Heroku future in doubt as Salesforce freezes features to focus on AI

 Salesforce will no longer accept new enterprise contracts for Heroku, its cloud application platform, and is no longer focused on new features, with the reason given being investment elsewhere in "enterprise-grade AI."

Nitin T. Bhat, who leads the Heroku business unit within Salesforce, posted an update on the Heroku blog in which he stated that Heroku was "transitioning to a sustaining engineering model." Users were quick to conclude that "they’re planning to coast from here out and let the product slowly degrade."

Bhat said that enterprise account contracts will no longer be offered, though existing enterprise subscriptions will continue to be honored and renewed. New pay-as-you-go customers will still be accepted. 

Heroku was founded in 2007, initially as a platform for Ruby applications, and acquired by Salesforce in late 2010. Applications run in containers called dynos, and are easily scaled by adding more dynos or increasing their size. The platform is older than Docker and was revolutionary in providing easy deployment, often with a simple git push, alongside scalability.

Blake Gentry, lead product engineer at Heroku in its early days following the Salesforce acquisition, commented that "Salesforce gave Heroku a ton of funding to build out a vision that was way ahead of its time … the launch of the multi language Cedar runtime in 2011 led to incredible growth," though he added that "by 2012 we were drowning in tech debt and scaling challenges."

The latest announcement has provoked surprise and disappointment in the community. "Nothing else exists to fill this spot. Fly and others offer varying degrees of easier-than-AWS hosting, but nobody offers true PaaS like Heroku," said another comment. 

In August last year, Gartner categorized Heroku as a leader in its Magic Quadrant for cloud-native application platforms. Last year Heroku gained a number of AI-related capabilities, including support for AI inference, and MCP (Model Control Protocol) support for use by AI agents. In April 2025 the team introduced the "next generation of the Heroku platform, codenamed Fir," with support for standard cloud native buildpacks and an expanded range of Dyno options. In October, the company previewed Heroku Vibes for instant applications created with AI and natural language prompts.

Fir was made generally available, but only as part of the enterprise-only Private Space network-isolated environments. 

Non-enterprise customers now question whether this next generation runtime, the successor to Cedar, will every make it to the wider platform. "We're waiting for general release but sounds like that's just not going to happen now. Which is a shame because it felt like the first real innovation in years," said one.

Heroku remains widely admired, but with enterprise sales shut down and limited investment it now seems that decline is inevitable.

There are certainly other options. Fly.io offers a platform based on isolated execution environments called sprites. Other options in this space include Render, Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare, or traditional cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure.