[HN Gopher] An Update on Heroku
___________________________________________________________________
An Update on Heroku
Author : lstoll
Score : 218 points
Date : 2026-02-06 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.heroku.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.heroku.com)
| slices wrote:
| Just about to set up a new app to deploy to Heroku, but this does
| not seem promising. Render seems like the next logical move, but
| curious where others are looking for alternatives.
| Tankenstein wrote:
| I moved to render years ago and have been very happy with the
| decision. It feels like heroku, if it never got acquired by
| salesforce and kept improving.
| guzik wrote:
| yes,, render feels like the most natural next step right now
| (similar mental model). Still kind of nostalgic about Heroku,
| had really good times with it.
| hboon wrote:
| Yes, Render if you want something similar.
| quentindanjou wrote:
| Railway for backend APIs. Render for front-end apps. That's my
| current go-to.
|
| Although I would consider, _when possible_, using Vercel or
| Netlify.
| nightpool wrote:
| Why/when do you use Railway over Render?
| quentindanjou wrote:
| When bandwidth matters, when you don't want to over or
| under provision, when you need multiple seats: if you make
| a project with a small team, Render is going to be quite
| expensive because of the cost of each seat while Railway
| offers unlimited seats for they paid plans. Just the whole
| pricing is different, I found myself more leaning into
| Railway when doing calculations.
| nop_slide wrote:
| why split, you could use railway and render for both front
| end and back end
| quentindanjou wrote:
| Sorry, I wasn't saying you should split, I wanted to say
| that depending on what type of apps you are more leaning
| into one makes a bit more sense than the other. Render with
| their own CDN is quite good for frontend apps. In
| comparison, the whole config and auto scalling/provisioning
| of Railway makes it easier for backend app.
|
| Of course you can do both with both of these services.
| g8oz wrote:
| "transitioning to a sustaining engineering model". I don't care
| what anyone says, it takes real talent to come up with lines like
| this.
| sarreph wrote:
| Surely it's a typo and they meant "sustainable"?
|
| Otherwise IMO such an odd word choice. Definition:
|
| >> providing physical or mental strength or support
| sebiw wrote:
| Sustaining as in sustaining their shareholders.
| shortsightedsid wrote:
| Sustaining is used in Engineering to mean that it's now post-
| GA and there is no further development. The platform is not
| End of Life but there are no more features planned.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| It's like PBS, they are going to beg for your money now with a
| sustaining engineering membership
| kenforthewin wrote:
| We've been optimizing for decades to engineer the bullshit-
| generating super-soldiers required to craft modern PR
| statements.
| earless1 wrote:
| From a business perspective, this means they will not be
| investing in innovation on the platform anymore. Instead, they
| will focus their efforts on maintaining the current operations
| and keeping the lights on.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| From a business perspective the have brought it out to the
| field with a shotgun.
| awestroke wrote:
| As opposed to the relentless innovation they have
| demonstrated in the past 5+ years? /s
| paxys wrote:
| Heroku has been running in this mode for a long time. The
| only difference is they made it official.
| throwoutway wrote:
| Could have just said we will Keep the Lights on
| ceejayoz wrote:
| This reads more like "we won't deliberately turn the lights
| _off_ ... but they're probably gonna break on their own
| eventually".
| danudey wrote:
| The lights will stay on until they burn out or the power
| goes off, or someone bumps the light switch or steals the
| light bulbs.
| bityard wrote:
| In a company I used to work for, "sustaining engineering" was
| the team of developers that handled all of the bugs and issues
| reported by customers on old-but-still-technically-supported
| versions of the products. (The ones who worked on current
| versions of the products where just "engineering.")
|
| So basically heroku will fix whatever is broken, but don't
| expect any new features or development.
| codegeek wrote:
| I am sure that the guy whose name is on the Post didn't even
| write this himself. Probably some corporate writer using LLM
| :).
| slices wrote:
| I would love to see the prompt that led to that word salad
| BillinghamJ wrote:
| Seems strange not to just... say nothing and merely remove any
| mentions of an enterprise offering from the website.
|
| All this blog post can do is make people nervous and lead to
| customers moving elsewhere. Revenue will drop, and further
| compound their desire to not invest in the platform. What's the
| benefit/upside in publishing such an article?
