Heroku Shifts to Sustaining Engineering Model Amid Strategic Realignment

Today, Heroku announced a significant strategic shift, transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support. This move marks a clear pivot away from new feature development toward maintaining operational excellence for the platform's existing user base.

What This Means for Current Users

The most immediate takeaway for Heroku's customer base is that there's no change to their day-to-day operations. Customers who pay via credit card through the Heroku dashboard—both existing and new—can continue using the platform without any modifications to pricing, billing, service, or functionality. The core platform remains fully operational, including applications, pipelines, teams, and add-ons.

This continuity is crucial for businesses running production workloads on Heroku. The platform continues to be production-ready and actively supported, with the engineering team maintaining their focus on quality and operational excellence rather than introducing new features.

Enterprise Contract Changes

A notable change affects new enterprise customers. Heroku will no longer offer Enterprise Account contracts to new customers. However, this doesn't impact existing enterprise relationships—current Enterprise subscriptions and support contracts will continue to be fully honored and may renew as usual. This suggests Heroku is sunsetting its enterprise sales motion while maintaining commitments to existing enterprise clients.

Strategic Rationale

According to Heroku's announcement, this shift allows the company to focus product and engineering investments where they can deliver the greatest long-term customer value. Specifically, Heroku is emphasizing helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted way.

This strategic realignment appears to reflect broader market trends where cloud platforms are increasingly positioning themselves around AI capabilities. By maintaining Heroku as a stable, reliable platform while redirecting innovation resources toward AI-focused offerings, Heroku seems to be acknowledging that its core value proposition—simple, reliable deployment—remains solid, but future growth opportunities lie elsewhere.

Industry Context

Heroku's move isn't entirely surprising given the evolution of the cloud platform market. Since Salesforce acquired Heroku in 2010, the platform has faced increasing competition from both major cloud providers offering similar PaaS capabilities and newer deployment platforms like Vercel, Netlify, and Railway.

Many long-time Heroku users have already migrated to alternatives due to pricing changes, feature stagnation, or the desire for more control over their infrastructure. This announcement essentially formalizes what many suspected—that Heroku's innovation engine has slowed considerably.

What This Doesn't Mean

It's important to clarify what this announcement doesn't signal. Heroku isn't shutting down or abandoning its user base. The platform remains actively supported with a focus on the fundamentals that made it popular: stability, security, and reliability. For many small to medium-sized projects, side projects, and businesses that value simplicity over cutting-edge features, Heroku remains a viable option.

Additionally, the announcement doesn't affect Heroku's open-source ecosystem or add-on marketplace. These components continue to function as before, providing the extensibility that many users rely on.

Looking Forward

The transition to a sustaining model raises questions about Heroku's long-term positioning within Salesforce's portfolio. While the platform maintains its utility for certain use cases, the lack of new features and the discontinuation of enterprise sales suggest Heroku may eventually be integrated more tightly with Salesforce's other offerings or potentially repositioned entirely.

For current users, the message is clear: Heroku remains a stable, supported platform for your existing workloads. For new users evaluating deployment options, this announcement suggests carefully considering whether Heroku's current feature set meets your needs, as significant innovation is unlikely.

Heroku's shift represents a pragmatic acknowledgment of market realities while maintaining commitments to existing customers. It's a transition from growth mode to maintenance mode, allowing the company to optimize for stability while pursuing strategic opportunities in adjacent areas like AI deployment.

Featured image: Heroku's official announcement graphic