alt Hacker NewsHeroku is not dead
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> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recent and related:
An Update on Heroku - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46913903 - Feb 2026 (347 comments)
> 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.
If someone has written an article about how $X is not dead, $X is probably dead.
That's too bad.
Why would you use Heroku when platforms like Render/Railway/Northflank exist today?
i used to heard a lot about Heroku, but in the past year, none.
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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.