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
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.
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?
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.
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”....
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
It means: go elsewhere, they're dead.
What's the best alternative?
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
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.
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?
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.
"sustaining engineering model"
ie, life support.. bit rot will set in, they are dead.
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”....
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
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.
"transitioning to a sustaining engineering model". I don't care what anyone says, it takes real talent to come up with lines like this.
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.
Could have just said we will Keep the Lights on
This reads more like "we won't deliberately turn the lights off… but they're probably gonna break on their own eventually".
Surely it's a typo and they meant "sustainable"?
Otherwise IMO such an odd word choice. Definition:
>> providing physical or mental strength or support
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.
Sustaining as in sustaining their shareholders.
We've been optimizing for decades to engineer the bullshit-generating super-soldiers required to craft modern PR statements.
It's like PBS, they are going to beg for your money now with a sustaining engineering membership
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.
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.
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...
This may be the worst piece of corporate communication that I've ever seen.
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.
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
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?
> lead to customers moving elsewhere
Since they're no longer accepting new enterprise clients, maybe this is intentional.
I think they’d be happy if all the customers moved on. They just don’t want to upset enterprise customers.
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.
How does render compare to fly.io? Does anyone has experience running production rails apps on these?
https://render.com/articles/render-vs-fly-io
Sad day. Was such an amazing product and gave a start to so many companies back then.
It was the easiest place to host my Rails apps back in the day.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Translation: We're going to reassign the engineers into Salesforce AI.
I thought if you were all in on AI you wouldn’t need engineers - just swarms of agents doing everything. :)
Huh, so that's what they mean when using the word "we". "We" is not Heroku, it's Salesforce.
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.
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
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.
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.
It's a bit surprising, one would have thought that with the event of accessible coding through agents, such site deployment sites would prosper.
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.
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!
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.
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
Literally nobody who seriously uses Heroku wants to self-host their own Heroku.
What DO you want?
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.
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..
northflank comes close
I wonder how much money Salesforce would need to sell what's left of Heroku to a better steward.
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.
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.
I don't see AWS as a PaaS at all. Heroku's selling point has always been how it makes everything way easier.
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.
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.
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.
Why/when do you use Railway over Render?
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.
why split, you could use railway and render for both front end and back end
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.
Yes, Render if you want something similar.
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.
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.
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.
So they are going into maintenance mode?
Just please don't sunset Heroku Connect
They will still raise prices when renewal time comes around.
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/
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.
They are discontinuing it, you were right.
i am impressed. no ai can ever write announements this bad
Was this written by llm?
Dogfooding their future products!
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.
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.
more like herok-who?
Salesforce is the worst, lol