Heroku Alternatives
What Heroku's "sustaining engineering" announcement actually means
Last updated: March 2026
On February 6, 2026, Nitin T. Bhat, SVP and General Manager at Heroku, published a post titled "An Update on Heroku". It was written in the careful, measured language of corporate communication. Most developers read it once, felt vaguely unsettled, and went looking for someone to explain what it actually means.
This chapter does that.
What Heroku announced (February 6, 2026)
Heroku is transitioning to a "sustaining engineering model." That phrase does a lot of work, so let's break it down.
The practical translation: Heroku will maintain the platform. Security patches will ship. The core product, apps, pipelines, teams, add-ons, will keep running. What ends is active investment in new features and new enterprise sales cycles.
Bhat's post pointed to the broader direction: Salesforce is prioritizing Agentforce and AI-driven products. Heroku is no longer the strategic growth focus.
What stays the same
Credit card customers continue without interruption. If you pay with a card, nothing changes in the near term.
Existing enterprise contracts are honored and can renew. Heroku is not walking away from current enterprise relationships.
The core platform remains operational: apps, dynos, pipelines, add-ons, the developer workflow teams rely on.
What changes
No new enterprise contracts for new customers. If you are evaluating Heroku for a new enterprise deal, that path is closed.
No net-new feature development. The platform will be maintained, not evolved.
Long-term roadmap clarity decreases. Questions about where Heroku goes in three to five years have no clear answer.
What "sustaining engineering" means in plain language
Sustaining engineering is a product lifecycle term. It means a product has moved from active development into maintenance mode. The goal shifts from building to preserving.
In practice, the engineering team's job changes. Instead of shipping new capabilities, the focus moves to keeping existing capabilities running, patching security vulnerabilities, and managing operational continuity.
Most energy goes toward patching, hardening, and keeping things stable. Fewer net-new capabilities, backlogs weighted toward maintenance, product innovation shifting elsewhere in the company. If you were waiting for a roadmap item to reduce friction, you might be waiting indefinitely.
This is not unusual in software. Products mature. Markets shift. Owners reprioritize. The issue is not that sustaining engineering exists; it's what usually comes after.
One useful framing from Greyhound Research: "sustaining engineering is rarely a stable equilibrium. It's a holding pattern." The pattern typically moves in one direction: toward deeper maintenance, reduced investment, or eventually winding down or absorbing the product into something else.
That doesn't mean Heroku disappears tomorrow. It means the trajectory has changed in a way that matters for teams making 12 to 36 month infrastructure decisions.
Historical parallels: what usually happens next
Three cases are relevant here. None of them are identical to Heroku's situation. All of them are instructive.
IBM Bluemix
IBM Bluemix launched in 2014 as IBM's PaaS play. It had a strong enterprise customer base, credible infrastructure, and a real developer community. IBM invested in it for several years before announcing that Bluemix would be rebranded into IBM Cloud.
The rebranding wasn't the end. But the years that followed were marked by declining developer attention, reduced ecosystem momentum, and a platform that felt increasingly like it was being maintained rather than built. Teams that had planned their 2018 roadmaps around Bluemix found themselves renegotiating those assumptions.
VMware Pivotal
Pivotal had a loyal enterprise customer base, particularly for Cloud Foundry-based deployments. When VMware acquired Pivotal, the message was continuity. In practice, the product roadmap slowed, the developer experience stagnated, and the most ambitious platform-level features didn't ship. Teams on Pivotal eventually had to reckon with whether their infrastructure strategy was still viable.
Google App Engine
Google App Engine is perhaps the most well-known case. It was genuinely ahead of its time, a developer experience that influenced almost everything that came after. Google maintained it. It didn't shut down. But it stopped evolving in ways that mattered, and the developer community moved to Kubernetes, Cloud Run, and other primitives that Google was actively building.
App Engine still runs. But teams that built their infrastructure identity around it in 2012 found themselves in a different position by 2016.