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| > lead to customers moving elsewhere
|
| Since they're no longer accepting new enterprise clients, maybe
| this is intentional.
| CPLX wrote:
| I think they'd be happy if all the customers moved on. They
| just don't want to upset enterprise customers.
| simonw wrote:
| I wonder how much money Salesforce would need to sell what's left
| of Heroku to a better steward.
| petcat wrote:
| My understanding is that Heroku is just an AWS reseller. I
| don't know if there's a lot of value in a PaaS piggy-backing on
| another PaaS anymore. Especially for Salesforce.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I don't see AWS as a PaaS at all. Heroku's selling point has
| always been how it makes everything way easier.
| simonw wrote:
| There's a ton of value right now in the existing customers.
| None of them want to put effort into migrating away from
| Heroku if they can avoid it.
| wqtz wrote:
| It would be impossible to buy a company as a steward. We worked
| with them. In the early 2020s, their teams were as lazy as IBM
| boomers. Happy to hop on a call, but let's do an rain check or
| whatever and come back to you after 17 weeks to say no in an
| email CCed with 42 people playing hot potato between commercial
| people who try their best to sound technical. You need a mind
| map to know which person you were talking to and who introduced
| you to them.
|
| My money is on holding companies like IAC buying the brand
| first through financial engineering and restructuring finances
| initially. They would load it up with debt like they did with
| the sporting goods store in Sopranos.
|
| Afterward, they would sell it to a Euro-based caretaking
| company like Bending Spoons, with a focus on maintenance
| engineering rather than innovation engineering.
| sebiw wrote:
| > helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a
| secure and trusted way
|
| > Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new
| customers
|
| Seems contradictory or I just don't understand how they do
| product management.
|
| My opinion: Heroku had its time but then stagnated heavily in
| keeping up with what was going on around it. With the rise of
| Container as a Service platforms there now were a multitude of
| more cost-efficient and flexible alternatives which were
| comparable to the service Heroku offered.
| nightpool wrote:
| Translation: We're going to reassign the engineers into
| Salesforce AI.
| sebiw wrote:
| Huh, so that's what they mean when using the word "we". "We"
| is not Heroku, it's Salesforce.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| I thought if you were all in on AI you wouldn't need
| engineers - just swarms of agents doing everything. :)
| sc68cal wrote:
| It's such a shame, because they had one of the best services
| out there. Being able to push via Git and end up with a running
| deployment was a killer feature. It may not have been the first
| (Elastic Beanstalk was way older but when it first came out it
| was Java only iirc, ick) but it was incredibly popular.
|
| Seeing them now chasing AI as a "me too" after being acquired
| by Salesforce just shows that huge companies will acquire
| something then sit on it for years and let it rot.
| sebiw wrote:
| Yup, their Git Push Deployment was really a killer concept
| and a huge gateway for people just writing good apps not
| needing to care about infra and still being able to get a
| production-ready setup.
| sm123 wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. That "git push and you're live" moment
| removed a huge amount of accidental complexity, and it's
| been the guiding experience behind what we're building at
| Build.io.
| simonw wrote:
| "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.
| dmathieu wrote:
| It means: go elsewhere, they're dead.
| an0malous wrote:
| What's the best alternative?
| syx wrote:
| Moved from heroku to fly.io three years ago and I don't
| regret it, great platform occasionally goes down and
| requires a bit of attention but the support forum is great
| actsasbuffoon wrote:
| I had an issue with one of my Sprites (Fly.io also runs
| sprites.dev) and the CEO responded to me personally in
| less than 10 minutes. They got it fixed quickly.
|
| I was a free customer at the time. I pay for it happily
| now.
