Salesforce's core product was on bare metal up to a couple years ago. What they should have done is adopt Heroku as their internal Platform-as-a-Service. That would have solved three problems: 1) provided a ready and proven foundation for cloud adoption by Salesforce business units, 2) stimulated Heroku's product roadmap by giving it a very large and loyal design partner, and 3) eliminated the opportunity cost in terms of headcount, developer productivity, and poor imitation that came with the alternative "Falcon" aka "Hyperforce" project that became Salesforce's albatross and black hole for developer energy and goodwill going on 7+ years now.
This is very much a double-edged sword. I've seen products get killed because they had one outsized customer with outsized influence over the product design and made it too specific to that customer rather than building something for everyone the customer would have to adapt to.
If they had, heroku would be very different today, since they aren't even doing enterprise contracts anymore (from what I saw of some other comments here). Maybe that would have been a good thing, maybe not.
From what I saw, Heroku was unsuitable for a serious large company. Deploy-on-push is a nice UX for a small company, but once you need something more structured, it wasn't enough.
The previous way (prior to SFDX which was clearly influenced by Heroku) was terrible. 12 hour long deploys that end when one unit test times out-style terrible. No code history terrible. There is no way that Heroku was worse for integration.
Whether they could have replaced APEX with Heroku is a different issue.
This sentence is what really seals the death for me. I used to be a big Heroku fan. And used them as late as 2023. But tbh it very quickly fell behind the capabilities and devex of products like Supabase and Vercel.
While I agree that it will probably stick around in zombie mode for another decade, if Salesforce doesn't want to improve the product, it will just slowly bleed users until the cost to maintain it is less than the revenue.
(Unfortunately the only way to view that list is reverse-chronological but we'll eventually change that)
Reading comments about people's challenges and displeasures with Heroku over the years, they have almost never resonated with me. When the complaints were contextualized, I certainly understood them, but they have not been applicable to my needs and experiences.
My current team at work had a meeting about the announcement, and decided to spend gradual time over the next year exploring how we would migrate off Heroku if we must, and running tests of our own alternative infra in pursuit of that. It is also our desire not to need to! Our first-pass assessment of such a migration is that it would (1) be time-consuming at the expensive of other work, (2) be more expensive (in engineering time) than we presently spend, and (3) likely result in worse DX than what Heroku provides.
We definitely don't want to leave, but we also know the professional choice is to be prepared to do so within the next year or two. We would not have had that conversation at all if the announcement had not been so strange. If I have any feedback for the leadership at Salesforce, it would be that: communicate better, because you are pushing otherwise-satisfied customers away.
Honestly though it isn’t that hard to go k8s anymore and self host with Argo etc. You can use ChatGPT to figure it all out. Just go bare minimum commodity VPS and use agnostic code as infrastructure like terraform. Then you can just win from the race to the bottom of cost
If it's not dead now, it'll die soon enough.
We've been on self service and we've been on enterprise contracts. In the last 2 years I believe we've cycled through about seven account managers. Heroku as a concept might not be dead, but if you release an incredibly empty announcement saying there's no new enterprise contracts and existing ones may be renewed, enterprise Heroku is absolutely dead and I'd suggest it means Heroku as the current product is dead too.
Any Heroku user that has been at the level of an enterprise user before, or who currently is, would be ringing alarm bells at the current situation. It doesn't matter about the internal good will of employees - if you have a blog post hanging your enterprise customers out to dry (ironically as enterprise customers we have received zero communication from Heroku about this) after a year of terrible stability - you're really doing a great job of killing the whole thing.
> Heroku remains an actively supported, production-ready platform, with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational excellence
Anyone that has used Heroku for a while will know that it is far less reliable today than it has been at nearly any point in its history (it's the least reliable since its first year of existence, imo). There is very little "operational excellence" left as an organization. All you need to do is look at how they communicated (or extreme lack-thereof) a critical outage that lasted for hours last year[1]
As an organization, we've put up with terrible reliability over the last couple of years, and swallowed cost increases every renewal and we've always been committed. That's changed in the last few days - we've tried out Railway and Northflank, and we'll continue to try out a few other services until we find the one that fits. We're lucky, we have about 9 months left on our contract and that gives us enough time to move.
An Update on Heroku - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46913903 - Feb 2026 (347 comments)
Sounds like you were right on both counts?
The ops planning point resonates. When you're evaluating alternatives, the question isn't just "where do I move?" but "how do I avoid this situation again?" That's why we went with unlimited apps on flat pricing instead of per-app billing. Makes the economics predictable, and you're not locked into a single vendor's roadmap decisions.