The common thread: sustaining engineering doesn't mean immediate failure. It means reduced optionality over time. The longer you stay, the less leverage you have when you eventually decide to move.
Who should care most
Not every Heroku user needs to take action. But some segments should take this more seriously than others.
Mission-critical production users
If customer revenue runs on Heroku, roadmap ambiguity affects disaster recovery strategy, enterprise sales conversations, board-level risk discussions, and long-term budgeting.
Growth-stage teams maintaining legacy apps
Many growth-stage teams are already compensating for platform constraints: layered CI pipelines, networking workarounds, or a growing collection of add-ons stitched together over time. When a platform slows down, technical debt compounds quietly. The migration surface area grows. Planning early keeps options open.
Regulated and security-sensitive workloads
If you operate in healthcare, fintech, or other regulated environments, compliance expectations are always evolving. A stable platform is useful, but if it's not evolving with regulatory expectations it introduces friction over time. The February 2026 announcement means compliance gaps that exist today are unlikely to close.
Platform teams already layering workarounds
Some teams have effectively built a thin platform on top of Heroku: custom build and release scripts, externalized CI/CD orchestration, expanding add-on sprawl, security controls bolted on around the edges. This problem is only going to get worse.
Teams currently evaluating Heroku
If you are in an active evaluation and considering Heroku as a new platform choice, the announcement is a clear signal to evaluate elsewhere. The enterprise sales path for new customers is closed. The feature roadmap is frozen. You would be adopting a platform at the beginning of its decline rather than the middle of its growth.
What happened to Heroku Postgres (2025 context)
Before the February 2026 announcement, there was another signal worth noting.
In early 2025, Heroku migrated its own Essential-tier Postgres databases off its proprietary infrastructure and onto AWS Aurora. The developer community had a predictable reaction: some treated it as validation that AWS RDS was simply a better database infrastructure layer. Others read it as Heroku shedding undifferentiated infrastructure it no longer wanted to own.
Both readings have merit. What it suggests is that the sustaining engineering posture did not appear overnight. Heroku had been deprioritizing infrastructure investment for some time. The February 2026 announcement made it explicit.
Developer reaction: what the community is saying
The community response has been a mixture of unsurprised pragmatism and genuine nostalgia.
On r/rails, one developer captured the sentiment plainly: "Not entirely surprising. They killed innovation on that years ago. Sad, because they were way ahead of the curve at one point."
Another clarified the technical distinction: "EOS != EOL. It's hidden in there, but the main change is to enterprise sales cycles." End of Sale is not End of Life. Heroku is not disappearing.
The nostalgia thread is real too: "I still remember getting a demo of Heroku when I was in college and having my mind blown." For a certain generation of developers, Heroku represents the moment when deploying a web app became comprehensible.
Across teams currently reassessing Heroku, three patterns arise in practice:
Small teams planning calmly. Founders and lean engineering teams are documenting dependencies, reviewing runway, and deciding whether Heroku fits their next two years. Very little drama. Mostly spreadsheets and whiteboards.
Mid-stage teams reconsidering AWS complexity. Some teams that previously avoided AWS overhead are revisiting the tradeoff. They're looking for Heroku-level simplicity with more predictable long-term platform direction.
Security-focused teams using this moment to redesign. Security-sensitive organizations are treating this as an opportunity to clean house: redesigning CI/CD pipelines, hardening networking boundaries, consolidating add-ons, and aligning infrastructure with audit requirements.
Is Heroku shutting down?
No. Not immediately, and not in any announced sense.
Heroku has committed to operational continuity. Credit card customers continue. Existing enterprise contracts are honored. The platform runs.
The more accurate framing is: Heroku is no longer being built. It is being preserved.
For some teams, that distinction doesn't matter much today. For teams planning infrastructure decisions over a 2 to 5 year horizon, the distinction matters a great deal.
