I love this article but don't understand the conclusion. Heroku is dead as a doornail, of course.
Salesforce's core product was on bare metal up to a couple years ago. What they should have done is adopt Heroku as their internal Platform-as-a-Service. That would have solved three problems: 1) provided a ready and proven foundation for cloud adoption by Salesforce business units, 2) stimulated Heroku's product roadmap by giving it a very large and loyal design partner, and 3) eliminated the opportunity cost in terms of headcount, developer productivity, and poor imitation that came with the alternative "Falcon" aka "Hyperforce" project that became Salesforce's albatross and black hole for developer energy and goodwill going on 7+ years now.
> 2) stimulated Heroku's product roadmap by giving it a very large and loyal design partner
This is very much a double-edged sword. I've seen products get killed because they had one outsized customer with outsized influence over the product design and made it too specific to that customer rather than building something for everyone the customer would have to adapt to.
If they had, heroku would be very different today, since they aren't even doing enterprise contracts anymore (from what I saw of some other comments here). Maybe that would have been a good thing, maybe not.
> What they should have done is adopt Heroku as their internal Platform-as-a-Service
From what I saw, Heroku was unsuitable for a serious large company. Deploy-on-push is a nice UX for a small company, but once you need something more structured, it wasn't enough.
Can you elaborate on your claim it’s not enough? PasS (platform as a service) has been transformative for modern infrastructure. Containers for better, or worse, have made deployments substantially “easier,” giving every org the ability to provide Heroku like services. But, Heroku provided this sort of ease, and more, long before containers ate the world. And regardless of containers themselves, I fail to see how something “more structured” would even exist. Deploy on push is still subject to being merged and everywhere I’ve worked has had no shortage of checks and approvals to merge.
I previously deployed stuff to Salesforce when I ran a very large Asia-Pacific Salesforce org.
The previous way (prior to SFDX which was clearly influenced by Heroku) was terrible. 12 hour long deploys that end when one unit test times out-style terrible. No code history terrible. There is no way that Heroku was worse for integration.
Whether they could have replaced APEX with Heroku is a different issue.
> Heroku remains an actively supported, production-ready platform, with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational excellence rather than introducing new features [1]
This sentence is what really seals the death for me. I used to be a big Heroku fan. And used them as late as 2023. But tbh it very quickly fell behind the capabilities and devex of products like Supabase and Vercel.
While I agree that it will probably stick around in zombie mode for another decade, if Salesforce doesn't want to improve the product, it will just slowly bleed users until the cost to maintain it is less than the revenue.
Honored to be included, working at Bitscribe actually got me to sign up to HN which subsequently, between working for YC companies and the HN Hiring posts, has driven a significant majority of my career, so it all kind of comes full circle.
I may predate you! We were shared an office with Heroku back during their/our YC days.
Fun memory - James and bitscribe helped me with my prior startup. I remember them brainstorming a 'collaborative IDE' while they helped us set up our servers.
You may have been at bitscribe at the time with pedro and morton?
Heroku <feedback@heroku.com>
Tue, Nov 6, 2007, 1:03 PM
to jason
Hello -
You've been invited to the Heroku beta by your friend james@heroku.com.
They included this message:
--------------------------------------------------
So we're up and running, and can officially talk about our YC funding now. You are probably outside of our audience, but feel free to kick it around and send me any feedback you have. Going to invite Colin and the Bracy's too.
I got you beat, Oct 25, 2007 - the original post I mentioned that they had a bug (a before_filter for authentication on the invite route) so it was unusable before they fixed it based on my report - a classic rails error! Vintage stuff, great nostalgia.
> You may have been at bitscribe at the time with pedro and morton?
It's been so long I had to go back and find my prior post, but I think so!
As someone who has used and enjoyed Heroku off-and-on since 2010, I was rattled by the phrasing of the announcement.
