[HN Gopher] An Update on Heroku
___________________________________________________________________
An Update on Heroku
Author : lstoll
Score : 479 points
Date : 2026-02-06 15:20 UTC (1 days 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.
| muzani wrote:
| They meant what they wrote. Merriam-Webster's definition: "to
| support the weight of"
|
| It means they're transitioning to the absolute minimum to
| keep it alive and nothing more. That could, in worst cases,
| mean firing everyone except one guy, or using AI to keep it
| alive.
| 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
| port11 wrote:
| "In standard corporate doublespeak with lots of jargon...",
| followed by whatever you want to hand wave away.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| It's what CA/Broadcom does to literally every software product
| they own.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Or some kind of twisted brain with a "fake it till you make it!
| or continue to fake it" attitude. I think people doing that
| stuff for long enough almost have no other choice but to
| believe themselves, that they are doing net positive work,
| otherwise the cognitive dissonance would be too great.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| I don't understand the dismissiveness. I think it's pretty
| clear. Keeping it going for the current users, but not trying
| to innovate. It might seem weird in an industry that prizes
| constant innovation and disruption, but this is a mature thing
| to do.
| 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.
| PanMan wrote:
| Heroku does lots of revenue, even if they pay AWS. I do think
| it would be worth.. quite a bit. And I would be very happy if
| a better steward would buy 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.
| sealeck wrote:
| Even when you build cool things it's respectful not to
| plant them in HN comments :)
|
| I think the usual solution to this is to talk about cool
| stuff you've done that is only incidentally relevant to
| the product you're selling. For example, some detail on
| how you built a technical system or solved a problem,
| etc...
| 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?
| syx wrote:
| No my one is a simple ruby sinatra app with no DB. Yeah
| unfortunately it wasn't super reliable as heroku but
| they're getting better at keeping the instances up
| 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!
| naniwaduni wrote:
| To be clear, you just answered "Do you care to show
| prices?" with No.
| sm123 wrote:
| You're right - reading that back, it comes across as a
| "no," and that wasn't my intent.
|
| We should show pricing, and we will. We temporarily
| stripped the site back while overhauling positioning and
| pricing, which is why it's missing right now. That's on
| us, not a stance against transparency.
|
| In the meantime, I'm more than happy to share pricing
| directly.
|
| At a high level on our pricing: - Current customers are
| on a mix of usage-based and fixed monthly plans,
| depending on their needs. We've found many of our
| customers love the fixed plan as it's a whole new level
| of predictability. - We're generally architected to land
| well below Heroku's Enterprise pricing and to be
| competitive with a IaaS. - We want pricing to get out of
| your way as you scale, so no big steps in pricing as you
| add services. - Databases are HA by default and support
| replication. - Pipelines and review apps don't require
| hacks to avoid per-review-app database costs.
|
| Happy to answer specifics here or over email if helpful.
| 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.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| "Depends on what you used it for" applies to just about
| any platform.
|
| Realistically, self-hosting the PaaS defeats the purpose
| of a PaaS for the crowd Heroku was attracting.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Heroku was one of the first to have that seamless UX,
| only after which others like Fly or Render or Railway
| came to copy it. I wager people were primarily attracted
| to that user experience and only minimally cared that it
| was fully hosted versus not, because there was also AWS
| at that time.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| How do you think self-hosting affects that seamless UX
| they value.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| As I said, the correct software on top handles it all for
| you. I don't think you've actually tried Dokploy.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Dokku is better. And neither is what Heroku's bread and
| butter customer needs.
|
| But alas, my interest in painstaking explaining why self-
| hosting is fundamentally incompatible with a product
| who's value prop was "nothing to install" is waning.
|
| Have a good one.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| You and I simply have different opinions on what Heroku's
| value proposition was, because, again, AWS was also right
| there and also was "nothing to install." Therefore Heroku
| was used primarily for its dead simple UX, something
| which is replicated even in a self-hosted environment,
| because, again, the value prop was never about PaaS or
| self-hosting, it was always about the user experience.
|
| Have a good weekend.
| tyre wrote:
| Having used Heroku at multiple startups during the
| 2012-2015 years, this is not correct.
|
| With heroku you could `git push heroku master` and it
| would do everything else from there. The UX was nice, but
| that was not the reason people chose it. It was so easy
| compared to running on EC2 instances with salt or
| whatever. For simple projects, it was incredible.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| That's literally the UX I'm talking about and that's what
| other companies copied too. To be clear, I'm not (just)
| talking about how heroku.com looks and works, I'm talking
| about the entire user experience including git push to
| deploy, so I believe you are agreeing with me here. That
| is why I said VPS with Dokploy or Coolify and so on have
| the same UX, both in the command line with git push
| deploys supported as well as (now, at least) a vastly
| superior website user experience, akin to Vercel.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Ok so I am researching what to use in this space - a
| Vercel-ish clone on cheap VPS - and, is Dokploy really
| the best option?