Sustaining engineering postures have a directional pull. They rarely reverse. The teams that wait for a shutdown announcement to start planning are the teams that find themselves making rushed decisions under pressure rather than deliberate ones on their own timeline.
Next steps
The answer depends on where your team is.
If you are stable and not under compliance or enterprise pressure: you can reasonably stay for now. The productive move is structured assessment:
Draft a one-page internal memo summarizing platform risk and dependency exposure
Inventory applications, databases, and add-ons
Clarify your 12-24 month infrastructure requirements
Identify compliance or enterprise triggers that could force change
Revisit quarterly
Staying intentionally is very different from staying by inertia.
If you are evaluating Heroku for a new deployment: the announcement is a clear signal. There are better options for new platforms at this stage.
If you are on Heroku Shield and HIPAA compliance is part of your product: the compliance implications deserve immediate attention. Compliance gaps that exist today are unlikely to close under a sustaining engineering model. See Heroku and HIPAA.
If you are an enterprise customer with an existing contract: your contract is honored. But start evaluating alternatives before renewal, not at renewal. Leverage requires runway.
Plan deliberately while the timeline is still yours to set.
For a structured decision framework: Should You Migrate?
For pricing and cost implications: Heroku Pricing
For the full alternative landscape: Compare Platforms
Heroku Alternatives
What Heroku's "sustaining engineering" announcement actually means
Last updated: March 2026
On February 6, 2026, Nitin T. Bhat, SVP and General Manager at Heroku, published a post titled "An Update on Heroku". It was written in the careful, measured language of corporate communication. Most developers read it once, felt vaguely unsettled, and went looking for someone to explain what it actually means.
This chapter does that.
What Heroku announced (February 6, 2026)
Heroku is transitioning to a "sustaining engineering model." That phrase does a lot of work, so let's break it down.
The practical translation: Heroku will maintain the platform. Security patches will ship. The core product, apps, pipelines, teams, add-ons, will keep running. What ends is active investment in new features and new enterprise sales cycles.
Bhat's post pointed to the broader direction: Salesforce is prioritizing Agentforce and AI-driven products. Heroku is no longer the strategic growth focus.
What stays the same
Credit card customers continue without interruption. If you pay with a card, nothing changes in the near term.
Existing enterprise contracts are honored and can renew. Heroku is not walking away from current enterprise relationships.
The core platform remains operational: apps, dynos, pipelines, add-ons, the developer workflow teams rely on.
What changes
No new enterprise contracts for new customers. If you are evaluating Heroku for a new enterprise deal, that path is closed.
No net-new feature development. The platform will be maintained, not evolved.
Long-term roadmap clarity decreases. Questions about where Heroku goes in three to five years have no clear answer.
What "sustaining engineering" means in plain language
Sustaining engineering is a product lifecycle term. It means a product has moved from active development into maintenance mode. The goal shifts from building to preserving.
In practice, the engineering team's job changes. Instead of shipping new capabilities, the focus moves to keeping existing capabilities running, patching security vulnerabilities, and managing operational continuity.
Most energy goes toward patching, hardening, and keeping things stable. Fewer net-new capabilities, backlogs weighted toward maintenance, product innovation shifting elsewhere in the company. If you were waiting for a roadmap item to reduce friction, you might be waiting indefinitely.
This is not unusual in software. Products mature. Markets shift. Owners reprioritize. The issue is not that sustaining engineering exists; it's what usually comes after.
One useful framing from Greyhound Research: "sustaining engineering is rarely a stable equilibrium. It's a holding pattern." The pattern typically moves in one direction: toward deeper maintenance, reduced investment, or eventually winding down or absorbing the product into something else.
That doesn't mean Heroku disappears tomorrow. It means the trajectory has changed in a way that matters for teams making 12 to 36 month infrastructure decisions.
Historical parallels: what usually happens next
Three cases are relevant here. None of them are identical to Heroku's situation. All of them are instructive.
