Last week, Heroku announced it is transitioning to a "sustaining engineering model." In plain English: no new features, no new enterprise contracts for new customers, and Salesforce is redirecting its investment elsewhere. The platform will be maintained for security and stability, but that's it.
If you've been in this industry long enough, you know what "sustaining mode" means. It's the corporate way of saying "we're done here." The platform isn't shutting down tomorrow — your apps will keep running, your billing won't change — but the writing is on the wall. No one invests in a platform that has stopped investing in itself.
A bit of history
Heroku changed the game when it launched. It made deploying a web application as simple as git push. It showed the world that developers shouldn't need to be sysadmins to ship their code. For that, Heroku deserves enormous credit. Many of us — myself included — were inspired by what they built.
But Heroku's model had a fundamental flaw baked into it from day one: it ran your code on their infrastructure, in their way, with their constraints. 30-second HTTP timeouts. No persistent storage. No SSH access. No custom packages. Forced 24-hour restarts. These weren't bugs — they were consequences of a shared platform trying to serve everyone.
When Salesforce acquired Heroku in 2010, many hoped it would bring investment and scale. Instead, it brought neglect. The removal of free dynos in 2022 was the first clear signal. This announcement is the second. There won't be a third.
What this means if you're on Heroku
First, don't panic. Your apps are fine. Heroku isn't switching off the lights next month.
But you should start planning. Here's what I'd think about:
If you're on a credit card plan: You can keep running, but you're now on a platform with no roadmap. Every competitor is innovating while Heroku stands still. Think about whether you want your production infrastructure on a platform in maintenance mode.
If you're on an enterprise contract: You can still renew, but new enterprise features aren't coming. If your needs grow, Heroku won't grow with you. This is especially concerning for teams that need compliance features, private networking, or advanced database configurations — areas where Heroku was already behind.
If you're starting something new: There is simply no reason to start a new project on Heroku today.
The real lesson here
The deeper lesson isn't about Heroku specifically — it's about the PaaS model and vendor lock-in. When you build on a traditional PaaS, you're not just using a service; you're betting your business on someone else's roadmap, someone else's pricing decisions, and someone else's corporate strategy. Heroku users just learned that their infrastructure decisions were ultimately made in a Salesforce boardroom.
This is exactly why we built Cloud 66 the way we did. We don't host your applications. We don't own the servers your code runs on. Instead, we give you the deployment experience that made Heroku great — simple, automated, developer-friendly — but on your own infrastructure. Your cloud account. Your servers. Your data.
When we go to sleep at night, your servers don't depend on us being there. That's not a limitation — it's a feature.
Stop migrating. Start owning.
Heroku isn't the first PaaS to fade, and it won't be the last. Nodejitsu, Stackato, Deis, Gondor, Dotcloud — the graveyard of PaaS providers is long. Each one launched with excitement, attracted a loyal user base, and then shut down or got acqui-hired. And every single time, the customers were left scrambling. New platform, new deployment model, new constraints, new migration project. Rinse and repeat.
This is the fundamental problem with any platform that hosts your code for you. When the platform goes away, everything goes away. Your servers, your data, your runtime — all of it lived in someone else's house. And when they close the door, you're out on the street looking for a new one.
With Cloud 66, the architecture is different by design. We deploy and manage your applications on servers that belong to you, in your own cloud account. If Cloud 66 disappeared tomorrow — and we have no intention of going anywhere — your servers would still be running. Your apps would still be serving traffic. Your databases would still have your data. You'd lose the management layer, not the infrastructure itself. There is nothing to migrate away from because there is nothing we hold hostage.
That's the difference between renting someone else's platform and owning your own infrastructure with good tooling on top. One puts you back on the migration treadmill every few years. The other gets you off it permanently.
Moving from Heroku to Cloud 66
If you're considering a move, we've made it straightforward. The migration comes down to three steps:
Connect your git repo and deploy — Cloud 66 pulls your code directly from GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket and deploys it to the cloud provider of your choice. AWS, Google Cloud, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Azure, Vultr — or your own servers. Your code, your cloud account.
Migrate your data — We have built-in tools for importing Postgres data directly from Heroku. For MySQL and other databases, our toolbelt makes it simple to upload and restore your backups.
Switch your DNS — Point your domain to your new environment and you're done.
We have a detailed migration guide to walk you through it. And if you need help, we're here.
What you gain by switching
Beyond the peace of mind of owning your infrastructure, here are some things Heroku users tell us they appreciate after moving:
Cost savings. Heroku's pricing is, to put it generously, aggressive. A setup that costs $750/month on Heroku often runs for under $200/month on Cloud 66 with a provider like Hetzner — with dedicated resources, not shared dynos. We're talking 50-90% savings depending on your setup.
Real servers, real access. SSH into your boxes. Install custom packages. Run long-running processes without arbitrary timeouts. Store files on disk. These are not exotic requirements — they're things every production application eventually needs.
Managed databases without the markup. We build, configure, and manage Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, and InfluxDB on your own servers. Private networking included, no $1,200/month "Private Spaces" add-on required.
No forced restarts. Heroku restarts your dynos every 24 hours. This masks memory leaks during development and creates unnecessary disruption in production. On Cloud 66, your processes run until you decide to restart them.
Your choice of cloud. We support 240+ data center regions across 9 cloud providers, plus your own hardware. Want to run in Hetzner's Falkenstein data center? Go for it. Want to split between AWS and your own colo? That works too.
The numbers, side by side
If you want the full picture, we've put together a detailed comparison of Cloud 66 vs Heroku. Here are some highlights:
On pricing alone, the difference is stark. A 2.5 GB application instance costs $250/month on Heroku — on Cloud 66 with your own cloud account, it's $20/month. That's a 92% saving. For databases, an 8 GB Postgres instance with 256 GB storage runs $200/month on Heroku versus $60/month on Cloud 66 — a 70% reduction. And unlike Heroku's Postgres, there are no connection limits and no 4-day rollback window.
On add-on compatibility, every Heroku add-on has a Cloud 66 equivalent. Heroku Postgres and Redis become managed databases on your own servers. Heroku Scheduler becomes Cloud 66 Jobs. Papertrail becomes Log Pipes. SSL through ACM becomes free, auto-renewing Let's Encrypt certificates with wildcard support. Your environment variables export directly — no rewriting configuration.
On infrastructure, you go from 25 data center regions on shared dynos to 242+ regions on dedicated servers across 9 cloud providers. Review apps become Preview Deployments. And your CI/CD pipeline — whether it's GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or GitLab CI — works exactly the same way.
Most teams complete the migration within a day. Same languages, same frameworks, same databases — just better infrastructure underneath.
To Heroku, with respect
I want to be clear: this isn't a victory lap. Heroku pioneered a category and made life better for millions of developers. The "Heroku experience" became a benchmark that everyone — including us — aspires to match.
But the era of trusting your production infrastructure to a platform you don't control is ending. The next decade belongs to tools that give developers the simplicity they want with the ownership they need.
If you're looking at your Heroku bill and your Heroku roadmap and thinking about what's next, give Cloud 66 a try. Your first app deploys in minutes, and your first server is free.
We've been doing this since 2012. We're not going anywhere.