If any Heroku customer is reading this and not immediately going "we need to move off Heroku ASAP" all future problems are their own fault.
replyThat has been the case for a very long time at this point, the Salesforce acquisition was a death knell. The only stuff i have left on Heroku are zombie projects I don't care about.
replyThe Salesforce acquisition closed in 2010, when Heroku was barely three years old.
replyA whole lot of Heroku's best features shipped after they were acquired. They had a pretty good run under Salesforce for the first few years.
It would be interesting to hear a full oral history of when and where things went wrong after that. I expect the original founders leaving was a major factor.
As a former enterprise person, this clearly states “exiting growth cycle into low-staffing maintenance mode”; Salesforce must have bought them to kill a price-beating competitor to multi-year Salesforce PaaS contracts, same as Okta did with Auth0. Investors are typically-majority short-sighted and only care about growth-cycle revenue, so once they reached market saturation, they were ripe and duly reaped. So long, Heroku.
replyYou are saying the plan was to buy a "price-beating competitor", invest in them for 16 years, and then finally pull the rug out now?
replyThey’re not competition if you own them! Typepad continued for over a decade after it was purchased. Auth0 is still in maintenance mode afaik. It can last as long as revenue pays for the FTE to maintain it, or until corporate reallocated the FTE to higher revenue-per-FTE-hour opportunities.
replyReminds me of https://youtu.be/T2BY8zZ1CTM?si=XDroWqVD-pElN9si
replyFYI, you forgot to remove the &si= tracking cookie from your derogatory comment that uniquely identifies you. As a former Salesforce/Heroku employee and so presumably familiar with Heroku’s treatment within the megacorp for at least some of (checks notes) the past sixteen years, do you have anything relevant to contribute to this post?
replythat was great!
replyAbsolutely none of this is true. What was the PaaS Heroku was apparently beating at the time of the acquisition?
replyNoted. Please accept my apologies and retraction.
replyWas clear to me. If I was looking at using them, I wouldn’t. If I was already using them, I’d stop. They seem dedicated to supporting the slow extinction so it doesn’t have to be a fire drill exit, but how do you sleep at night knowing they’re playing with matches.
reply"sustaining engineering model"
replyie, life support.. bit rot will set in, they are dead.
What's not to get? The product is being bumped down in terms of priority so they can focus on AI word salad solutions. They are waiting for enough customers to end their contracts before they discontinue the product altogether.
replyIt means: go elsewhere, they're dead.
replyWhat's the best alternative?
replyWe saw this coming (like most people) a while ago when Heroku started flaking without status updates, and moved part of our workload to Fly. We ended up moving off Fly as well (significant unreliability and just some very strange network load balancer issues that would cause us downtime) and went to Railway, and that's been fantastic so far. We've moved our whole workload onto it.
replyIf you like VPS, Hetzner with Dokploy. It works great, the UI has essentially all the features of Fly or Render that you'd use for deployment, like preview build URLs and environments.
replyVery close to the worst alternative for people who actually need Heroku, but it won't stop people from plugging it to death and back.
replyEh, no, depends on why you used Heroku in the first place. Way back when, I used it because the UI was dead simple and it Just Worked™. If I can replicate that with a VPS and have a good UI around it that takes care of everything, it's functionally the same to me.
reply"Depends on what you used it for" applies to just about any platform.
replyRealistically, self-hosting the PaaS defeats the purpose of a PaaS for the crowd Heroku was attracting.
Heroku was one of the first to have that seamless UX, only after which others like Fly or Render or Railway came to copy it. I wager people were primarily attracted to that user experience and only minimally cared that it was fully hosted versus not, because there was also AWS at that time.
replyHow do you think self-hosting affects that seamless UX they value.
replyMoved 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
replyI 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.
replyI 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?
replyNo my one is a simple ruby sinatra app with no DB. Yeah unfortunately it wasn’t super reliable as heroku but they’re getting better at keeping the instances up
replyFly.io are absolute G’s. The product is awesome and the tech blogs they write are fantastic.
replyDigital Ocean App Engine has the easy setup and GUI management that made Heroku popular.
replyBuild.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.
replyWe 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.
Do you care to show prices? The true benefit of heroku for me was really predictable pricing model. Build.io website doesn’t have it on mobile site at all. I don’t want to look at demo, i want to hook up my credit card, set a monthly budget and explore
replyllIIllIIllIIl & runako give me an email on steven[at]build.io and I'll share. As mentioned, we stripped the site back while we overhaul and we certainly didn't expect this today!
replyFWIW it doesn't look like pricing or details of the service offerings are available on the desktop site, either.
replyNot to be confused with builder.io, or worse, builder.ai
replyOh, they're very clear, just not explicit.
replyHoly 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”....
reply> including helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted way.
replyBaffling
It saves face with investors to say you're shuttering a product to focus on the hot new thing as a strategic decision than to say you're shuttering it because your actions have led it to be unviable.
replyReminds me of when blockchain was in literally everything. So the wheel turns.
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