| an0malous wrote:
| It didn't seem quite as fire-and-forget as doing `Heroku
| create` when I tried to use it 3-4 years ago, especially
| the database setup. Do you use their Postgres offering?
| mindwok wrote:
| Fly.io are absolute G's. The product is awesome and the
| tech blogs they write are fantastic.
| sm123 wrote:
| 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 light right now. It's
| mostly a placeholder while we prep a broader push over the
| few months. Happy to answer questions here if helpful.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Not to be confused with builder.io, or worse, builder.ai
| llIIllIIllIIl wrote:
| 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
| runako wrote:
| FWIW it doesn't look like pricing or details of the
| service offerings are available on the desktop site,
| either.
| sm123 wrote:
| llIIllIIllIIl & runako give me an email on
| steven[at]build.io and I'll share. As mentioned, we
| stripped the site back while we overhaul and we certainly
| didn't expect this today!
| satvikpendem wrote:
| If you like VPS, Hetzner with Dokploy. It works great, the
| UI has essentially all the features of Fly or Render that
| you'd use for deployment, like preview build URLs and
| environments.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Very close to the worst alternative for people who
| actually need Heroku, but it won't stop people from
| plugging it to death and back.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Eh, no, depends on why you used Heroku in the first
| place. Way back when, I used it because the UI was dead
| simple and it Just Worked(tm). If I can replicate that
| with a VPS and have a good UI around it that takes care
| of everything, it's functionally the same to me.
| runako wrote:
| Digital Ocean App Engine has the easy setup and GUI
| management that made Heroku popular.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Holy crap is this underselling how poorly this announcement is
| structured. Not only does it not provide clarity, it words
| things in such a way that it just begs more questions. "There
| are no changes for now"....
| Daviey wrote:
| "sustaining engineering model"
|
| ie, life support.. bit rot will set in, they are dead.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| > including helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-
| grade AI in a secure and trusted way.
|
| Baffling
| Macha wrote:
| It saves face with investors to say you're shuttering a
| product to focus on the hot new thing as a strategic decision
| than to say you're shuttering it because your actions have
| led it to be unviable.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| toyg wrote:
| 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.
| altairprime wrote:
| 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, Heroku.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Oh, they're very clear, just not explicit.
| dainiusse wrote:
| Was this written by llm?
| sebiw wrote:
| Dogfooding their future products!
| realusername wrote:
| This blog post is peak comedy. Heroku is half abandoned, I
| expected the post to be something like "we're sunsetting Heroku"
| before clicking and what we get instead is about AI.
| CPLX wrote:
| They are discontinuing it, you were right.
| easton wrote:
| I just got some Heroku socks like two months ago at an event,
| they must've killed it at the start of the year. Weird.
| swader999 wrote:
| They will still raise prices when renewal time comes around.
| bluedino wrote:
| Sad day. Was such an amazing product and gave a start to so many
| companies back then.
| xXSLAYERXx wrote:
| It was the easiest place to host my Rails apps back in the day.
| ProfessorZoom wrote:
| more like herok-who?
| prodigycorp wrote:
| This may be the worst piece of corporate communication that I've
| _ever_ seen.
| wlonkly wrote:
| I found myself wondering where the rest of it went.
| PanMan wrote:
| It really surprises me there isn't a modern heroku alternative
| that supports the same.. things. Like build pipelines, routing
| included, multiple worker types. AWS is way less batteries
| included. And none of the competitors seems to offer the same
| kind of service, last time I looked.
| culi wrote:
| I think there's a couple decent alternatives out there:
| https://alternativeto.net/software/heroku/
|
| There are also a lot of cool "self-hosted Heroku" alternatives
|
| - Coolify (PHP) (2020) https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify
|
| - Dokku (Go) (2013) https://github.com/dokku/dokku
|
| - Dokploy (TypeScript) (2024)
| https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy
|
| - CapRover (TypeScript) (2017)
| https://github.com/caprover/caprover
|
| - Komodo (Rust) (2022) https://github.com/moghtech/komodo
| ezekg wrote:
| Literally nobody who seriously uses Heroku wants to self-host
| their own Heroku.
