Who cares about heroku in 2026? It’s a dead horse
An Update on Heroku
181–190 of 366 posts
Re: An Update on Heroku
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
If any Heroku customer is reading this and not immediately going "we need to move off Heroku ASAP" all future problems are their own fault.
That has been the case for a very long time at this point, the Salesforce acquisition was a death knell. The only stuff i have left on Heroku are zombie projects I don't care about.
The Salesforce acquisition closed in 2010, when Heroku was barely three years old.
A whole lot of Heroku's best features shipped after they were acquired. They had a pretty good run under Salesforce for the first few years.
It would be interesting to hear a full oral history of when and where things went wrong after that. I expect the original founders leaving was a major factor.
Re: An Update on Heroku
#183This news from Heroku does not come as any surprise to the people that were there (as I was). Lots of moving parts and second guessing (that I won't share), but one thing I will say is: Incentives matter. The seeds of this outcome were planted years ago when sales comp plans changed. When a sales rep can hit their target by simply converting the way an existing customer gets billed, none of them look for new business…
Most of my career, I've worked for startups and small/medium sized businesses, mostly using Ruby On Rails or Node based stuff for language/frameworks.
In every single company I've worked for in the past 15-20 years in this capacity the biggest focus was to exit heroku as quickly as possible. The reason: Price. You don't get to charge a premium for tooling, especially not when open source tooling exists that lets you use cloud providers without paying "the Heroku Tax".) Is Heroku still using AWS/any cloud provider? They should have rolled their own infrastructure decades ago. Alas, they got bought by a shit show of a company.
(Note: I stopped working in 2023 due to health, and much of my early career was ASP/PHP/.NET)
Re: An Update on Heroku
#184Disclaimer: Founder of northflank.com here so very clearly biased. But if you’re looking for an alternative, reach out. If not, all good. Heroku pioneered what a PaaS could be, alongside Cloud Foundry and others, so I’m genuinely sad to see it go down like this. We built Northflank because we saw enterprises wanting to deploy workloads in their own VPC with Heroku-level simplicity. Over the past 5 years, our mission…
Do you have any public docs on how y'all migrate customers out of Heroku Postgres without downtime? Seems to be the sticking point for a lot of people, myself included.
Crunchy Bridge will help you migrate. They did a great job for us. We had a minute or so of downtime to let the read replica catch up and cut across. The team knows Heroku well, and some of them built it. (No affiliation, just a happy customer.)
Re: An Update on Heroku
#185"We know changes like this can raise questions, and we want to be clear about what this means for customers." Proceeds to not be clear about what this means for customers.
What's not to get? The product is being bumped down in terms of priority so they can focus on AI word salad solutions. They are waiting for enough customers to end their contracts before they discontinue the product altogether.
Re: An Update on Heroku
#186"We know changes like this can raise questions, and we want to be clear about what this means for customers." Proceeds to not be clear about what this means for customers.
As a former enterprise person, this clearly states “exiting growth cycle into low-staffing maintenance mode”; Salesforce must have bought them to kill a price-beating competitor to multi-year Salesforce PaaS contracts, same as Okta did with Auth0. Investors are typically-majority short-sighted and only care about growth-cycle revenue, so once they reached market saturation, they were ripe and duly reaped. So long, He…
You are saying the plan was to buy a "price-beating competitor", invest in them for 16 years, and then finally pull the rug out now?
Re: An Update on Heroku
#187As somebody whose first day working at Heroku was the day this acquisition closed, I think it’s mostly a misconception to blame Salesforce for Heroku’s stagnation and eventual irrelevance. Salesforce gave Heroku a ton of funding to build out a vision that was way ahead of its time. Docker didn’t even come out until 2013, AWS didn’t even have multiple regions when it was built. They mostly served as an investor and left us alone to do our thing, or so it seemed those first couple years.
The launch of the multi language Cedar runtime in 2011 led to incredible growth and by 2012 we were drowning in tech debt and scaling challenges. Despite more than tripling our headcount in that first year (~20 to 74) we could not keep up.
Mid 2012 was especially bad as we were severely impacted by two us-east-1 outages just 2 weeks apart. To the extent it wasn’t already, reliability and paying down tech debt became the main focus and I think we went about 18 months between major user-facing platform launches (Europe region and eventually larger sized dynos being the biggest things we eventually shipped after that drought). The organization lost its ability to ship significant changes or maybe never really had that ability at scale.
That time coincided with the founders taking a step back, leaving a loss of leadership and vision that was filled by people more concerned with process than results. I left in 2014 and at that time it already seemed clear to me that the product was basically stalled.
I’m not sure how much of this could have been done better even in hindsight. In theory Salesforce could have taken a more hands on approach early on but I don’t think that could have ended better. They were so far from profitability in late 2010 that they could not stay independent without raising more funding. The venture market in ~2010 was much smaller than a few years later—tiny rounds and low valuations. Had the company spent its pre-acquisition engineering cycles building for scalability & reliability at the expense of product velocity they probably would have never gotten successful.
Even still, it was the most amazing professional experience of my career, full of brilliant and passionate people, and it’s sad to see it end this way.
Re: An Update on Heroku
#188Wow, I have to admit that I have not heard anyone in the past 2 years or so to be on Heroku so it makes sense. I think they handled it quite well knowing that there most likely have been a steady decline of users. Generally I would avoid promoting myself but in this situation I think it fits the topic. I'm co-founder of a Platform-as-a-Service based in Europe named Ploi Cloud [0]. We focus on web applications working…
Tiny nitpick but you may want to localize the pricing page, in the UK we use . as a separator instead of , - thought you were changing €1000/month for one 1 vCPU!
Appreciate the suggestion, thank you! Definitely not charging that much :-)
Re: An Update on Heroku
#189Spinning up temporary VMs/stateful machines is going to be super valuable in the next year or 2. Heroku not jumping on this just shows the state of Salesforce. Absolutely inept. I foresee slack going down a similar path of enshittification
Thanks for reminding me that slack is owned by Salesforce. What are we going to use when slack turns to shit, IRC again maybe?
type.com (full disclosure I am one of the cofounders)
Re: An Update on Heroku
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a former enterprise person, this clearly states “exiting growth cycle into low-staffing maintenance mode”; Salesforce must have bought them to kill a price-beating competitor to multi-year Salesforce PaaS contracts, same as Okta did with Auth0. Investors are typically-majority short-sighted and only care about growth-cycle revenue, so once they reached market saturation, they were ripe and duly reaped. So long, He…
You are saying the plan was to buy a "price-beating competitor", invest in them for 16 years, and then finally pull the rug out now?
Reminds me of https://youtu.be/T2BY8zZ1CTM?si=XDroWqVD-pElN9si