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)
Fun memory - James and bitscribe helped me with my prior startup. I remember them brainstorming a 'collaborative IDE' while they helped us set up our servers.
You may have been at bitscribe at the time with pedro and morton?
Heroku <feedback@heroku.com> Tue, Nov 6, 2007, 1:03 PM to jason
Hello -
You've been invited to the Heroku beta by your friend james@heroku.com.
They included this message: -------------------------------------------------- So we're up and running, and can officially talk about our YC funding now. You are probably outside of our audience, but feel free to kick it around and send me any feedback you have. Going to invite Colin and the Bracy's too.
--------------------------------------------------
Heroku lets you create web applications right in your web browser. Follow the link to activate your account, then create Rails apps instantly:
http://heroku.com/core/invitation/accept/6d1c4cdb60
To learn more about Heroku, check out our public website:
Have fun, and don't hesitate to drop us a line with your comments or questions.
- James, Adam, and Orion
> You may have been at bitscribe at the time with pedro and morton?
It's been so long I had to go back and find my prior post, but I think so!
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
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.
If it's not dead now, it'll die soon enough.
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.
Sounds like you were right on both counts?
> 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.
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)