| emilsedgh wrote:
| We had an enterprise account on Heroku. We invested a
| little in Dokku and moved to self host it as of a few
| months ago.
|
| We now have a kubernetes (k3s) backed Dokku self hosted on
| Hetzner. Significantly cheaper but pretty robust.
|
| Just saying that it's not literally, but you are right,
| most people wouldn't be interested in self hosting.
| esseph wrote:
| What DO you want?
| PanMan wrote:
| Thanks for the reply! Most of these (also on the
| alternativeto) are self-hosted, which is different from
| having heroku do it. Also most only support webservers, while
| the majority of our servers aren't web..
| airsat18 wrote:
| northflank comes close
| Robdel12 wrote:
| Salesforce is the worst, lol
| xnx wrote:
| Not at all surprising, but a real shame. Nothing that I know of
| has come close to the ease of the "Deploy to Heroku" button.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| It's nice that they would admit this, but it seems a little
| strange that they would. Why not just never add new features and
| let people figure it out on their own? A big statement like this
| seems more like implicitly killing the platform, which is what
| they say they aren't doing.
|
| I guess the best way to interpret this is that they are killing
| the platform over time but they don't want to kill it right now
| since money is still coming in and it would make too many
| customers mad.
| nelsonfigueroa wrote:
| The corporate speak is crazy. I think the update boils down to
| this sentence:
|
| > Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new
| customers
| jbm wrote:
| Yeah I agree. I saw someone say that they were not in KTLO
| mode, but this seems pretty bad, especially considering it
| happening at Salesforce.
| kristapsmors wrote:
| chatgpt translation: Heroku isn't shutting down, but they're
| basically done building new stuff. For those who want to move and
| potentially save $ in process, here is a nice cost comparison:
| https://infraslash.com/costs/
| kuczmama wrote:
| This is a sad day. I used heroku for years (in the past).
|
| A few alternatives to consider
|
| - https://render.com/ - this is very close to heroku
|
| - https://coolify.io/ - My personal favorite. It's slightly more
| involved, but you can run it on any hardware like hetzner and
| save a boatload.
| swat535 wrote:
| How does render compare to fly.io? Does anyone has experience
| running production rails apps on these?
| ojusave wrote:
| https://render.com/articles/render-vs-fly-io
| hakanensari wrote:
| So they are going into maintenance mode?
| mixtureoftakes wrote:
| i am impressed. no ai can ever write announements this bad
| awad wrote:
| For those not as well-versed in corporate PR....Salesforce are
| going to do just the bare minimum to keep the service going until
| the revenue dries up (or some > 0 $$ threshold where it just
| doesn't financially make sense to keep it running).
|
| Pour one out for Heroku as they were truly a revelation back in
| the day and one of the most magical experiences ever on first
| run.
| czhu12 wrote:
| I've been developing an open source Heroku alternative so we may
| never again be gouged for nice deployment pipelines.
|
| https://canine.sh
|
| It supports all the quality of life features like opening a shell
| via a cli, which I found was one of my favorite parts of Heroku
| (canine run --myproject /bin/bash)
|
| Been fortunate enough to get a sponsorship from the Portainer
| folks, which allows me to maintain and develop full time!
| Trasmatta wrote:
| This is such a weird press release that totally obscures what
| it's trying to say. Just use clear and concise language and treat
| your customers like adults.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| It's a bit surprising, one would have thought that with the event
| of accessible coding through agents, such site deployment sites
| would prosper.
| hoherd wrote:
| Didn't you read the last line of the announcement? They have
| enterprise AI dollars to chase! Salesforce wants some of them
| billions. Gotta make up for the 42% their stock price has
| dipped in the last 12 months.