IBM Bluemix
IBM Bluemix launched in 2014 as IBM's PaaS play. It had a strong enterprise customer base, credible infrastructure, and a real developer community. IBM invested in it for several years before announcing that Bluemix would be rebranded into IBM Cloud.
The rebranding wasn't the end. But the years that followed were marked by declining developer attention, reduced ecosystem momentum, and a platform that felt increasingly like it was being maintained rather than built. Teams that had planned their 2018 roadmaps around Bluemix found themselves renegotiating those assumptions.
VMware Pivotal
Pivotal had a loyal enterprise customer base, particularly for Cloud Foundry-based deployments. When VMware acquired Pivotal, the message was continuity. In practice, the product roadmap slowed, the developer experience stagnated, and the most ambitious platform-level features didn't ship. Teams on Pivotal eventually had to reckon with whether their infrastructure strategy was still viable.
Google App Engine
Google App Engine is perhaps the most well-known case. It was genuinely ahead of its time, a developer experience that influenced almost everything that came after. Google maintained it. It didn't shut down. But it stopped evolving in ways that mattered, and the developer community moved to Kubernetes, Cloud Run, and other primitives that Google was actively building.
App Engine still runs. But teams that built their infrastructure identity around it in 2012 found themselves in a different position by 2016.
The common thread: sustaining engineering doesn't mean immediate failure. It means reduced optionality over time. The longer you stay, the less leverage you have when you eventually decide to move.
Who should care most
Not every Heroku user needs to take action. But some segments should take this more seriously than others.
Mission-critical production users
If customer revenue runs on Heroku, roadmap ambiguity affects disaster recovery strategy, enterprise sales conversations, board-level risk discussions, and long-term budgeting.
Growth-stage teams maintaining legacy apps
Many growth-stage teams are already compensating for platform constraints: layered CI pipelines, networking workarounds, or a growing collection of add-ons stitched together over time. When a platform slows down, technical debt compounds quietly. The migration surface area grows. Planning early keeps options open.
Regulated and security-sensitive workloads
If you operate in healthcare, fintech, or other regulated environments, compliance expectations are always evolving. A stable platform is useful, but if it's not evolving with regulatory expectations it introduces friction over time. The February 2026 announcement means compliance gaps that exist today are unlikely to close.
Platform teams already layering workarounds
Some teams have effectively built a thin platform on top of Heroku: custom build and release scripts, externalized CI/CD orchestration, expanding add-on sprawl, security controls bolted on around the edges. This problem is only going to get worse.
Teams currently evaluating Heroku
If you are in an active evaluation and considering Heroku as a new platform choice, the announcement is a clear signal to evaluate elsewhere. The enterprise sales path for new customers is closed. The feature roadmap is frozen. You would be adopting a platform at the beginning of its decline rather than the middle of its growth.
What happened to Heroku Postgres (2025 context)
Before the February 2026 announcement, there was another signal worth noting.
In early 2025, Heroku migrated its own Essential-tier Postgres databases off its proprietary infrastructure and onto AWS Aurora. The developer community had a predictable reaction: some treated it as validation that AWS RDS was simply a better database infrastructure layer. Others read it as Heroku shedding undifferentiated infrastructure it no longer wanted to own.
Both readings have merit. What it suggests is that the sustaining engineering posture did not appear overnight. Heroku had been deprioritizing infrastructure investment for some time. The February 2026 announcement made it explicit.
Developer reaction: what the community is saying
The community response has been a mixture of unsurprised pragmatism and genuine nostalgia.
On r/rails, one developer captured the sentiment plainly: "Not entirely surprising. They killed innovation on that years ago. Sad, because they were way ahead of the curve at one point."
Another clarified the technical distinction: "EOS != EOL. It's hidden in there, but the main change is to enterprise sales cycles." End of Sale is not End of Life. Heroku is not disappearing.