Reading comments about people's challenges and displeasures with Heroku over the years, they have almost never resonated with me. When the complaints were contextualized, I certainly understood them, but they have not been applicable to my needs and experiences.
My current team at work had a meeting about the announcement, and decided to spend gradual time over the next year exploring how we would migrate off Heroku if we must, and running tests of our own alternative infra in pursuit of that. It is also our desire not to need to! Our first-pass assessment of such a migration is that it would (1) be time-consuming at the expensive of other work, (2) be more expensive (in engineering time) than we presently spend, and (3) likely result in worse DX than what Heroku provides.
We definitely don't want to leave, but we also know the professional choice is to be prepared to do so within the next year or two. We would not have had that conversation at all if the announcement had not been so strange. If I have any feedback for the leadership at Salesforce, it would be that: communicate better, because you are pushing otherwise-satisfied customers away.
As someone who moved from Heroku -> App Engine -> Cloud Run, I think you'll appreciate the modern alternatives more. If you remove the cost factor, the development experience within GCP is far superior. Not to mention the security features are great as well.
I think Cloud Run has many nice features that Heroku's apps don't. However, Heroku's services ecosystem and the easy bindings don't have a direct Cloud Run equivalent, imo, and are inferior in the GCP world.
If it works fine and cash flows then sales force would sell it before shutting it down. PE would love to acquire and milk it (and you).
Honestly though it isn’t that hard to go k8s anymore and self host with Argo etc. You can use ChatGPT to figure it all out. Just go bare minimum commodity VPS and use agnostic code as infrastructure like terraform. Then you can just win from the race to the bottom of cost
We know that it isn't intractable, nor is it particularly difficult. However, our particulars are such that Heroku is a small fraction of our expenses, so it simply feels like an annoying distraction from otherwise focusing purely on opportunities for revenue growth.
Totally understand. The existential risk is the main issue. I will say it’s never been easier for software generalists to become competent Devops, treat it like another piece of software you engineer
Exactly. Anyone knows how corporations make decisions knows this announcement was lighting a fuse on the bomb. It's just one strategic vision rethink or executive team change away from exploding. They have no long term reason to keep it alive which means it's only a distraction.
I'd like to agree with this, but I sadly don't. I'd like to agree because we've been Heroku customers for about 18 years - which is wild to think about. I've used Heroku both personally and professionally day-in, day-out for over a decade.
We've been on self service and we've been on enterprise contracts. In the last 2 years I believe we've cycled through about seven account managers. Heroku as a concept might not be dead, but if you release an incredibly empty announcement saying there's no new enterprise contracts and existing ones may be renewed, enterprise Heroku is absolutely dead and I'd suggest it means Heroku as the current product is dead too.
Any Heroku user that has been at the level of an enterprise user before, or who currently is, would be ringing alarm bells at the current situation. It doesn't matter about the internal good will of employees - if you have a blog post hanging your enterprise customers out to dry (ironically as enterprise customers we have received zero communication from Heroku about this) after a year of terrible stability - you're really doing a great job of killing the whole thing.
> Heroku remains an actively supported, production-ready platform, with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational excellence
Anyone that has used Heroku for a while will know that it is far less reliable today than it has been at nearly any point in its history (it's the least reliable since its first year of existence, imo). There is very little "operational excellence" left as an organization. All you need to do is look at how they communicated (or extreme lack-thereof) a critical outage that lasted for hours last year[1]
As an organization, we've put up with terrible reliability over the last couple of years, and swallowed cost increases every renewal and we've always been committed. That's changed in the last few days - we've tried out Railway and Northflank, and we'll continue to try out a few other services until we find the one that fits. We're lucky, we have about 9 months left on our contract and that gives us enough time to move.
The market has clearly passed it by. I was a huge Heroku fan. It even inspired my first startup in 2014 (basically a healthcare tech version of Heroku). At the time, I thought it was the future, and found messing around in AWS, etc., too time-consuming and unnecessary. That was when Rails was all the rage.