| sleight42 wrote:
| Exactly this. Missed opportunity.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| Heroku (YC W08) was acquired by Salesforce all the way back in
| 2010 [0], a little over 15 years ago. A lot of people forget
| that, and assume the acquisition was somewhat recent.
|
| Pretty illuminating reading the thread from 2010, it was big news
| at the time.
|
| 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1982489
| sleight42 wrote:
| Salesforce mostly left Heroku to do its own thing for a long
| time. Since that changed, dumpster fire.
| anyfactor wrote:
| This is surprising to me. I actively used Heroku during the
| early to mid 2010s. I do not remember ever seeing the
| Salesforce logo there much later.
| craigkerstiens wrote:
| It sounds like there were pretty broad layoffs which impacted a
| lot more than just a focus on enterprise contracts. It wasn't
| "just" a few enterprise sales people. Engineering may have indeed
| been the least impacted, but this sounds like biggest round of
| layoffs to hit Heroku since its inception, not just some right
| sizing from over hiring.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I used to be a fan of Heroku when I started working web apps...
| The deployments were so easy, but I became numb to the actual
| task of dealing with the complexities of a deployment, when they
| killed the free tier I struggled for a while... I work with
| Rails, and I used to bitch a lot about how hard it was to deploy
| an app, but in retrospective I kind of thank Salesforce for
| murdering their own product.
|
| Now I deploy at my leisure with stuff like Dokku, or Kamal,
| directly on a 5 bucks VM on a fresh Linux box in 10 minutes flat.
| I wrote a nice web app that wraps around Dokku and manage the
| stack much in the same way I did before with Heroku... I'm much
| happier and I learned a ton on the way.
| barkerja wrote:
| Just please don't sunset Heroku Connect
| decidertm wrote:
| Disclaimer: 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 has been solving the graduation problem
| where companies outgrow their PaaS and have to eventually
| migrate.
|
| Northflank runs in your VPC (AWS/GCP/Azure/OCI) with the same
| git-push experience. We have customers ranging from small
| startups to governments and public companies who would've
| otherwise built their own internal developer platform. They
| either use Northflank as-is in their own cloud or use our API to
| build their IDP on top of it.
|
| Most common use cases are preview environments and production
| workloads. Happy to answer questions and throw in some credits if
| you're evaluating alternatives.
| ezekg wrote:
| 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.
| decidertm wrote:
| hey!
|
| northflank supports the same buildpacks that you run on
| Heroku, so it should be fairly straightforward.
|
| we have these docs for a more detailed walkthrough:
|
| 1/ https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/migrate-from-
| hero...
|
| 2/ https://northflank.com/blog/how-to-migrate-from-heroku-a-
| ste...
| ezekg wrote:
| Sorry, but telling people to take a logical backup of their
| database, and then download it onto their local work
| station is insane for a production application. First, a
| logical backup at any decent scale will fail, and second, I
| don't even have enough local storage to do that -- even
| ignoring the compliance issues with downloading a full copy
| of production data onto a work station.
|
| For a company like Northflank, I'd expect actual
| production-grade documentation for migrating, not
| instructions that are only applicable to a toy app.
| decidertm wrote:
| I agree, I wouldn't either. You can import directly via a
| DB to DB import in the platform without involving your
| laptop.
|
| https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/databases-and-
| per....
|
| Some folks want to do that, others want to import a
| backup directly, some want to spawn a read replica and
| sync their DB. Different strokes for different folks, all
| supported on Northflank.
| caffeinated_me wrote:
| Looks like that still has downtime for a Postgres
| migration- you're suggesting going into maintenance mode
| and just doing a dump/restore. I've seen that take hours
| once you hit the terabyte scale, depending on hardware.
|
| I've had pretty good luck setting up logical replication
| from Heroku to the new provider and having a 10-15 minute
| maintenance window to catch up once it's in sync. Might be
| worth considering.
|
| You might also want to add a warning about Postgres
| versions. There's some old bugs around primary key hash
| functions that can cause corruption on a migration. I've
| seen it twice when migrating from Heroku to other vendors.