|
| What do you think about Caprover?
| https://github.com/caprover/caprover
|
| Or uh.. Dokku https://github.com/dokku/dokku
|
| Right now I am using Coolify but so far it has not been
| exactly reliable
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I don't like their UIs, Dokploy's is far more modern. And
| yes Coolify is not known to be very reliable, especially
| because it's built on PHP.
|
| Check out these videos:
|
| https://youtu.be/ELkPcuO5ebo
|
| https://youtu.be/RoANBROvUeE
| runako wrote:
| Digital Ocean App Engine has the easy setup and GUI
| management that made Heroku popular.
| moorow wrote:
| We saw this coming (like most people) a while ago when
| Heroku started flaking without status updates, and moved
| part of our workload to Fly. We ended up moving off Fly as
| well (significant unreliability and just some very strange
| network load balancer issues that would cause us downtime)
| and went to Railway, and that's been fantastic so far.
| We've moved our whole workload onto it.
| bendangelo wrote:
| Kamal works well
| 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.
| le-mark wrote:
| Reminds me of when blockchain was in literally everything. So
| the wheel turns.
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| ameliaquining wrote:
| I think a lot of people are under the misconception that
| the Salesforce acquisition happened a lot later than it
| really did. In particular, I think people often
| implicitly date it to the late-2010s-ish period when
| Heroku's product emphasis got more visibly enterprisey,
| and in particular when it started putting integrations
| with Salesforce's other products front and center.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Honestly if you're still using Heroku today it's because you
| haven't really caught up with what's going on around you
| nathanappere wrote:
| What's a better offering that makes it easier to push
| projects in production?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| In 2026, every major cloud provider has a service that
| lets you just hand it a Docker container and let it
| figure out how to run it.
| franciscop wrote:
| I loved Heroku, but moved away a couple of years back. Tried
| 3 major "alternatives" (dokku, Render, Fly.io), and the big
| clouds, and the only thing that made me happy at the end was
| Coolify. I do keep Netlify for FE-only projects though.
| oth001 wrote:
| I get what you're saying but the onus is (and should)
| definitely be on the company to inform customers - and
| there's many laws to that effect.
| stackskipton wrote:
| What laws? As long as they fulfill Heroku fulfills the
| obligation in any contracts they have made, no law has been
| broken.
|
| If you are paying month to month and actually check the
| Terms of Services of those services, most of them can shut
| down instantly without notice as long as they stop billing
| you.
| 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.
| carefree-bob wrote:
| 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?
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| Reminds me of https://youtu.be/T2BY8zZ1CTM?si=XDroWqVD-
| pElN9si
| carefree-bob wrote:
| that was great!
| altairprime wrote:
| They're not competition if you own them! Typepad continued
| for over a decade after it was purchased. Auth0 is still in
| maintenance mode afaik. It can last as long as revenue pays
| for the FTE to maintain it, or until corporate reallocated
| the FTE to higher revenue-per-FTE-hour opportunities.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Auth0 still has a ton of people working on it at Okta. If
| they're facing execution problems, it's not due to a lack
| of resources.
| hosh wrote:
| Auth0 and Okta serves two different market segments.
| You'd use Autho0 for your customers and Okta for your
| employees.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| That's why they bought Auth0 in the first place. They
| didn't have a real offering for customer identity.
| jamwil wrote:
| First of all, you and me, start workin' at the bank
| glenngillen wrote:
| Absolutely none of this is true. What was the PaaS Heroku was
| apparently beating at the time of the acquisition?
| altairprime wrote:
| Noted. Please accept my apologies and retraction.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Oh, they're very clear, just not explicit.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| conductr wrote:
| Was clear to me. If I was looking at using them, I wouldn't. If
| I was already using them, I'd stop. They seem dedicated to
| supporting the slow extinction so it doesn't have to be a fire
| drill exit, but how do you sleep at night knowing they're
| playing with matches.
| ubertaco wrote:
| I worked at Pardot around the time Salesforce started using
| this same language in internal announcements about Pardot.
|
| Our Pardot leadership translated for us and provided the
| necessary context: Pardot is being killed. The plan was to
| start building the product that would replace it, stop selling
| new contracts, rename Pardot in the meantime so the change
| wouldn't be as noticeable, and in a timeline of "by 10 years
| from now" Pardot wouldn't exist anymore.
|
| This is Salesforce for "last call for the lifeboats, we're
| gonna capsize the boat."
| 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.
| H8crilA wrote:
| The balance sheet write-off.
| 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
| swat535 wrote:
| Thank you! Can't believe I missed that..
