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?

> 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.

Proceeds to not be clear about what this means for customers.

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.

> Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers

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.

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.

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!

Pretty illuminating reading the thread from 2010, it was big news at the time.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1982489

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.

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.

Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.

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

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.

Anyone any experience with https://sevalla.com/ ?

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.

Also feel like many are still trying to recreate the Heroku experience all these years laters tbh

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.”

https://github.com/orgs/heroku/projects/130

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.

sustaining == maintanence mode

[0] https://www.fortrabbit.com

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.

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.

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. À 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…

Stolen from https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/s/6U8jJJRzBC

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.

It's been a butchered acquisition and missed opportunities along the way. And now it ends up just like Microsoft's Skype.

Reading the comments, it turns out the blog post says nothing.

Reading the between lines, Heroku is being deprecated.

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.

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.

The Story Of Heroku With Adam Wiggins, co-founder and former CTO of Heroku.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3nEwB6apkvUpwk8W9KgzEF