For anyone actively planning their migration: the technical migration is usually straightforward (Buildpacks, Procfiles, etc. mostly work the same). The harder part is re-architecting around the pricing model of wherever you land. Happy to answer questions if helpful.
> All I can say is: it sounds to me like there is hope, as a lot of these pains are being addressed actively.
If you're coming for the title, I think reading the above quote is sufficient.
What stood out from the comments: people don't want to leave the simplicity, they just can't justify the cost or trust the direction. That's exactly the gap we're trying to fill. Flat pricing (hobby plans from $5/mo, pro from $22/mo), unlimited apps per plan, and we're actually shipping features.
Not trying to be opportunistic here, but if anyone's evaluating alternatives, happy to help. We have people migrating from Heroku weekly and the feedback has been solid.
One thing worth considering: at $200/mo you're still managing patches, security updates, backups, and handling your own uptime. A single Hetzner VPS is also a single point of failure. The cost savings are real, but so is the operational overhead that comes back to bite you at 2am.
We built miget.com to sit in that middle ground—simpler than managing your own servers, way cheaper than Heroku. Unlimited apps on flat pricing ($5/mo hobby, $22/mo pro with dedicated CPU), so you're not penalized for scaling out. Free tier if you want to try it.
Not saying DIY is wrong—just that there are more options now between "manage everything yourself" and "$1200/mo PaaS."
The "no new features" announcement is honest, but it forced a lot of teams into planning mode overnight. Most aren't looking for fancy features. They want reliable deployments, reasonable pricing, and to not worry about their platform disappearing. That's the gap we're trying to fill - Heroku-style DX without the Salesforce uncertainty or the sticker shock.
That's why we built miget.com around flat pricing for unlimited apps instead of per-app billing. Makes the economics predictable, and you're not betting on a single vendor's roadmap decisions. Free tier for trying it out, hobby plans from $5/mo.
The DX concern is real though. Most alternatives either give you raw infrastructure (more ops work) or lock you into their specific tooling. Worth running some tests to see what the actual tradeoffs are for your stack.
> Heroku is not dead, it's changing.
Mmk, changing into something no one should use. They were struggling to keep up before the Salesforce acquisition and have only gone further down hill after that.
There was a time that Heroku was king, it was so easy to get started, and while it was always expensive, at least it was cutting edge. Then they lost that edge and many other, better, alternatives took their place (this was pre-acquisition).
At best Heroku is in maintenance mode at this point (if that).
"Not dead" might be a technical truth, but "on life support" would be my analogy. As soon as it stops being profitable, or the owner wants to push users of to a more profitable platform, they'll pull the plug.
In terms of Ops planning, Heroku is a toxic target platform now, full of risk (more than it was before, at any rate). I wouldn't touch it for a new project and would definitely have plans in place to move anything I have there off.
I asked Claude to build /provision-server and /deploy skills. It was way easier than it should’ve been.
My infra costs on this one project have gone from $1200 to <$200/mo.
Neon is awesome, with lightweight branching and instant restores.
Heroku is most definitely dead.
The frustrating part wasn't just the lack of new features - it was watching the price stay high while reliability got worse. We're building miget.com partly because of that: flat pricing for unlimited apps, so you don't get nickel-and-dimed as you scale out. Starts at $5/mo for hobby projects, free tier for trying it out.
Not trying to pitch - just saying there are options now that didn't exist when Heroku was the only game in town. The PaaS space is healthier for it.
1. Deal under the SF Master Contract (I have one AE/SE to yell at and am treated like a major customer due to our overall spend. Heroku is only 1% of our overall SF spend)
2. Best support for C# apps
3. Heroku Connect provides a Postgres endpoint for SF Data (No need to mess with API's or Mulesoft)
4. Applink allows me to call apps running on Heroku (No need to mess with API's or Mulesoft)
Right now, I am sticking with Heroku.
I know most of their product team was gutted, so I don't know what is going to happen long term. Time will tell (And yes, I have started looking at alternatives)
PS: If you know of a provider who can provide all the above 4, let me know
>A lot of Heroku folks I know are avoiding HackerNews and other sites, for mental health purposes.
If these are the types of "engineers" Heroku hired, it's not a mystery why they failed. The author admits to spending their time "shitposting" at work, "burning out," etc. Maybe they're not the "high-performing IC/tech lead" they delusionally believe they are.
Seeing as Heroku doesn't do any enterprise contracts anymore I'm curious how they're going to afford the project. But I guess just saying "it's not dead" fixed that problem.