| nocodeguy wrote:
| Bucardo would be an option:
| https://www.porter.run/blog/migrating-postgres-from-
| heroku-t...
| bobbyiliev wrote:
| I've been using DigitalOcean App Platform for a while now. It's
| not a 1:1 Heroku replacement, but the git-based deploys, managed
| DBs, and ability to move to Droplets later without a big
| migration have worked very well for me.
| realkf wrote:
| Yeah, I moved a while back to DO's App Platform. I've not had
| any issues with them so far. Recommend them a lot.
| codegeek wrote:
| I am considering DO App Platform for a new project. Would you
| be open to sharing any lessons learned ?
| bearjaws wrote:
| The downfall of Heroku should be studied, they had lightning in a
| bottle and blew it.
|
| Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.
| sleight42 wrote:
| Often seems like there's no defeat that Benioff can't steal
| from the jaws of Victory.
| o_m wrote:
| What is there to be studied? Once a company is acquired you
| bounce. There is usually a two year grace period before you
| start feeling the pain as a customer, which should give you the
| time to migrate.
| anamexis wrote:
| Salesforce acquired Heroku 15 years ago.
| carimura wrote:
| Time flies. I do think the vision lasted pretty long post
| acquisition, maybe 5 years or so, but then the inevitable
| seemed... inevitable.
| cpursley wrote:
| And Heroku has stagnated for at least 13 of those years...
| brightball wrote:
| 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 for
| lower traffic stuff. Love Fly.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| 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.
| brightball wrote:
| All I can say is thank you. I learned to manage servers
| because of Slicehost and the articles on it back then.
|
| I remember being excited by the merger because well,
| Rackspace had such a fantastic reputation at the time.
| People still tell stories about their service. The
| Rackspace Cloud was just up against an absolute monster in
| AWS and never really became competitive.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| Thank you for the kind words, brought back some fun and
| interesting memories. I spent a lot of time helping to
| write and edit those articles, as did my coworkers, glad
| they helped you!
| nicoburns wrote:
| > They took all of the great things about Heroku but also
| dramatically improved and added new capabilities
|
| I also love Fly, but they were missing easy managed databases
| (which always seemed like _the_ main reason to use Heroku to
| me). And now they have them they 're very expensive (even
| compared to Heroku). Which is a shame because their compute
| is very cheap.
| brightball wrote:
| For what it's worth, I've been very happy using Crunchydata
| PostgreSQL with Fly.
| tptacek wrote:
| If there was one thing we would all decide differently here
| at Fly.io, like if you gave us a time machine, is how we
| did databases. Someday Kurt and I will write the post about
| how those decisions came to pass and how they played out.
|
| We're doing Managed Postgres now (MPG), which is what we
| should have done to begin with, but it took us _for-ev-er_
| to get here.
| prmph wrote:
| Not sure why people love fly.io over all the other
| competitors so much. I myself prefer render.com, for the
| simplicity and predictability of their billing, and their
| deployment model is so intuitive
| OGEnthusiast wrote:
| Downfall? The founders and VCs made tens of millions of
| dollars. That's the success condition for them.
| codegeek wrote:
| Nothing to study. A common scenario when a mega corp acquires
| an incredibly successful startup and then lets it die. Happens
| more often than not. This is why I chuckle when I see an
| acquisition and the founders claim "Nothing is changing. We are
| not going anywhere" . There may be exceptions but the moment a
| hugely successful company like heroku gets acquired, you know
| it's most likely game over. To their credit, they survived 15
| years after acquisition but barely.
| bmenrigh wrote:
| Often "nothing is changing" ends up being more literal than
| the founders realize or intend. Acquisitions by big companies
| tend to slow the development to a crawl as development
| bureaucracy takes over. When a great product is practically
| frozen in time it stops being great in 5-15 years as the rest
| of the world passes them by.
| brightball wrote:
| Yea, this is accurate in my experience.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > 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(tm) 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is a typical acquisition by the book, always goes the same
| way after three to five years.
