Why did Heroku fail?

Two reasons:

* expensive to scale

* developer limitations

This limited it to smaller scale projects, MVPs, proof of concepts where paying a little more for a certain range of developer productivity makes sense. Such is the case with rapid development platforms in general. When you grow you shift to wholesale-priced primitives that give you more control.

This title seems very premature, and the article itself doesn't justify it well. While there are reasons to not use Heroku (pricing, the security debacle) and be annoyed with them, I don't see any signs of them losing their position in their sector of the market yet. They are still the go-to if you're in the "small-size project, don't want hassle, set up everything for me please" space.

They might lose that position in the future due to many missteps, but at this point it's like asking "why did Microsoft fail?". It didn't. It might not be what it was, but it's still a pretty successful concern, and same goes for Heroku.

Having alternatives is very cool. I did migrate an app to Render, motivated by Heroku's recent security woes. But in the process of doing so, I realized that Heroku has accumulated a lot of plugins, conveniences etc. over the years. If Heroku dropped their prices to be a bit less egregious, I probably wouldn't bother moving.

It will take quite a while before anybody can match them on convenience, and eg. Render is definitely not there yet - it has the basics down and done right, and if the basics are enough for you, it'll work. But a lot of things you get out of the box one-click support for in Heroku will be a manual setup on the alternative PaaSes, with a community wiki article to guide you at best.

I mean, fair enough, if that is true then respect to you. But I just figured it might come off as tasteless and maybe not a good idea to represent Heroku with.

The core product (not data) was so mired in tech debt, scaling challenges, and operational burden post-Cedar that we didn’t ship any major new features for ~18mo.

Finally shipping something major (the Europe region) was a massive effort with a lot of internal political struggles, as was performance dynos. That was why I left, because the writing was on the wall that an organization which had atrophied its ability & urgency to ship new product was not one that could continue to innovate in a meaningful way. Not to mention that headcount was already being starved at this point, so you couldn’t throw people at the problems.

I don’t think most people realize just how small the headcount working on the core platform product was, like 8-15 people for the whole time after acquisition.

There were a handful of additional big successes like private spaces, compliance certifications, metrics, etc driven by the few remaining people with the burning will to really push stuff forward. But eventually those people moved on, and by that point the company had already lost SFDC’s interest even though revenue growth and profitability had finally come around.

Forever thankful for the core group of amazing people like you that I was fortunate to spend a few years living the dream with. I’m glad I appreciated how special it was at the time!