No disrespect to the author but I'm sorry, it's dead for all intents and purposes. No one should consider it for new projects and existing projects should be looking for the exit.
> Heroku is not dead, it's changing.
Mmk, changing into something no one should use. They were struggling to keep up before the Salesforce acquisition and have only gone further down hill after that.
There was a time that Heroku was king, it was so easy to get started, and while it was always expensive, at least it was cutting edge. Then they lost that edge and many other, better, alternatives took their place (this was pre-acquisition).
At best Heroku is in maintenance mode at this point (if that).
There's such a long history of Heroku in this post, which isn't bad per-say, but the post is lacking any evidence or insight to support the title. I'm not sure if the point is to say "I know a lot about Heroku, so trust me" but it comes off like that.
> All I can say is: it sounds to me like there is hope, as a lot of these pains are being addressed actively.
If you're coming for the title, I think reading the above quote is sufficient.
Not developing new features means firing the engineering team, supporting it with a skeleton crew of the cheapest available labour. The press release was refreshingly honest about this, at least in CEO-speak.
"Not dead" might be a technical truth, but "on life support" would be my analogy. As soon as it stops being profitable, or the owner wants to push users of to a more profitable platform, they'll pull the plug.
In terms of Ops planning, Heroku is a toxic target platform now, full of risk (more than it was before, at any rate). I wouldn't touch it for a new project and would definitely have plans in place to move anything I have there off.
Like when a football club's board puts out a statement saying they're "fully behind the manager", this is code for "we're firing him in a few weeks and are actively interviewing replacements".
Having Robbo's full support is often the last sound people hear. They just hear they have Robbo's full confidence and a nice man pops a bag over their head.
I signed an enterprise deal a week before the announcement. Here is what Heroku provides that I can't find anywhere else.
1. Deal under the SF Master Contract (I have one AE/SE to yell at and am treated like a major customer due to our overall spend. Heroku is only 1% of our overall SF spend)
2. Best support for C# apps
3. Heroku Connect provides a Postgres endpoint for SF Data (No need to mess with API's or Mulesoft)
4. Applink allows me to call apps running on Heroku (No need to mess with API's or Mulesoft)
Right now, I am sticking with Heroku.
I know most of their product team was gutted, so I don't know what is going to happen long term. Time will tell (And yes, I have started looking at alternatives)
PS: If you know of a provider who can provide all the above 4, let me know
> Then I talked to my friends who still work there, and I don't think Heroku is dead.
Seeing as Heroku doesn't do any enterprise contracts anymore I'm curious how they're going to afford the project. But I guess just saying "it's not dead" fixed that problem.
I love this article but don't understand the conclusion. Heroku is dead as a doornail, of course.
Salesforce's core product was on bare metal up to a couple years ago. What they should have done is adopt Heroku as their internal Platform-as-a-Service. That would have solved three problems: 1) provided a ready and proven foundation for cloud adoption by Salesforce business units, 2) stimulated Heroku's product roadmap by giving it a very large and loyal design partner, and 3) eliminated the opportunity cost in terms of headcount, developer productivity, and poor imitation that came with the alternative "Falcon" aka "Hyperforce" project that became Salesforce's albatross and black hole for developer energy and goodwill going on 7+ years now.
> 2) stimulated Heroku's product roadmap by giving it a very large and loyal design partner
This is very much a double-edged sword. I've seen products get killed because they had one outsized customer with outsized influence over the product design and made it too specific to that customer rather than building something for everyone the customer would have to adapt to.
If they had, heroku would be very different today, since they aren't even doing enterprise contracts anymore (from what I saw of some other comments here). Maybe that would have been a good thing, maybe not.
> What they should have done is adopt Heroku as their internal Platform-as-a-Service
From what I saw, Heroku was unsuitable for a serious large company. Deploy-on-push is a nice UX for a small company, but once you need something more structured, it wasn't enough.