| WildGreenLeave wrote:
| Wow, 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 on NodeJS and PHP but would be open to other
| platforms if people need it. Heroku has always been a source of
| inspiration to me so if you are looking for an alternative and
| care about it having a strong European presence please check it
| out. (We do have a US location too!)
|
| 0: https://ploi.cloud
| dluan wrote:
| so EOL announcement without saying when it will be, but
| eventually.
|
| we've been loyal heroku customers for over a decade. should have
| switched off long ago, but as a small team, it was too valuable.
| such a shame.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| What are some good alternatives?
|
| Anyone any experience with https://sevalla.com/ ?
| lpellis wrote:
| I've been very happy with https://render.com/ , seems the
| closest to what heroku was
| cssanchez wrote:
| Dokku. The self hosted alternative.
| brightball wrote:
| Fly.io is incredible.
| davidhariri wrote:
| Railway is the spiritual successor. Fly is great too. I highly
| recommend both.
| vintagedave wrote:
| 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.
| henrypoydar wrote:
| What is the concern exactly? (Product/platform
| enshittification?)
| betteryet wrote:
| Back in the day, Heroku, Stripe, and GitHub were iconic
| engineering organizations. They had this culture rooted in Unix
| ethos with a sprinkle of modern minimalism and style that was
| outstanding. You could really see people give a damn in the
| careful design and polish of their APIs, docs, primitives, and
| overall output.
|
| Now Heroku and GitHub have been gutted in spirit by their
| acquirers, which is such a damn shame for our field. We still
| have Stripe and Apple to some extent, and maybe some new places,
| but I personally feel a real sense of loss from Heroku and GitHub
| exiting their status as places you could admire.
| trvz wrote:
| Amongst the people opting for just plain Linux servers Linode
| was the big name back then. They later got supplanted by
| DigitalOcean, and both are of course also run into the ground
| by now.
| nubg wrote:
| Title should be updated to "Sunsetting Heroku".
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 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
| andrewstuart wrote:
| >> " 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."
| andrew-ld wrote:
| slopification is the new enshittification
| davepeck wrote:
| Watching their public roadmap to see what happens. Right now, it
| looks about the same as it has for a while: useful new features
| and expected maintenance, moving along at a reasonable if not
| blistering clip.
|
| https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130
| chris_marino wrote:
| This 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. Don't need new leads. Don't need to win
| competitive deals. But finding new customers and losing
| opportunities are the only things that signal/drive innovation.
| But from a budgeting perspective, why increase investment in a
| product that already hits/exceeds their sales targets?
|
| Over time sales targets get met, but the product doesn't advance.
| By the time all existing customers that can convert have
| converted, the product is no longer competitive. Like bankruptcy,
| it comes gradually, then suddenly.
| windowshopping wrote:
| This literally says nothing - are we supposed to infer that they
| are putting the product into maintenance mode and will no longer
| be developing new features for it? This is a masterpiece of
| corporate nullspeech.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| > with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational
| excellence rather than introducing new features
|
| it sounds pretty clear that it's in maintenance mode
| dwaltrip wrote:
| It's clear enough but they aren't going out of their way to
| make it obvious. It's definitely fluffed up / corporately
| sanitized.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| Damage control to limit the rush for the exits?
| wxw wrote:
| > Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model
|
| sustaining == maintanence mode
| paxys wrote:
| Why don't they just spin off the company or sell it? Heroku is a
| well-established brand (despite Salesforce's best efforts) and
| there are still plenty of customers and hobbyists relying on it
| today. Its value to the parent company is clearly 0. Give it away
| and let someone else have a run at it. Keep an ownership stake in
| case someone does manage to turn it around. Literally zero
| downside in it.
| CodinM wrote:
| As someone that migrated off of Heroku back in 2023 for a
| monitoring start-up - why were you still on Heroku?!