| tptacek wrote:
| Honestly, this is super fair. I went in expecting to hate-
| read it (not because I have any issues with Render, they're
| great, just these X vs. Y competitive posts). But yeah, I
| think this is a reasonable way to look at it.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| I find it quite funny that they give themselves maximum
| marks for transparent pricing. If you go to their pricing
| page, everything is priced as "per user/month plus compute
| costs*". Maybe it's just because I'm on mobile and the page
| doesn't seem to work super well, but reading if I have no
| idea what those compute costs are and therefore what the
| actual cost is.
| joelanman wrote:
| https://railway.com is another good one
| 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.
| rubslopes wrote:
| I've been using Coolify for deploying my webapps for about 3
| years, it has a good web UI.
| 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...
| scraplab wrote:
| 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.)
| almost wrote:
| I've been incredibly happy with Northflank since moving over a
| few years ago after Heroku got unreliable. Felt like an upgrade
| from Heroku and the support and reliability have been great.
| 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 ?
| pgm8705 wrote:
| Digital Ocean App Platform is great. We switched to it from
| Heroku in 2021. It had some growing pains to start, but has
| been rock solid since. I can only think of 1 downtime incident
| that was their fault. They continue to improve the platform
| too, and are VERY responsive to requests.
| 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!
| stevoski wrote:
| Oh those Slicehost articles were excellent. I felt like I
| could actually do my own sys admin by following them.
| 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
| tptacek wrote:
| I think people mostly like the cool balloons Annie draws
| for us.
| 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.
| xeromal wrote:
| Heroku was bought by salesforce when it was only 3 years old.
| 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.
| pigbearpig wrote:
| It was 16 years...
| pjmlp wrote:
| It isn't as if the last years have been anything like
| everyone deploys Rails on Heroku days.
| glenngillen wrote:
| They had lightning in a bottle because they had an amazing
| developer experience... and gave everyone free compute and data
| transfer.
|
| So much of the value was already delivered in that simple `git
| push heroku master` which gave you a container + load balancer
| + a database. The vast majority of people didn't need more. And
| of those that were left that did far too few of them were
| willing to suddenly start paying $32/mo per dyno (you just gave
| me one for free! I only want one more!) or make the jump to
| multiple hundreds of dollars for a database.
|
| Read any of the threads about Heroku over the years. The
| biggest complaint is always "it's too expensive". Even when a
| large percentage of what was on people's bills were add-ons
| like databases, new relic, redis, logging, etc (i.e., not
| Heroku).
| aqme28 wrote:
| And the company I worked for hired a full devops team to save
| us like 5 grand per month on Heroku, only to end up with a
| much worse developer experience.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| This problem one doesn't have, if one pays attention to
| devops from the start, maybe keeping 1 or 2 capable devops
| people, who keep things lean. Problem is of course finding
| the capable ones with the right mindset to keep things as
| simple and lean as possible.
|
| The result of suddenly needing to hire devops should be to
| get a convenient setup, but then do you really still need
| the whole devops team? And if you don't, then hiring them
| for limited time might come at a cost (hiring freelancers
| or consultants).
| pigbearpig wrote:
| Huh? I'm no fan of Salesforce, but they bought Heroku in 2010.
| That's not "just letting it die."
| olalonde wrote:
| It's just a case of an innovative product that got commodified
| over time. Not much you can do about that.
| 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
| TechnicalParrot wrote:
| 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 EUR1000/month for one 1 vCPU!
| WildGreenLeave wrote:
| Appreciate the suggestion, thank you! Definitely not charging
| that much :-)
| sreekanth850 wrote:
| is this linked with Ploi.io?
| WildGreenLeave wrote:
| Separate companies but Dennis (founder of Ploi.io) is the
| other co-founder, so indirectly linked. :)
| 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.
| mcapodici wrote:
| Anything that can host Kubetnetes. If you are going to fo
| devopsy deployments might as well use the standard.
| 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.
| bjt wrote:
| Digital Ocean is run into the ground? I've been with them for
| a long time and recently just launched new stuff. Still a
| pretty nice experience and a pretty decent price.
| re-thc wrote:
| Yes, they haven't updated their infrastructure in a long
| time. Pricing hence isn't competitive.
|
| With each new generation they fall behind.
| 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.
| eek2121 wrote:
| 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)
| ryantgtg wrote:
| This is my experience, too. Heroku didn't stay competitive
| price-wise with alternatives. And scaling even slightly from
| the basic dynos quadrupled (or whatever) the price.
|
| Feature and experience-wise, we were always really happy with
| heroku.
|
| I don't know if this fits with the "salesforce purchased and
| let stagnate" narrative that nearly everyone here is pushing.
| hnmullany wrote:
| Heroku got a lot of attention and funding within Salesforce
| at least for the first few years - they grew from about $1M
| in ARR when they got acquired, and I think they peaked at
| around $200M (second hand - so I don't know if part of that
| was funny-money revenue allocated from Enterprise
| agreements.)
| 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.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Sometimes it's best to just let things die.