Can you elaborate on your claim it’s not enough? PasS (platform as a service) has been transformative for modern infrastructure. Containers for better, or worse, have made deployments substantially “easier,” giving every org the ability to provide Heroku like services. But, Heroku provided this sort of ease, and more, long before containers ate the world. And regardless of containers themselves, I fail to see how something “more structured” would even exist. Deploy on push is still subject to being merged and everywhere I’ve worked has had no shortage of checks and approvals to merge.
That lacks imagination. There's no corporate workflow that can't ultimately translate to moving git tags.
Perhaps, but why should one do it when it's a bad model ? Jury because it's possible ?
How did you objectively decide it's a bad model?
Because it's more enterprise to open a Service Now ticket and have Joe from IT upload the new content using FTP.
I subjectively did based on my experience.
Except you want to track what went to production and what didn't and for how long
Releases of a Heroku app is tracked by the platform, and both shown the the UI, in the CLI and available in the API.
Git is remarkably good at tracking history. CI systems are also great at showing history.
I previously deployed stuff to Salesforce when I ran a very large Asia-Pacific Salesforce org.
The previous way (prior to SFDX which was clearly influenced by Heroku) was terrible. 12 hour long deploys that end when one unit test times out-style terrible. No code history terrible. There is no way that Heroku was worse for integration.
Whether they could have replaced APEX with Heroku is a different issue.
> Heroku remains an actively supported, production-ready platform, with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational excellence rather than introducing new features [1]
This sentence is what really seals the death for me. I used to be a big Heroku fan. And used them as late as 2023. But tbh it very quickly fell behind the capabilities and devex of products like Supabase and Vercel.
While I agree that it will probably stick around in zombie mode for another decade, if Salesforce doesn't want to improve the product, it will just slowly bleed users until the cost to maintain it is less than the revenue.
[1] https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
Concur. I was the first user[1] but not using it any more, sadly. It's been dead to me for about 5 years, functionally.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31349536
Wow we have to add that post to https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights!
(Unfortunately the only way to view that list is reverse-chronological but we'll eventually change that)
Honored to be included, working at Bitscribe actually got me to sign up to HN which subsequently, between working for YC companies and the HN Hiring posts, has driven a significant majority of my career, so it all kind of comes full circle.
I may predate you! We were shared an office with Heroku back during their/our YC days.
Fun memory - James and bitscribe helped me with my prior startup. I remember them brainstorming a 'collaborative IDE' while they helped us set up our servers.
You may have been at bitscribe at the time with pedro and morton?
Heroku <feedback@heroku.com> Tue, Nov 6, 2007, 1:03 PM to jason
Hello -
You've been invited to the Heroku beta by your friend james@heroku.com.
They included this message: -------------------------------------------------- So we're up and running, and can officially talk about our YC funding now. You are probably outside of our audience, but feel free to kick it around and send me any feedback you have. Going to invite Colin and the Bracy's too.
--------------------------------------------------
Heroku lets you create web applications right in your web browser. Follow the link to activate your account, then create Rails apps instantly:
http://heroku.com/core/invitation/accept/6d1c4cdb60
To learn more about Heroku, check out our public website:
http://heroku.com/
Have fun, and don't hesitate to drop us a line with your comments or questions.
- James, Adam, and Orion
I got you beat, Oct 25, 2007 - the original post I mentioned that they had a bug (a before_filter for authentication on the invite route) so it was unusable before they fixed it based on my report - a classic rails error! Vintage stuff, great nostalgia.
> You may have been at bitscribe at the time with pedro and morton?
It's been so long I had to go back and find my prior post, but I think so!
And then some senior leader will say some bullshit about not being a growth driver and just being a distraction and done, killed off.
As someone who has used and enjoyed Heroku off-and-on since 2010, I was rattled by the phrasing of the announcement.