| esher wrote:
| The original Heroku often gets praised here. Rightfully so. It
| inspired many. We started our PHP PaaS [0] 13 years, ago. Most of
| the others from that area are long gone. PagodaBox, CloudControl,
| PhpFog ...
|
| [0] https://www.fortrabbit.com
| anyfactor wrote:
| I think the "Heroku story" was less about technical limitations,
| but everything except technical limitations. More than a decade
| ago, I started learning and building on Heroku and hosted all my
| side projects and client projects on Heroku. Then when they got
| acquired, I was naive; then they removed their free tier and that
| broke my trust.
|
| I primarily worked on PoC/MVP development where I worked to bring
| ideas to something barely tangible. And Heroku's free tier
| decisions meant it was a barrier for developers to develop on
| their platform. Pay first, develop later. It was like the rest of
| the industry.
|
| After that, I just exited containerized platform-based
| application development entirely because convenience and having
| that weird developer philosophy "I must not pay because I can
| find a way" was less of a reason than sustainability. For me,
| containerized application platforms was about POC and MVP. If
| there was growth then me or the client can pay for the
| convenience. But if there was nothing, pretty easy to delete the
| project.
|
| Then I committed to replicating the Heroku experience with a
| small VPS, backing up via rsync, and moving from PostgreSQL to
| SQLite. I can even charge clients for hosting (+ maintenance) on
| my VPS.
|
| I do not know, to me containerized application platforms are
| limited by commercial challenges rather than technical ones. I
| see tons of containerised application platforms, but the trust
| has eroded because of a single company.
|
| I have changed my development facility and laid the groundwork to
| not commit to these platforms. Sustainability over convenience.
|
| Sure, I understand and respect folks at fly.io, render, railway,
| and even the open source variants of these companies (Caddy
| etc.). But there is no sustainability guarantee for these
| platforms. It was not just about the "free tier", to me it
| transcends to a philosophical point about building applications
| in general. Sure, there could be a new era with AI making MVP/PoC
| development easy through hosting in containerised applications,
| but that is a tangent point.
|
| If Heroku were doing everything right, there would not be a dozen
| application platforms out there, but they made mistakes and, in
| my opinion, made the entire containerised application platform
| model untrustworthy.
| collimarco wrote:
| I have moved all Rails apps away from Heroku in the last years.
| It was great 10 years ago, but then became expensive, full of
| bugs and with terrible support. All our Rails apps (Pushpad,
| Newsletter.page, etc) are running on Cuber gem + DigitalOcean
| Kubernetes... In the last years we achieved 100% uptime (five
| nines), zero subtle bugs and huge cost savings.
| krashidov wrote:
| Spinning 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
| pimeys wrote:
| Thanks for reminding me that slack is owned by Salesforce. What
| are we going to use when slack turns to shit, IRC again maybe?
| itay-maman wrote:
| It took me several reads to distill their post to this one
| sentence: "Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered
| to new customers"
|
| I'd be glad to stand corrected but AFAICT this is the only
| sentence that describes the change. All other say "nothing is
| changing in [some area]".
|
| Trying to downplay something to that extent immediately raises
| suspicious that this something (the change) is much more profound
| that what is stated.
| chris_marino wrote:
| Salesforce, like every large enterprise software company, has a
| formal (and strict) End of Life process. It starts with an
| announcement like this indicating End of Sales, then once the
| contract obligations are met, they can end support, then EoL.
|
| There is no way they can avoid this kind of public notice.
| reactordev wrote:
| RIP Heroku.
|
| It was good before SalesForce...
|
| In 2018, I had to transition my org at the time from Heroku to
| AWS (with the org lacking any AWS experience outside of myself).
|
| We ended up with a "Heroku-like" experience. Push to GitHub.
| Action triggers job. Job packages and deploys. A la carte yaml
| config for extras like databases and ALBs. It worked pretty well.
| It was an in house solution to an in house problem.
|
| Still, it wasn't quite Heroku...
| diqi wrote:
| What does this even say?
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