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.
> 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?
You've been invited to the Heroku beta by your friend [email protected].
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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31349536
(Unfortunately the only way to view that list is reverse-chronological but we'll eventually change that)
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 <[email protected]> Tue, Nov 6, 2007, 1:03 PM to jason
Hello -
You've been invited to the Heroku beta by your friend [email protected].
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
> 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!
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.
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
If it's not dead now, it'll die soon enough.
> 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.
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
Sounds like you were right on both counts?
An Update on Heroku - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46913903 - Feb 2026 (347 comments)