Comment by daxfohl

As soon as they put a persistent Salesforce brand banner across the top which did nothing but waste space and put that ugly logo in our face every day, my team started our transition off Heroku pretty much right away.

I think their main failure points were the following:

- not lowering prices as time went off. They probably kept a super-huger margin profit, but they’re largely irrelevant today

- not building their own datacenters and staying in aws. That would have allowed them to lower prices and gain even more market share. Everyone that has been in amazon/aws likely has seen the internal market rate for ec2 instances and know there’s a HUGE profit margin deriving by building datacenters. Add the recent incredible improvements to compute density (you can easily get 256c/512t and literally terabytes of memory in a 2u box) and you get basically an infinite money glitch.

> One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue.

Sounds not that different from containers, if you just choose the most popular tooling.

Small projects: docker compose, posgres, redis, nginx

Big projects: kubernetes, posgres, redis, nginx

This is why Heroku lost popularity.

My company still uses Heroku in production actually. Every time I see the Salesforce logo show up I wince, but we haven't had any issues at all. It continues to make deployment very easy.

I talked to some Heroku reps at a local tech conference a year or so ago; it was clear that they were instructed to not have any personal opinions of the shredding of the free tier, but they did admit in a roundabout way that it lost them a lot of customers - some they were glad to get rid of as they were gaming the goodwill and costing Heroku lots of money, but weren't sure if it was a good long term idea or not.

Didn't they offer free compute? IIRC all free compute on the Internet went away with the advent of cryptocurrencies as it became practical to abuse the compute and translate it directly into money.

> One language, one deployment platform, one database, a couple plugins to choose from, everything simple and straightforward, no decision fatigue.

I feel like this also describes something like Vercel. Having never personally used Heroku, is Vercel all that different except Ruby vs JS as the chosen language?

Was going to say, I still use Heroku, and it's been working ok, but I'm getting increasingly creepy vibes from it and fear that it could be abandoned. Starting of course with Salesforce acquisition.

I use the core product for my SaaS apps. Great platform, does what it needs to do. Haven’t felt the need to switch. Sometimes tempted to move to a single VPS with Coolify or Dokku, but not interested in taking on the server admin burden.