The nostalgia thread is real too: "I still remember getting a demo of Heroku when I was in college and having my mind blown." For a certain generation of developers, Heroku represents the moment when deploying a web app became comprehensible.
Across teams currently reassessing Heroku, three patterns arise in practice:
Small teams planning calmly. Founders and lean engineering teams are documenting dependencies, reviewing runway, and deciding whether Heroku fits their next two years. Very little drama. Mostly spreadsheets and whiteboards.
Mid-stage teams reconsidering AWS complexity. Some teams that previously avoided AWS overhead are revisiting the tradeoff. They're looking for Heroku-level simplicity with more predictable long-term platform direction.
Security-focused teams using this moment to redesign. Security-sensitive organizations are treating this as an opportunity to clean house: redesigning CI/CD pipelines, hardening networking boundaries, consolidating add-ons, and aligning infrastructure with audit requirements.
Is Heroku shutting down?
No. Not immediately, and not in any announced sense.
Heroku has committed to operational continuity. Credit card customers continue. Existing enterprise contracts are honored. The platform runs.
The more accurate framing is: Heroku is no longer being built. It is being preserved.
For some teams, that distinction doesn't matter much today. For teams planning infrastructure decisions over a 2 to 5 year horizon, the distinction matters a great deal.
Sustaining engineering postures have a directional pull. They rarely reverse. The teams that wait for a shutdown announcement to start planning are the teams that find themselves making rushed decisions under pressure rather than deliberate ones on their own timeline.
Next steps
The answer depends on where your team is.
If you are stable and not under compliance or enterprise pressure: you can reasonably stay for now. The productive move is structured assessment:
Draft a one-page internal memo summarizing platform risk and dependency exposure
Inventory applications, databases, and add-ons
Clarify your 12-24 month infrastructure requirements
Identify compliance or enterprise triggers that could force change
Revisit quarterly
Staying intentionally is very different from staying by inertia.
If you are evaluating Heroku for a new deployment: the announcement is a clear signal. There are better options for new platforms at this stage.
If you are on Heroku Shield and HIPAA compliance is part of your product: the compliance implications deserve immediate attention. Compliance gaps that exist today are unlikely to close under a sustaining engineering model. See Heroku and HIPAA.
If you are an enterprise customer with an existing contract: your contract is honored. But start evaluating alternatives before renewal, not at renewal. Leverage requires runway.
Plan deliberately while the timeline is still yours to set.
For a structured decision framework: Should You Migrate?
For pricing and cost implications: Heroku Pricing
For the full alternative landscape: Compare Platforms
What Heroku's "sustaining engineering" announcement actually means
Last updated: March 2026
On February 6, 2026, Nitin T. Bhat, SVP and General Manager at Heroku, published a post titled "An Update on Heroku". It was written in the careful, measured language of corporate communication. Most developers read it once, felt vaguely unsettled, and went looking for someone to explain what it actually means.
This chapter does that.
What Heroku announced (February 6, 2026)
Heroku is transitioning to a "sustaining engineering model." That phrase does a lot of work, so let's break it down.
The practical translation: Heroku will maintain the platform. Security patches will ship. The core product, apps, pipelines, teams, add-ons, will keep running. What ends is active investment in new features and new enterprise sales cycles.
Bhat's post pointed to the broader direction: Salesforce is prioritizing Agentforce and AI-driven products. Heroku is no longer the strategic growth focus.
What stays the same
Credit card customers continue without interruption. If you pay with a card, nothing changes in the near term.
Existing enterprise contracts are honored and can renew. Heroku is not walking away from current enterprise relationships.
The core platform remains operational: apps, dynos, pipelines, add-ons, the developer workflow teams rely on.
What changes
No new enterprise contracts for new customers. If you are evaluating Heroku for a new enterprise deal, that path is closed.
No net-new feature development. The platform will be maintained, not evolved.
