The Heroku Transition: What It Means for Users and What Options Exist
Heroku recently announced that it is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support. According to Heroku, the platform remains actively supported and production-ready, with no changes to pricing, billing, or day-to-day usage for customers paying through the Heroku dashboard. Core platform functionality, including applications, pipelines, teams, and add-ons, is unaffected, and existing Enterprise contracts will continue to be honored and may renew as usual.
For teams running applications on Heroku today, the most important takeaway is simple: Heroku is not going away.
LaunchPad Lab and Heroku: Over a Decade of Partnership
Heroku has been an exceptional platform for well over a decade. We’ve been active users since its earliest days around 2010, and when Salesforce acquired Heroku, LaunchPad Lab was invited to become one of the platform’s early partners. For more than 10 years, we’ve helped teams launch, scale, and operate production, business-critical applications on Heroku.
That history matters. Heroku has consistently delivered a strong developer experience, operational reliability, and a low-friction path from idea to production. This announcement reflects a continued emphasis on the qualities that made Heroku successful in the first place: stability, security, and operational excellence.
What This Announcement Actually Changes
From a practical standpoint, very little changes for most teams:
- Heroku remains fully supported and production-ready
- There are no changes to pricing, billing, or day-to-day usage
- Core platform features remain intact
- Existing Enterprise subscriptions continue as agreed
Heroku’s engineering focus will shift away from introducing new platform features and toward maintaining quality, reliability, and security. For many teams, that tradeoff is perfectly acceptable and even desirable.
Why Some Teams Use This Moment as a Checkpoint
With that context in mind, some teams use moments like this not because they are unhappy with Heroku, but because it is a natural checkpoint to validate that their current platform still aligns with where their product and organization are headed.
As products mature and teams scale, infrastructure needs often evolve. Independent of this announcement, some organizations have explored alternatives to Heroku to support goals such as:
- Greater control over infrastructure
- Different cost dynamics at scale
- Deeper integration with a specific cloud ecosystem
- More flexibility around deployment models
Common Heroku Alternatives Teams Consider
For teams evaluating Heroku alternatives or Heroku Enterprise alternatives, there are several strong options depending on priorities and technical needs.
- Render and Railway are often considered by teams looking for a Heroku-like developer experience with modern managed infrastructure.
- Fly.io is frequently chosen by teams interested in global deployments and edge-adjacent architectures.
- DigitalOcean App Platform offers a balance between ease of use and closer access to underlying cloud resources.
- AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure appeal to teams that want deeper integration with a specific cloud provider’s ecosystem and a broader set of native services.
- Kubernetes-based approaches, such as EKS, GKE, or AKS, are typically explored by teams seeking maximum control, portability, or enterprise-grade customization.
Each option comes with tradeoffs around complexity, cost, operational responsibility, and developer experience. There is no one-size-fits-all answer.
How to Think About Choosing the Right Platform
When evaluating whether to stay on Heroku or explore alternatives, teams should consider:
- How important is developer velocity versus infrastructure control?
- How predictable and scalable are costs over time?
- What operational burden can your team realistically support?
- How tightly do you need to integrate with other cloud services?
- What does long-term scale look like for your product?
The right choice depends on your application, team structure, and business goals, not just the platform itself.
How LaunchPad Lab Can Help
LaunchPad Lab has been a leading Heroku partner for over 10 years, and we continue to support teams running successful applications on Heroku today. We also help teams evaluate alternatives, plan migrations, and execute transitions when it makes sense.
Whether you want to confirm that Heroku is still the right fit, understand how other platforms compare, or explore a potential migration path, we can help you make a clear, informed decision based on real-world experience.
Final Thoughts
Heroku’s transition to a sustaining engineering model reinforces its commitment to reliability and stability. For many teams, staying on Heroku remains a strong and sensible choice. For others, this may be a useful moment to reassess long-term infrastructure strategy.
If you’re considering Heroku alternatives or want a second opinion on what makes sense for your application, we’re always happy to talk.
