An Update on Heroku

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Interpretation of the announcement

  • “Sustaining engineering model” is widely read as “maintenance mode” / “keep the lights on”: bug fixes and operations, no meaningful new features.
  • Several commenters say this is how Heroku has effectively operated for years; the post just makes it official.
  • The language is criticized as vague “corporate nullspeech” that obscures the real message instead of clearly stating “no more new features, long tail support.”
  • Stopping new Enterprise contracts is seen as the concrete signal of a slow-motion sunset and the first step in a formal end‑of‑life process.

Customer reactions and risk assessment

  • Many argue any serious customer should immediately plan to migrate; staying now means accepting future problems as self‑inflicted.
  • Others see it as a “mature” acknowledgment of Heroku’s lifecycle: stable, not growing, but not shutting down imminently.
  • Some enterprise users report years of outages, poor support, and culture decay after the Salesforce acquisition; for them this is long overdue confirmation.
  • A few note Salesforce processes typically require explicit “end of sales” announcements as precursors to eventual EOL.

Alternatives and migration paths

  • Hosted PaaS successors frequently mentioned: Render, Railway, Fly.io, Northflank, DigitalOcean App Platform, Vercel/Netlify (for frontends), DO App Platform, plus various niche/European offerings.
  • Self‑hosted “Heroku-like” tools: Coolify, Dokku, Dokploy, CapRover, Frost, Cuber, Kamal, Canine, plus plain Kubernetes or VPS setups (often on Hetzner/DO).
  • Debate over suitability: some insist self‑hosting defeats Heroku’s value prop (“nothing to install”), others say modern self‑hosted UIs replicate the experience well enough.
  • Postgres migration is called out as the hard part; suggestions include Crunchy Bridge and logical replication to minimize downtime.

Pricing, trust, and business dynamics

  • A recurring theme: Heroku became too expensive (“Heroku tax”), especially after free tiers and cheap dynos disappeared; many teams left primarily for cost.
  • Confusing or “shady” billing language and the removal of the free tier eroded trust, especially for MVP/PoC use cases.
  • Some ex‑insiders blame sales incentives: revenue targets could be hit by upselling existing customers instead of winning new ones, removing pressure to innovate.

Heroku’s legacy and technical history

  • Strong nostalgia: the “git push and you’re live” experience is described as magical, career‑making, and still unmatched in polish.
  • Heroku is remembered as a pioneer of developer‑centric UX, buildpacks, and turnkey pipelines that inspired many later platforms.
  • Former employees in the thread describe massive growth after the Salesforce acquisition, followed by crippling tech debt, AWS outages, and a shift from product velocity to reliability and process.
  • Several see this as a classic arc: visionary founding team, rapid growth, tech debt, founders leaving, bureaucracy rising, and eventual stagnation.

Broader industry reflections

  • The situation is framed as part of a larger pattern: big‑company acquisitions (Salesforce, Microsoft, etc.) diluting once‑admired engineering cultures and products.
  • Some argue PaaS itself has been commoditized (containers, “just run my Docker image” on major clouds), making Heroku’s original model less economically compelling.
  • Others counter that no one has truly recreated the original Heroku experience end‑to‑end, which is why so many “new Herokus” keep appearing.