Long-term roadmap clarity decreases. Questions about where Heroku goes in three to five years have no clear answer.
What "sustaining engineering" means in plain language
Sustaining engineering is a product lifecycle term. It means a product has moved from active development into maintenance mode. The goal shifts from building to preserving.
In practice, the engineering team's job changes. Instead of shipping new capabilities, the focus moves to keeping existing capabilities running, patching security vulnerabilities, and managing operational continuity.
Most energy goes toward patching, hardening, and keeping things stable. Fewer net-new capabilities, backlogs weighted toward maintenance, product innovation shifting elsewhere in the company. If you were waiting for a roadmap item to reduce friction, you might be waiting indefinitely.
This is not unusual in software. Products mature. Markets shift. Owners reprioritize. The issue is not that sustaining engineering exists; it's what usually comes after.
One useful framing from Greyhound Research: "sustaining engineering is rarely a stable equilibrium. It's a holding pattern." The pattern typically moves in one direction: toward deeper maintenance, reduced investment, or eventually winding down or absorbing the product into something else.
That doesn't mean Heroku disappears tomorrow. It means the trajectory has changed in a way that matters for teams making 12 to 36 month infrastructure decisions.
Historical parallels: what usually happens next
Three cases are relevant here. None of them are identical to Heroku's situation. All of them are instructive.
IBM Bluemix
IBM Bluemix launched in 2014 as IBM's PaaS play. It had a strong enterprise customer base, credible infrastructure, and a real developer community. IBM invested in it for several years before announcing that Bluemix would be rebranded into IBM Cloud.
The rebranding wasn't the end. But the years that followed were marked by declining developer attention, reduced ecosystem momentum, and a platform that felt increasingly like it was being maintained rather than built. Teams that had planned their 2018 roadmaps around Bluemix found themselves renegotiating those assumptions.
VMware Pivotal
Pivotal had a loyal enterprise customer base, particularly for Cloud Foundry-based deployments. When VMware acquired Pivotal, the message was continuity. In practice, the product roadmap slowed, the developer experience stagnated, and the most ambitious platform-level features didn't ship. Teams on Pivotal eventually had to reckon with whether their infrastructure strategy was still viable.
Google App Engine
Google App Engine is perhaps the most well-known case. It was genuinely ahead of its time, a developer experience that influenced almost everything that came after. Google maintained it. It didn't shut down. But it stopped evolving in ways that mattered, and the developer community moved to Kubernetes, Cloud Run, and other primitives that Google was actively building.
App Engine still runs. But teams that built their infrastructure identity around it in 2012 found themselves in a different position by 2016.
The common thread: sustaining engineering doesn't mean immediate failure. It means reduced optionality over time. The longer you stay, the less leverage you have when you eventually decide to move.
Who should care most
Not every Heroku user needs to take action. But some segments should take this more seriously than others.
Mission-critical production users
If customer revenue runs on Heroku, roadmap ambiguity affects disaster recovery strategy, enterprise sales conversations, board-level risk discussions, and long-term budgeting.
Growth-stage teams maintaining legacy apps
Many growth-stage teams are already compensating for platform constraints: layered CI pipelines, networking workarounds, or a growing collection of add-ons stitched together over time. When a platform slows down, technical debt compounds quietly. The migration surface area grows. Planning early keeps options open.
Regulated and security-sensitive workloads
If you operate in healthcare, fintech, or other regulated environments, compliance expectations are always evolving. A stable platform is useful, but if it's not evolving with regulatory expectations it introduces friction over time. The February 2026 announcement means compliance gaps that exist today are unlikely to close.
Platform teams already layering workarounds
Some teams have effectively built a thin platform on top of Heroku: custom build and release scripts, externalized CI/CD orchestration, expanding add-on sprawl, security controls bolted on around the edges. This problem is only going to get worse.
