Just about to set up a new app to deploy to Heroku, but this does not seem promising. Render seems like the next logical move, but curious where others are looking for alternatives.

"transitioning to a sustaining engineering model". I don't care what anyone says, it takes real talent to come up with lines like this.

Seems strange not to just... say nothing and merely remove any mentions of an enterprise offering from the website.

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?

I wonder how much money Salesforce would need to sell what's left of Heroku to a better steward.

> helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted way

> 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.

"We know changes like this can raise questions, and we want to be clear about what this means for customers."

Proceeds to not be clear about what this means for customers.

Was this written by llm?

This blog post is peak comedy. Heroku is half abandoned, I expected the post to be something like "we're sunsetting Heroku" before clicking and what we get instead is about AI.

I just got some Heroku socks like two months ago at an event, they must've killed it at the start of the year. Weird.

They will still raise prices when renewal time comes around.

Sad day. Was such an amazing product and gave a start to so many companies back then.

more like herok-who?

This may be the worst piece of corporate communication that I've ever seen.

It really surprises me there isn’t a modern heroku alternative that supports the same.. things. Like build pipelines, routing included, multiple worker types. AWS is way less batteries included. And none of the competitors seems to offer the same kind of service, last time I looked.

Salesforce is the worst, lol

Not at all surprising, but a real shame. Nothing that I know of has come close to the ease of the "Deploy to Heroku" button.

It's nice that they would admit this, but it seems a little strange that they would. Why not just never add new features and let people figure it out on their own? A big statement like this seems more like implicitly killing the platform, which is what they say they aren't doing.

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.

The corporate speak is crazy. I think the update boils down to this sentence:

> Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers

chatgpt translation: Heroku isn’t shutting down, but they’re basically done building new stuff. For those who want to move and potentially save $ in process, here is a nice cost comparison: https://infraslash.com/costs/

This is a sad day. I used heroku for years (in the past).

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.

So they are going into maintenance mode?

i am impressed. no ai can ever write announements this bad

For those not as well-versed in corporate PR....Salesforce are going to do just the bare minimum to keep the service going until the revenue dries up (or some > 0 $$ threshold where it just doesn't financially make sense to keep it running).

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’ve been developing an open source Heroku alternative so we may never again be gouged for nice deployment pipelines.

https://canine.sh

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!

This is such a weird press release that totally obscures what it's trying to say. Just use clear and concise language and treat your customers like adults.

It's a bit surprising, one would have thought that with the event of accessible coding through agents, such site deployment sites would prosper.

Heroku (YC W08) was acquired by Salesforce all the way back in 2010 [0], a little over 15 years ago. A lot of people forget that, and assume the acquisition was somewhat recent.

Pretty illuminating reading the thread from 2010, it was big news at the time.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1982489

It sounds like there were pretty broad layoffs which impacted a lot more than just a focus on enterprise contracts. It wasn't "just" a few enterprise sales people. Engineering may have indeed been the least impacted, but this sounds like biggest round of layoffs to hit Heroku since its inception, not just some right sizing from over hiring.