| re-thc wrote:
| > Literally zero downside in it.
|
| Any poor valuation or negative news can tank the stock price
| harder than dealing with it privately.
| CodinM wrote:
| As someone that migrated off of Heroku back in 2023 for a
| monitoring start-up - why were you still on Heroku?!
| barkerja wrote:
| For us, the reason is we're primarily a Salesforce company and
| rely on the Heroku Connect product to facilitate bidirectional
| syncing between Salesforce and PostgreSQL (which also requires
| Heroku PG).
|
| One of the biggest benefits to this product -- aside from the
| syncing mechanism -- is a bypass of Salesforce's extremely
| limiting (and expensive) API limits.
| 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?
| krashidov wrote:
| type.com (full disclosure I am one of the cofounders)
| mplewis wrote:
| You gotta fix the home page. I'm not sitting through a
| movie trailer to find out how your chat app works.
| krashidov wrote:
| haha we actually launched it today. Point taken though!
| It's not a video though just an interactive widget.
| Instead of scrolling you press enter. Once we launch I'm
| sure we'll have something more traditional
| 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?
| billwashere wrote:
| Here is an article that explains it better -
| https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-shuts-down-heroku-e...
|
| Stolen from https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/s/6U8jJJRzBC
| aristofun wrote:
| Who cares about heroku in 2026? It's a dead horse
| bgentry wrote:
| As 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your story. Those early days of using Heroku
| were really enjoyable for me. It felt so promising and simple.
| I remember explaining the concept to a lot of different people
| who didn't believe that the deployment model could be that
| simple and accessible until I showed them.
|
| Then life went on, I bounced around in my career, and forgot
| about Heroku. Years later I actually suggested it for someone
| to use for a simple project once and I could practically feel
| the other developers in the room losing respect for me for even
| mentioning it. I hadn't looked at it for so long that I didn't
| realize it had fallen out of favor.
|
| > 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
|
| This feels all too familiar. All of my enjoyable startup
| experiences have ended this way: The fast growing, successful
| startup starts attracting people who look like they should be
| valuable assets to the company, but they're more interested in
| things like policies, processes, meetings, and making the
| status reports look nice than actually shipping and building.
| ptdorf wrote:
| The cancer of corporations: bureaucracy.
| ghaff wrote:
| As corporations grow, they also increasingly need some
| level of process which can increasingly look a lot like
| bureaucracy.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| Bureaucracy is a natural consequence of workforce growth.
| Respectfully, I think you are blaming the symptoms here,
| not the root cause.
| drewda wrote:
| Thanks for a capsule tour through Heroku!
|
| FWIW, the team that eventually created "Docker" was working at
| the same time on dotCloud as a direct Heroku competitor. I
| remember meeting them at a meet-up in the old Twitter building
| but couldn't tell you exactly which year that was. Maybe 2010
| or 2011?
| bgentry wrote:
| Yep, that team did great work. I remember having lunch at the
| Heroku office with the dotCloud team in 2011 or 2012 and also
| Solomon Hykes demoing Docker to us in our office's basement
| before it launched. So much cool stuff was happening back
| then!
| asenchi wrote:
| I remember Solomon's demoing at All Hands... it was such a
| crazy time for tech and innovation.
| bgentry wrote:
| Oh hey Curt!! Remember, you are not a monitoring system
| :)
| asenchi wrote:
| Haha, funny you should mention that as I was just telling
| a coworker that story as we worked on a new dashboard for
| our infrastructure. :D
| asenchi wrote:
| It remains the greatest engineering team I've ever seen or had
| the pleasure to be a part of. I was only there from early 2011
| to mid 2012 but what I took with me changed me as an engineer.
| The shear brilliance of the ideas and approaches...I was
| blessed to witness it. I don't think I can overstate it, though
| many will think this is all hyperbole. I didn't always agree
| with the decisions made and I was definitely there when the
| product stagnation started, but we worked hard to reduce tech
| debt, build better infrastructure, and improve... but man, the
| battles we fought. Many fond memories, including the single
| greatest engineering mistake I've ever seen made, one that I
| still think about until this day (but will never post in a
| public forum :)).
|
| It was a pleasure working with you bgentry!
| Folcon wrote:
| I'm just going to chime in here and say thank you, there
| still really isn't in my mind a comparable offering to
| heroku's git push and go straight to a reasonable production
|
| I honestly find it a bit nuts, there's offerings that come
| close, but using them I still get the impression that they've
| just not put in the time really refining that user interface,
| so I just wanted to say thank you for the work you and the GP
| did, it was incredibly helpful and I'm happy to say helped me
| launch and test a few product offerings as well as some fun
| ideas
| gonational wrote:
| This!
|
| It absolutely boggles my mind that nothing else exists to
| fill this spot. Fly and others offer varying degrees of
| easier-than-AWS hosting, but nobody offers true PaaS like
| Heroku, IMHO.
