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An Update on Heroku(heroku.com)
59 points by lstoll 2 hours ago | 62 comments
simonw 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"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 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It means: go elsewhere, they're dead.

an0malous an hour ago | parent [-]

What's the best alternative?

sm123 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

syx an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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 a minute ago | parent [-]

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.

JamesSwift 4 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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”....

g8oz 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"transitioning to a sustaining engineering model". I don't care what anyone says, it takes real talent to come up with lines like this.

earless1 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

throwoutway 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Could have just said we will Keep the Lights on

sarreph an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Surely it's a typo and they meant "sustainable"?

Otherwise IMO such an odd word choice. Definition:

>> providing physical or mental strength or support

shortsightedsid an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

sebiw an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Sustaining as in sustaining their shareholders.

kenforthewin an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We've been optimizing for decades to engineer the bullshit-generating super-soldiers required to craft modern PR statements.

selimthegrim an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It's like PBS, they are going to beg for your money now with a sustaining engineering membership

prodigycorp an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This may be the worst piece of corporate communication that I've ever seen.

jihadjihad 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

BillinghamJ 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> lead to customers moving elsewhere

Since they're no longer accepting new enterprise clients, maybe this is intentional.

CPLX an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I think they’d be happy if all the customers moved on. They just don’t want to upset enterprise customers.

kuczmama an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

bluedino an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sad day. Was such an amazing product and gave a start to so many companies back then.

xXSLAYERXx an hour ago | parent [-]

It was the easiest place to host my Rails apps back in the day.

singularity2001 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a bit surprising, one would have thought that with the event of accessible coding through agents, such site deployment sites would prosper.

sebiw 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

sc68cal an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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 an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

nightpool 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Translation: We're going to reassign the engineers into Salesforce AI.

sebiw 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Huh, so that's what they mean when using the word "we". "We" is not Heroku, it's Salesforce.

czhu12 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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!

awad an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

PanMan an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 an hour ago | parent [-]

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

PanMan 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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..

ezekg an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Literally nobody who seriously uses Heroku wants to self-host their own Heroku.

emilsedgh 21 minutes ago | parent [-]

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.

simonw 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder how much money Salesforce would need to sell what's left of Heroku to a better steward.

petcat an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

nelsonfigueroa an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

xnx an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

kristapsmors an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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/

hakanensari an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So they are going into maintenance mode?

slices 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

quentindanjou an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Why/when do you use Railway over Render?

nop_slide an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

why split, you could use railway and render for both front end and back end

Tankenstein 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

hboon 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, Render if you want something similar.

guzik 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

easton an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They will still raise prices when renewal time comes around.

mixtureoftakes an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

i am impressed. no ai can ever write announements this bad

dainiusse an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Was this written by llm?

sebiw an hour ago | parent [-]

Dogfooding their future products!

Trasmatta an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

baggy_trough an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

realusername an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 an hour ago | parent [-]

They are discontinuing it, you were right.

ProfessorZoom an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

more like herok-who?

Robdel12 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Salesforce is the worst, lol

jcytong an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

gdulli an hour ago | parent [-]

Why is this so cringe? That's not the typical way AI writing is bad.