Teams currently evaluating Heroku
If you are in an active evaluation and considering Heroku as a new platform choice, the announcement is a clear signal to evaluate elsewhere. The enterprise sales path for new customers is closed. The feature roadmap is frozen. You would be adopting a platform at the beginning of its decline rather than the middle of its growth.
What happened to Heroku Postgres (2025 context)
Before the February 2026 announcement, there was another signal worth noting.
In early 2025, Heroku migrated its own Essential-tier Postgres databases off its proprietary infrastructure and onto AWS Aurora. The developer community had a predictable reaction: some treated it as validation that AWS RDS was simply a better database infrastructure layer. Others read it as Heroku shedding undifferentiated infrastructure it no longer wanted to own.
Both readings have merit. What it suggests is that the sustaining engineering posture did not appear overnight. Heroku had been deprioritizing infrastructure investment for some time. The February 2026 announcement made it explicit.
Developer reaction: what the community is saying
The community response has been a mixture of unsurprised pragmatism and genuine nostalgia.
On r/rails, one developer captured the sentiment plainly: "Not entirely surprising. They killed innovation on that years ago. Sad, because they were way ahead of the curve at one point."
Another clarified the technical distinction: "EOS != EOL. It's hidden in there, but the main change is to enterprise sales cycles." End of Sale is not End of Life. Heroku is not disappearing.
The nostalgia thread is real too: "I still remember getting a demo of Heroku when I was in college and having my mind blown." For a certain generation of developers, Heroku represents the moment when deploying a web app became comprehensible.
Across teams currently reassessing Heroku, three patterns arise in practice:
Small teams planning calmly. Founders and lean engineering teams are documenting dependencies, reviewing runway, and deciding whether Heroku fits their next two years. Very little drama. Mostly spreadsheets and whiteboards.
Mid-stage teams reconsidering AWS complexity. Some teams that previously avoided AWS overhead are revisiting the tradeoff. They're looking for Heroku-level simplicity with more predictable long-term platform direction.
Security-focused teams using this moment to redesign. Security-sensitive organizations are treating this as an opportunity to clean house: redesigning CI/CD pipelines, hardening networking boundaries, consolidating add-ons, and aligning infrastructure with audit requirements.
Is Heroku shutting down?
No. Not immediately, and not in any announced sense.
Heroku has committed to operational continuity. Credit card customers continue. Existing enterprise contracts are honored. The platform runs.
The more accurate framing is: Heroku is no longer being built. It is being preserved.
For some teams, that distinction doesn't matter much today. For teams planning infrastructure decisions over a 2 to 5 year horizon, the distinction matters a great deal.
Sustaining engineering postures have a directional pull. They rarely reverse. The teams that wait for a shutdown announcement to start planning are the teams that find themselves making rushed decisions under pressure rather than deliberate ones on their own timeline.
Next steps
The answer depends on where your team is.
If you are stable and not under compliance or enterprise pressure: you can reasonably stay for now. The productive move is structured assessment:
Draft a one-page internal memo summarizing platform risk and dependency exposure
Inventory applications, databases, and add-ons
Clarify your 12-24 month infrastructure requirements
Identify compliance or enterprise triggers that could force change
Revisit quarterly
Staying intentionally is very different from staying by inertia.
If you are evaluating Heroku for a new deployment: the announcement is a clear signal. There are better options for new platforms at this stage.
If you are on Heroku Shield and HIPAA compliance is part of your product: the compliance implications deserve immediate attention. Compliance gaps that exist today are unlikely to close under a sustaining engineering model. See Heroku and HIPAA.
If you are an enterprise customer with an existing contract: your contract is honored. But start evaluating alternatives before renewal, not at renewal. Leverage requires runway.
Plan deliberately while the timeline is still yours to set.
For a structured decision framework: Should You Migrate?
For pricing and cost implications: Heroku Pricing
For the full alternative landscape: Compare Platforms
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548 Market St #75826 San Francisco, CA 94104
© 2026. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy