a “Heroku-like” experience. Push to GitHub. Action triggers job. Job packages and deploys. À la carte yaml config for extras like databases and ALBs. It worked pretty well. It was an in house solution to an in house problem.

Still, it wasn’t quite Heroku…