Reading comments about people's challenges and displeasures with Heroku over the years, they have almost never resonated with me. When the complaints were contextualized, I certainly understood them, but they have not been applicable to my needs and experiences.
My current team at work had a meeting about the announcement, and decided to spend gradual time over the next year exploring how we would migrate off Heroku if we must, and running tests of our own alternative infra in pursuit of that. It is also our desire not to need to! Our first-pass assessment of such a migration is that it would (1) be time-consuming at the expensive of other work, (2) be more expensive (in engineering time) than we presently spend, and (3) likely result in worse DX than what Heroku provides.
We definitely don't want to leave, but we also know the professional choice is to be prepared to do so within the next year or two. We would not have had that conversation at all if the announcement had not been so strange. If I have any feedback for the leadership at Salesforce, it would be that: communicate better, because you are pushing otherwise-satisfied customers away.
As someone who moved from Heroku -> App Engine -> Cloud Run, I think you'll appreciate the modern alternatives more. If you remove the cost factor, the development experience within GCP is far superior. Not to mention the security features are great as well.
I think Cloud Run has many nice features that Heroku's apps don't. However, Heroku's services ecosystem and the easy bindings don't have a direct Cloud Run equivalent, imo, and are inferior in the GCP world.
If it works fine and cash flows then sales force would sell it before shutting it down. PE would love to acquire and milk it (and you).
Honestly though it isn’t that hard to go k8s anymore and self host with Argo etc. You can use ChatGPT to figure it all out. Just go bare minimum commodity VPS and use agnostic code as infrastructure like terraform. Then you can just win from the race to the bottom of cost
We know that it isn't intractable, nor is it particularly difficult. However, our particulars are such that Heroku is a small fraction of our expenses, so it simply feels like an annoying distraction from otherwise focusing purely on opportunities for revenue growth.
Totally understand. The existential risk is the main issue. I will say it’s never been easier for software generalists to become competent Devops, treat it like another piece of software you engineer
They stopped signing new enterprise contracts. Enterprise contracts are what pay the bills in most PAAS/SAAS offerings.
If it's not dead now, it'll die soon enough.
Exactly. Anyone knows how corporations make decisions knows this announcement was lighting a fuse on the bomb. It's just one strategic vision rethink or executive team change away from exploding. They have no long term reason to keep it alive which means it's only a distraction.
I'd like to agree with this, but I sadly don't. I'd like to agree because we've been Heroku customers for about 18 years - which is wild to think about. I've used Heroku both personally and professionally day-in, day-out for over a decade.
We've been on self service and we've been on enterprise contracts. In the last 2 years I believe we've cycled through about seven account managers. Heroku as a concept might not be dead, but if you release an incredibly empty announcement saying there's no new enterprise contracts and existing ones may be renewed, enterprise Heroku is absolutely dead and I'd suggest it means Heroku as the current product is dead too.
Any Heroku user that has been at the level of an enterprise user before, or who currently is, would be ringing alarm bells at the current situation. It doesn't matter about the internal good will of employees - if you have a blog post hanging your enterprise customers out to dry (ironically as enterprise customers we have received zero communication from Heroku about this) after a year of terrible stability - you're really doing a great job of killing the whole thing.
> Heroku remains an actively supported, production-ready platform, with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational excellence
Anyone that has used Heroku for a while will know that it is far less reliable today than it has been at nearly any point in its history (it's the least reliable since its first year of existence, imo). There is very little "operational excellence" left as an organization. All you need to do is look at how they communicated (or extreme lack-thereof) a critical outage that lasted for hours last year[1]
As an organization, we've put up with terrible reliability over the last couple of years, and swallowed cost increases every renewal and we've always been committed. That's changed in the last few days - we've tried out Railway and Northflank, and we'll continue to try out a few other services until we find the one that fits. We're lucky, we have about 9 months left on our contract and that gives us enough time to move.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44233923
Recent and related:
An Update on Heroku - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46913903 - Feb 2026 (347 comments)
The market has clearly passed it by. I was a huge Heroku fan. It even inspired my first startup in 2014 (basically a healthcare tech version of Heroku). At the time, I thought it was the future, and found messing around in AWS, etc., too time-consuming and unnecessary. That was when Rails was all the rage.