| airstrike wrote:
| I find render.com basically as good as Heroku and
| certainly much better than fly.io's unpredictable pricing
| lngric006 wrote:
| In 2022 Render increased their prices (which for my team
| worked out at a doubling of costs) with a one month
| notice period and the CEO's response to me when I asked
| him if he thought that was a fair notice period was that
| it was operationally necessary and he was sorry to see us
| go.
| almost wrote:
| For me Northflank have filled this spot. Though by the
| time I switched I was already using Docker so can't speak
| directly to their Heroku Buildpack support.
| fragmede wrote:
| vercel goes a step further, and (when configured this
| way) allocates a new hostname (eg feature-branch-add-
| thingg.app.vercel.example.com) for new branches, to make
| testing even easier.
| nathanappere wrote:
| But their offering is "frontend oriented", what you
| describe doesn't work for django / laravel / rails / etc,
| no ?
| fabianlindfors wrote:
| Yes. We are taking a stab at the entire infrastructure
| like Heroku did but with a focus on a coding agent-
| centric workflow: https://specific.dev
| ghaff wrote:
| The Heroku style of PaaS just isn't very interesting to
| most large businesses that actually pay for things. The
| world basically moved on to Kubernetes-based products
| (see Google and Red Hat)--or just shutdown like a lot of
| Cloud Foundry-based products. Yes, many individuals and
| smaller shops care more about simplicity but they're
| generally not willing/able to pay a lot (if anything).
| twoodfin wrote:
| It seems like you're right, but it's strange that the
| data world seems to be moving in the opposite direction,
| with PaaS products like Snowflake, DataBricks, Microsoft
| Fabric, even Salesforce's own Data Cloud eating the
| world.
| ghaff wrote:
| PaaS has always been this thing that isn't pure
| infrastructure or pure hosted software that you use as-
| is. Salesforce has something over 100K attendees of
| partners and users to its annual conference. It's always
| been this in-between thing with a fairly loose
| definition. I'd argue that Salesforce was long a cross
| between SaaS (for the users) and PaaS (for developers).
| You can probably apply the same view to a lot of other
| company products.
| ljm wrote:
| Heroku and Ruby, for me, was the 21st century answer to
| 'deploying' a PHP site over FTP.
|
| The fact that it required nothing but 'git push heroku
| master' at the time was incredible, especially for how
| easy it was to spin up pre-prod environments with it, and
| how wiring up a database was also trivial.
|
| Every time I come across an infrastructure that is
| bloated out with k8s, helm charts, and a complex web of
| cloud resources, all for a service not even running at
| scale, I look back to the simplicity we used to have.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| I completely agree that there's nothing comparable to
| old-school Heroku, which is crazy. That said, Cloudflare
| seems promising for some types of projects and I use them
| for a few things. Anyone using them as a one-stop-shop?
| christophilus wrote:
| I've been using Render for close to 5 years, and it's
| excellent. I can't think of anything I use that it doesn't
| do as well or better than Heroku did last I checked.
| asenchi wrote:
| I agree with everything you said, and can only thank the
| founders for their tremendous insight and willingness to
| push the limits. The shear number of engineering practices
| we take for granted today because of something like Heroku
| boggles my mind.
|
| I am forever grateful for the opportunity to work there and
| make it an effort to pass on what I learned to others.
| bgentry wrote:
| Absolutely agree and likewise buddy :)
| brabel wrote:
| > by 2012 we were drowning in tech debt and scaling
| challenges.
|
| > the greatest engineering team I've ever seen
|
| How do these two things reconcile in your opinion? In my view
| , doing something quickly is the easy part , good engineering
| is only needed exactly when you want things to be
| maintainable and scalable, so the assertions above don't
| really make much sense to me.
| allovertheworld wrote:
| Yea it seems like not much thought was put into
| scalability.
| macintux wrote:
| In general, my impression has been that you don't want to
| architect your solution at first for massive scaling,
| because:
|
| * You probably aren't going to need it, so putting the
| effort into scaling means slowing down your delivery of the
| very features that would make customers want your solution.
|
| * It typically slows down performance of individual
| features.
|
| * It definitely significant increases the complexity of
| your solution (and probably the user-facing tooling as
| well).
|
| * It is difficult to achieve until you have the live
| traffic to test your approach.
| asenchi wrote:
| Yeah I think there is a lot of truth here. You can't
| solve all the problems and in Heroku's case we focused on
| user experience (internally and externally). Great ideas
| like "git push heroku main" are game changers, but what
| happens once that git server is receiving 1000 pushes a
| minute? Totally different thought process.
|
| Perhaps the thing I would add is that even with the tech
| debt and scaling problems we still had over a million
| applications deployed ready for that request to hit them.
