we've been loyal heroku customers for over a decade. should have switched off long ago, but as a small team, it was too valuable. such a shame.
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!)
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.
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!
Also feel like many are still trying to recreate the Heroku experience all these years laters tbh
Nope, not clear.
This is a clear message “ the heroku product is cancelled but will not be shut down, will continue to operate exactly as before but no new features will be added.”
Pretty illuminating reading the thread from 2010, it was big news at the time.
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?
> Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers
Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.
Now Heroku and GitHub have been gutted in spirit by their acquirers, which is such a damn shame for our field. We still have Stripe and Apple to some extent, and maybe some new places, but I personally feel a real sense of loss from Heroku and GitHub exiting their status as places you could admire.
Proceeds to not be clear about what this means for customers.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since they're no longer accepting new enterprise clients, maybe this is intentional.
Anyone any experience with https://sevalla.com/ ?
I feel like that's Fly.io now. They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities...while improving on pricing, particularly for lower traffic stuff. Love Fly.
This is a common misconception, but it's actually not true. The reality is even more bizarre.
Most of Heroku's successful years came after the acquisition, not before. Heroku was acquired extremely early in its lifecycle, and Salesforce does actually bear responsibility for investing in it and making it the powerhouse it became. Most of what people remember as the glory days of Heroku came long after the acquisition. And in fact, at the time of acquisiton, Heroku was nowhere near as competitive as a product as it later became.
It was only much later on that Salesforce began to pull the supports out from underneath it, leaving it to fall behind and become what it is today.
The narrative of "BigCo™ acquires startup, then leaves it to wither and die" is a trope because it is very commonly true, but it's actually not what happened in this particular case.
ie, life support.. bit rot will set in, they are dead.
So basically heroku will fix whatever is broken, but don't expect any new features or development.
My money is on holding companies like IAC buying the brand first through financial engineering and restructuring finances initially. They would load it up with debt like they did with the sporting goods store in Sopranos.
Afterward, they would sell it to a Euro-based caretaking company like Bending Spoons, with a focus on maintenance engineering rather than innovation engineering.
Baffling
Otherwise IMO such an odd word choice. Definition:
>> providing physical or mental strength or support
I also love Fly, but they were missing easy managed databases (which always seemed like the main reason to use Heroku to me). And now they have them they're very expensive (even compared to Heroku). Which is a shame because their compute is very cheap.
To my understanding there was a runway-growth problem. Could the founders raise and spend (efficiently) enough money quickly enough to keep the business viable? It would be a big gamble and the alternatives were to shut down (no way!) or sell. So they sold.
Rackspace wanted to take Matt’s and Jason’s know how (plus customer base) and go big, really big! That defocused our efforts a bit, plus there were corporate integration headaches (though not too bad). Eventually Linode, already a competitor, and later Digital Ocean filled the void.
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.
Seems to be the sticking point for a lot of people, myself included.
Although I would consider, _when possible_, using Vercel or Netlify.
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
We're doing Managed Postgres now (MPG), which is what we should have done to begin with, but it took us for-ev-er to get here.
I remember being excited by the merger because well, Rackspace had such a fantastic reputation at the time. People still tell stories about their service. The Rackspace Cloud was just up against an absolute monster in AWS and never really became competitive.
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...
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.
I've had pretty good luck setting up logical replication from Heroku to the new provider and having a 10-15 minute maintenance window to catch up once it's in sync. Might be worth considering.
You might also want to add a warning about Postgres versions. There's some old bugs around primary key hash functions that can cause corruption on a migration. I've seen it twice when migrating from Heroku to other vendors.
For a company like Northflank, I'd expect actual production-grade documentation for migrating, not instructions that are only applicable to a toy app.
Of course you can do both with both of these services.
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.
I was a free customer at the time. I pay for it happily now.
https://northflank.com/docs/v1/application/databases-and-per....
Some folks want to do that, others want to import a backup directly, some want to spawn a read replica and sync their DB. Different strokes for different folks, all supported on Northflank.
Today, Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support. Heroku remains an actively supported, production-ready platform, with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational excellence rather than introducing new features. We know changes like this can raise questions, and we want to be clear about what this means for customers.
There is no change for customers using Heroku today. Customers who pay via credit card in the Heroku dashboard—both existing and new—can continue to use Heroku with no changes to pricing, billing, service, or day-to-day usage. Core platform functionality, including applications, pipelines, teams, and add-ons, is unaffected, and customers can continue to rely on Heroku for their production, business-critical workloads.
Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers. Existing Enterprise subscriptions and support contracts will continue to be fully honored and may renew as usual.
We’re focusing our product and engineering investments on areas where we can deliver the greatest long-term customer value, including helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted way.