The seeds of this outcome were planted years ago when sales comp plans changed. When a sales rep can hit their target by simply converting the way an existing customer gets billed, none of them look for new business. Don't need new leads. Don't need to win competitive deals. But finding new customers and losing opportunities are the only things that signal/drive innovation. But from a budgeting perspective, why increase investment in a product that already hits/exceeds their sales targets?
Over time sales targets get met, but the product doesn't advance. By the time all existing customers that can convert have converted, the product is no longer competitive. Like bankruptcy, it comes gradually, then suddenly.
I'd be glad to stand corrected but AFAICT this is the only sentence that describes the change. All other say "nothing is changing in [some area]".
Trying to downplay something to that extent immediately raises suspicious that this something (the change) is much more profound that what is stated.
Proceeds to not be clear about what this means for customers.
ie, life support.. bit rot will set in, they are dead.
I was a free customer at the time. I pay for it happily now.
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.
Baffling
Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
it sounds pretty clear that it's in maintenance mode
So basically heroku will fix whatever is broken, but don't expect any new features or development.
Otherwise IMO such an odd word choice. Definition:
>> providing physical or mental strength or support
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!)