| asenchi wrote:
| It is hard to explain the impact of such massive growth
| over a 2-3 period. New features were coming online while
| old ones were being abused by overuse. For instance, we
| launched PostgreSQL in the cloud, something we take for
| granted today. Not only that, but we offered an insane
| feature set around "follow" and "forking" that made working
| with databases seem futuristic.
|
| I remember when we launched that product we went to that
| year's PGCon and there were people in the crowd angry and
| dismissive that we would treat data that way. It was
| actually pretty confrontational. Products like that were
| being produced while we were also working on migrating away
| from the initial implementation of the "free tier"
| (internally called Shen). It took me and a few others
| months to replace it and ensure we didn't lose data while
| also making it maintainable. The resulting tool lovingly
| named "yobuko" ended up remaining for years after that
| (largely due to the stagnation and turn over).
|
| Anyways, that was just a slice of it. Decisions made today
| are not always the decisions you wanted to be made
| tomorrow. Day0 is great, day100 comes with more knowledge
| and regret. :D
| whitepoplar wrote:
| Tell us more about some of these ideas and approaches that
| changed you as an engineer! We'd love to hear!
| asenchi wrote:
| Well many of them you may know in that they made their way
| into so many systems (though arguably without the refined
| UX of Heroku) but the two that come up the most and I am
| teaching others:
|
| * The simpler the interface for the user, the more
| decisions you can make behind the scenes. A good example
| here is "git push heroku". Not only is that something every
| user (bot or human) can run, it is also easy to script,
| protect, and scale. It keeps the surface area small and the
| abstraction makes the most sense. The code that was behind
| that push lasted for quite some time, and it was
| effectively 1-2 Python classes as a service. But once we
| got the code into our systems, we could do anything with
| it... and we did. One of the things that blows my mind is
| that our "slug" (this is what we called the tarballs of
| code that we put on the runtimes) maker was itself a heroku
| app. It lived along side everyone else. We were able to
| reduce our platform down to a few simple pieces (what we
| called the kernel) and everything else was deployed on top.
| We benefited from the very things our customers were using.
|
| * NOTE: This one is going to be hard to explain because it
| is so simple, but when you start thinking about system
| design in this way the possibilities start to open up right
| in front of you. The idea is that everything we do is
| effectively explained as "input -> filter -> output". Even
| down to the CPU. But especially when it comes to a
| platform. With this design mentality we had a logging
| pipeline that I am still jealous of. We had metrics flowing
| into dashboards that were everywhere and informed us of our
| work. We had things like "integration testing" that ran
| continuously against the platform, all from the users
| perspective, that allowed us to test features long before
| they reached the public. All of these things were "input"
| that we "filtered" in some way to produce "output". When
| you start using that "output" as "input" and chaining these
| things together you get to a place where you can design a
| "kernel" (effectively an API service and a runtime) and
| start interacting with it to produce a platform.
|
| I remember when we were pairing down services to get to our
| "kernel" one of the Operations engineers developed our Chef
| so that an internal engineer needed maybe 5-7 lines of Ruby
| to deploy their app and get everything they needed. Simple
| input, that produced a reliable application setup, that
| could now get us into production faster.
|
| Anyways, those are just a couple.
| asenchi wrote:
| Here[0] is a talk that shows off some of these tools.
| Mark led the way on many of these ideas internally.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGcaofDq8SM
| ardeaver wrote:
| As far as the Salesforce acquisition goes, I'd be curious to
| see who made the decision to put Heroku into maintenance only
| mode.
|
| I worked for a different part of Salesforce. I don't really
| feel like Salesforce did a ton of meddling in any of its bigger
| acquisitions other than maybe Tableau. I think the biggest
| missed opportunity was potentially creating a more unified
| experience between all of its subsidiaries. Though, it's hard
| to call that a failure since they're making tons of money.
|
| It could be a case of post-founder leadership seeing that
| there's not a lot of room for growth and giving up. That
| happens a lot in the tech industry.
| duxup wrote:
| > people more concerned with process than results
|
| Sounds like something Steve Jobs observed at apple
| https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE?si=QOCBUqcUPWu8AsAX
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Link with spyware removed: https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE
| duxup wrote:
| Spyware?
| Centigonal wrote:
| GP means the si url parameter, which is a token that
| helps google track how their videos are being shared.
| netule wrote:
| Not OP, but the "si" parameter in the URL is an
| individual tracking identifier, generated specifically
| for YouTube to see who you share the link with.
| duxup wrote:
| TY
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I feel as if youtube itself might still contain some
| tracking.
|
| People recommend invidious and piped but they are starting
| to have issues.
|
| This video is archived on wayback machine (archive.org) and
| I feel as if that might be the best way to watch this video
| right now.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260207024055/https://www.yout
| u...
|
| Edit: I have also uploaded it on preservetube when I got
| interested in what are some wayback machine alternatives
| (given that wayback machine suggests to not upload videos
| given storage constraints unless absolutely necessary)
|
| So I found preservetube which is sort of intended for this
| and uploaded this video on it
|
| https://preservetube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE
| dpe82 wrote:
| Having been on a bigco team that underwent the same sort of
| headcount growth in a very short time I have to imagine that
| "more than tripling our headcount in that first year" was
| likely more a driver of the inability to keep up than a
| solution. That's not a knock on the talents of anyone hired;
| it's just exceedingly difficult to simultaneously grow a team
| that fast _and_ maintain any kind of velocity regardless of the
| complexity of the problems you 're trying to tackle. The
| culture and knowledge that enabled the previous team's velocity
| just gets completely diluted.
| deepsun wrote:
| I worked with some of the folks from there, and honestly you
| make it sounds like tech debt is inevitable consequence
| haunting projects from year one.
|
| I disagree, I think the folks just did a sloppy job of "let's
| bungee strap it all together" for speed, instead of more
| serious planning and architecturing. They self-inflicted the
| tech debt on them and got drowned in the debt interest super
| fast.
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| Sure, but that bungee strapped slop got them pretty damn far
| sowbug wrote:
| There's someone out there who built the scalable version of
| Heroku at another garage startup. But we never heard of them
| because Heroku beat them to market.
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| I used Heroku extensively before AWS reached its current level of
| maturity. Heroku made it incredibly easy to create cool apps.
| When Salesforce acquired it, and knowing a lot about Salesforce,
| I expected tight integration to address use cases where Apex is
| too limited (Apex being Salesforce's native language). There were
| (and still are) numerous such use cases. Unfortunately, this
| never materialized, and Salesforce gradually shifted away from a
| dev-first platform toward click-based config and heavy reliance
| on middleware for all kind of integrations.
|
| It's been a butchered acquisition and missed opportunities along
| the way. And now it ends up just like Microsoft's Skype.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Reading the blog post, I thought I wasn't good at English. Well,
| I am a non-native English speaker.
|
| Reading the comments, it turns out the blog post says nothing.
|
| Reading the between lines, Heroku is being deprecated.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| When I was young, the startup company I was at used heroku for
| fast deploys.
|
| We eventually migrated to AWS directly, because Heroku basically
| exploits you.
|
| Now I'd probably use Fly IO if not just a lambda with AWS
| gateway.
|
| I don't like building backends and will avoid doing so if
| possible.
| Lammy wrote:
| Headline includes the term "update" == always bad news.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| All I'm going to say is if your press release is titled "an
| update on heroku" instead if something exciting it means you
| aren't delivering happy news that is good for the user.
|
| I bet I'm right. Haven't read the article or comments, I'm just
| posting this comment to see if I'm proven right or wrong.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I still haven't used a system as nice as Ruby on Rails and Heroku
| circa 2014.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| There's very little written history about Heroku but there is
| this podcast
|
| The Story Of Heroku With Adam Wiggins, co-founder and former CTO
| of Heroku.
|
| https://open.spotify.com/episode/3nEwB6apkvUpwk8W9KgzEF
| keithluu wrote:
| TIL Salesforce acquires Heroku in 2011, way before I was even a
| CS graduate. I remember enjoying using the free tier of Heroku
| for my school projects but also the pain of dyno cold starts.
| burlesona wrote:
| Sad, although I guess I'm not surprised.
|
| I think it's fair to say that, if not for Heroku, I would not
| have had a career in software. I learned how to code web apps
| from books, and had a breakthrough when I discovered Rails (in
| 2009 I think?). But for the life of me I did not understand how
| to deploy a Rails app.
|
| I bashed my head against that wall for a while, then found
| Heroku, and it just worked. That let me ship a product when I
| barely knew what I was doing, which let me keep building and
| learning, until eventually I didn't need Heroku anymore. But I
| still always liked it, because I never enjoyed thinking about
| infrastructure.
|
| RIP Heroku, you were legendary.
| neya wrote:
| They shot themselves in the foot a long time ago and never
| recovered from that, I guess. I remember back in 2012-13 they
| made some changes that ghosted their primary ICP - indie devs and
| startup owners. They made the platform incredibly expensive to
| run. A lot of us panicked and had to move to other vendors - I in
| particular chose Google's AppEngine which was hugely under-
| appreciated at the time and eventually became a GCP consultant.
| All thanks to Heroku. Some of my other friends switched to Engine
| Yard (for rails) and the rest just went on to learn how to self
| host stuff onto EC2 instances. Heroku knowingly or unknowingly
| made a lot of careers of the present day engineers in AWS and GCP
| (including myself). So, I am a bit sad to see them in such a
| situation if I'm being honest.
| throwawaypath wrote:
| One of the worst "engineers" I've suffered working with (spent
| all day on Slack virtue signaling, put on a PIP) went to Heroku.
| A comment I made was "only a sinking ship would take them/her."
| This update from Heroku does not surprise me.
| crashprone wrote:
| Comment adds nothing valuable to the discussion. Hope you at
| least feel better now.
| throwawaypath wrote:
| Comment adds nothing valuable to the discussion. Hope you at
| least feel better now.
| steren wrote:
| At Google we call it KTLO ("Keep The Lights On")
| ksec wrote:
| Why do they not sell it? Why do companies just close down
| products and services without ever exploring a sale possiblity?
| elondemirock wrote:
| The simplicity it brought at the time to hand-jammed and complex
| processes was nothing short of exemplary. They set the bar on how
| streamlined application deployment can be and a great UI to go
| along with it.
|
| Heroku may die but the ideas Heroku executed on and brought to
| life will continue to prosper... so long Heroku!
| XCSme wrote:
| So, Andreas killed Heroku, with Coolify?
| elitan wrote:
| Heroku's git-push-to-deploy was magic in 2012. Sad to see it go
| out like this.
|
| I've been building Frost https://github.com/elitan/frost, open
| source and self-hosted. Same idea, git push to deploy, automatic
| SSL, custom domains, but on your own VPS. Docker-native, no
| vendor lock-in, no pricing surprises.
|
| The angle that's a bit different: it's designed for AI coding
| agents. Simple config they write correctly, clear errors, no K8s
| complexity to hallucinate. You give your agent the install URL
| and it sets up the whole server.
| seaofclouds wrote:
| garden of ideas now blossoms dancing with wind still creating,
| still
| seaofclouds wrote:
| garden of ideas
|
| now blossoms dancing with wind
|
| still creating, still
| muzani wrote:
| I've had a zombie project running on this for many years now. I
| used to charge people about $25 for 'lifetime', but there's only
| about ~10 regular users on it, so I try to keep it alive.
|
| Decided this is the time to make the switch over to AWS. They've
| been rather painful with cancellation. They required all dynos be
| downgraded to "Eco". Fine.
|
| But this downgrade also incurred another $5 charge which they now
| required me to pay to remove the credit card. It's not much, but
| this is shady af.
|
| The billing language has become increasingly shady over the
| years. Basic is "~$0.010/hour, Max of $7 per month". Eco is
| "~$0.005/hour, Flat fee of $5.00/month". But in reality, you're
| just being charged a flat $7 or $5 either way. Eco is visually
| shown as the "free" option, except it's not free at all.
|
| I'd love to just keep using Heroku and paying some flat rate; we
| were talking about putting some more work & funding into the
| project and maybe scaling it up to thousands of users. But I have
| no idea what Heroku can actually scale to and how much it costs.
| AWS etc are also not that clear on costs, but at least their
| specifications is a little more detailed than "Superior
| performance for your very large-scale, high traffic app"
| seyz wrote:
| It's too late. I loved Heroku, but having 5+ major outages in a
| single year was unacceptable. The support was abysmal, and
| transparency was non-existent. After the Salesforce acquisition,
| we watched the company culture shift, getting worse and worse
| over the years. We were forced to migrate to AWS. Even though we
| were high-spend customers, the trust is gone. This post is a nice
| gesture of transparency, but it's way too fluffy for my taste.
| Heroku is dead to me, there's no coming back from this.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| It was such a great product.
|
| Yes, I know they had one _truly_ horrible year. But, they righted
| the ship.
|
| I worked for a company that ran 10bn in revenue, with thousands
| of users, and Heroku just hummed along. It ran our business.
|
| The benefit to us was the _lack_ of problems that occurred at
| deploy time. Heroku 's orchestration of removing old dynos,
| adding new dynos, and their network control was spectacular. DB's
| were updated, or patched, without downtime. It truly was
| impressive.
|
| We moved to a combination of AWS and on-prem, and the overhead of
| providing what Heroku previously provided is quite large.
|
| I'll remember it fondly, and miss it a bit too.
| valzam wrote:
| I mean I know what it means but how can you corpo speak so hard
| that it's pretty much unclear what the change even is
| andrewdubinsky wrote:
| What does this mean in non-corpo speak?
| kolanos wrote:
| For a little context. Salesforce changed their enterprise
| structure, effectively doubling their prices and my guess is many
| of their larger customers fled the platform. The enterprise
| pricing organized dynos into blocks and without notice they
| doubled the minimum block unit you could have. As a result, you
| ended up paying for dynos you weren't even using because they
| were now rounding up, sometimes by thousands of dollars worth of
| dyno blocks. So if you thought Heroku was expensive before, now
| it just didn't make any financial sense at all. For the other
| PaaS out there: don't do this.
| mfru wrote:
| it would be too easy to just outright say "we are shutting this
| down over the next x years, right?
| pvtmert wrote:
| I originally saw this on Twitter/X, the wording here is very
| confusing. The tl;dr version is simply they are going to be KTLO
| -keep the lights on- mode.
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