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
An Update on Heroku
121–130 of 366 posts
Re: An Update on Heroku
#122[deleted]
Re: An Update on Heroku
#123The downfall of Heroku should be studied, they had lightning in a bottle and blew it. Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.
> Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.
This is a common misconception, but it's actually not true. The reality is even more bizarre.
Most of Heroku's successful years came after the acquisition, not before. Heroku was acquired extremely early in its lifecycle, and Salesforce does actually bear responsibility for investing in it and making it the powerhouse it became. Most of what people remember as the glory days of Heroku came long after the acquisition. And in fact, at the time of acquisiton, Heroku was nowhere near as competitive as a product as it later became.
It was only much later on that Salesforce began to pull the supports out from underneath it, leaving it to fall behind and become what it is today.
The narrative of "BigCo™ acquires startup, then leaves it to wither and die" is a trope because it is very commonly true, but it's actually not what happened in this particular case.
Re: An Update on Heroku
#124The 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 is a typical acquisition by the book, always goes the same way after three to five years.
Re: An Update on Heroku
#125>> “ 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.”
Re: An Update on Heroku
#126The downfall of Heroku should be studied, they had lightning in a bottle and blew it. Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.
I remember feeling the same way about Slicehost back in the day after Rackspace acquired them. Loved Slicehost. Not too long after though, Digital Ocean appeared with everything I loved about Slicehost and has kept getting better ever since. I feel like that's Fly.io now. They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities...while improving on pricing, particularly…
I was working for Slicehost at the time, we were a tiny team working our butts off in a loft office in downtown St. Louis, with a few remote employees.
To my understanding there was a runway-growth problem. Could the founders raise and spend (efficiently) enough money quickly enough to keep the business viable? It would be a big gamble and the alternatives were to shut down (no way!) or sell. So they sold.
Rackspace wanted to take Matt’s and Jason’s know how (plus customer base) and go big, really big! That defocused our efforts a bit, plus there were corporate integration headaches (though not too bad). Eventually Linode, already a competitor, and later Digital Ocean filled the void.
Re: An Update on Heroku
#127Railway is the spiritual successor. Fly is great too. I highly recommend both.
I really like Railway, and have deployed many sites with them, but got worried by their recent funding round. At some point those investment bills are going to come due.
What is the concern exactly? (Product/platform enshittification?)
Re: An Update on Heroku
#128slopification is the new enshittification
Re: An Update on Heroku
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the best alternative?
Build.io came out of this exact problem a few years ago (I joined in 25Q4) - trying to be what Heroku could have been if it had continued to evolve. We offer the same default simplicity/speed, but with the ability to go deeper once teams hit scale, cost, or workflow limits. Plus a pricing model that stays understandable and improves as teams scale rather than punishing them for it. Fair warning: the website is pretty…
Do you care to show prices? The true benefit of heroku for me was really predictable pricing model. Build.io website doesn’t have it on mobile site at all. I don’t want to look at demo, i want to hook up my credit card, set a monthly budget and explore
Re: An Update on Heroku
#130"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 am sure that the guy whose name is on the Post didn't even write this himself. Probably some corporate writer using LLM :).
I would love to see the prompt that led to that word salad