> At the time, I thought it was the future, and found messing around in AWS, etc., too time-consuming and unnecessary.
Sounds like you were right on both counts?
No disrespect to the author but I'm sorry, it's dead for all intents and purposes. No one should consider it for new projects and existing projects should be looking for the exit.
> Heroku is not dead, it's changing.
Mmk, changing into something no one should use. They were struggling to keep up before the Salesforce acquisition and have only gone further down hill after that.
There was a time that Heroku was king, it was so easy to get started, and while it was always expensive, at least it was cutting edge. Then they lost that edge and many other, better, alternatives took their place (this was pre-acquisition).
At best Heroku is in maintenance mode at this point (if that).
There's such a long history of Heroku in this post, which isn't bad per-say, but the post is lacking any evidence or insight to support the title. I'm not sure if the point is to say "I know a lot about Heroku, so trust me" but it comes off like that.
> All I can say is: it sounds to me like there is hope, as a lot of these pains are being addressed actively.
If you're coming for the title, I think reading the above quote is sufficient.
Not developing new features means firing the engineering team, supporting it with a skeleton crew of the cheapest available labour. The press release was refreshingly honest about this, at least in CEO-speak.
"Not dead" might be a technical truth, but "on life support" would be my analogy. As soon as it stops being profitable, or the owner wants to push users of to a more profitable platform, they'll pull the plug.
In terms of Ops planning, Heroku is a toxic target platform now, full of risk (more than it was before, at any rate). I wouldn't touch it for a new project and would definitely have plans in place to move anything I have there off.
It's pining for the fjords
Thanks, I came here to check if this comment had already been posted and was not disappointed.
Care to enlighten the rest of us on the inside joke here?
Monty Python - Dead Parrot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vuW6tQ0218
Thank you! Such an apt reference. Made my day
I moved off Heroku to Neon + Hetzner today.
I asked Claude to build /provision-server and /deploy skills. It was way easier than it should’ve been.
My infra costs on this one project have gone from $1200 to <$200/mo.
Neon is awesome, with lightweight branching and instant restores.
Heroku is most definitely dead.
Why would you use Heroku when platforms like Render/Railway/Northflank exist today?
If someone has written an article about how $X is not dead, $X is probably dead.
Like when a football club's board puts out a statement saying they're "fully behind the manager", this is code for "we're firing him in a few weeks and are actively interviewing replacements".
Having Robbo's full support is often the last sound people hear. They just hear they have Robbo's full confidence and a nice man pops a bag over their head.
I signed an enterprise deal a week before the announcement. Here is what Heroku provides that I can't find anywhere else.
1. Deal under the SF Master Contract (I have one AE/SE to yell at and am treated like a major customer due to our overall spend. Heroku is only 1% of our overall SF spend)
2. Best support for C# apps
3. Heroku Connect provides a Postgres endpoint for SF Data (No need to mess with API's or Mulesoft)
4. Applink allows me to call apps running on Heroku (No need to mess with API's or Mulesoft)
Right now, I am sticking with Heroku.
I know most of their product team was gutted, so I don't know what is going to happen long term. Time will tell (And yes, I have started looking at alternatives)
PS: If you know of a provider who can provide all the above 4, let me know
i used to heard a lot about Heroku, but in the past year, none.
That's too bad.
> Then I talked to my friends who still work there, and I don't think Heroku is dead.
Seeing as Heroku doesn't do any enterprise contracts anymore I'm curious how they're going to afford the project. But I guess just saying "it's not dead" fixed that problem.
[dead]
[dead]