Ivan CernjaThe End of Heroku: What It Means for Your Apps
Heroku is moving to maintenance mode. Here's what changed, what it means for your production apps, and what to do next.
On February 6, 2026, Heroku published a blog post announcing a transition to a "sustaining engineering model." No new features, no new enterprise contracts for new customers. Existing customers are unaffected for now: credit card customers can keep using Heroku, and existing enterprise contracts will be honored and can renew.
Heroku launched in 2007 and was one of the first platforms to offer git push deployments. Salesforce acquired it for $212 million in 2010, and at its peak the platform served millions of applications. Here's what the announcement means in practice and what your options are.
What This Means in Practice
If you have apps on Heroku today, nothing changes immediately. Dynos keep running, databases stay up, billing stays the same.
Over time, though, a platform in maintenance mode brings compounding issues. Security patches come slower with fewer engineers. Language runtimes evolve (Node 24, Python 3.14, Ruby 3.4), and if Heroku's buildpacks don't keep up, your deployment options narrow. Add-on partners have less incentive to maintain integrations on a platform that isn't growing, so third-party services will gradually degrade. Support response times will increase as teams shrink.
On the enterprise side, no new contracts means Salesforce is winding down the sales motion. This is typically how large companies begin a gradual product sunset. Existing contracts will be honored, but plan for less favorable renewal terms and reduced investment in support.
None of this happened overnight as Heroku removed its free tier in November 2022, eliminating free dynos and free Postgres. Feature development slowed significantly through 2023 and 2024 while competitors shipped modern capabilities like edge deployment, serverless scaling, and built-in observability. Users reported increasing reliability issues through 2025, and the February 2026 announcement is the official acknowledgment of a trend that's been visible for years.
What To Do Next
The urgency depends on your situation. Small apps, internal tools, and side projects can afford to wait 6-12 months. Production apps with moderate traffic, apps using Heroku-specific features like Heroku Connect or Review Apps, and apps on standard dynos without an enterprise contract should plan within 3-6 months. Enterprise contracts approaching renewal, mission-critical applications, and apps that need features Heroku won't be adding should start now.
There are broadly three paths forward:
- If you're on AWS or GCP (or want to be), Encore Cloud gives you a
git pushworkflow that provisions managed infrastructure in your account (powered by Encore, 12k+ GitHub stars). Infrastructure stays in sync with your application code automatically, so there's no drift when AI agents like Cursor or Claude Code change your code. Companies like Groupon, for example, already use this at scale. - Move to another managed platform. Services like Render, Fly.io, and Railway offer similar simplicity to Heroku. Quick to migrate to, but you're still on someone else's infrastructure.
- Self-host. Tools like Coolify and Dokku run a Heroku-like experience on your own servers. More control at a lower price, but you handle operations: OS updates, security patches, backups, and monitoring.
Each approach has tradeoffs and we cover them in detail in Top Heroku Alternatives in 2026.
Whichever direction you choose, start with a non-critical app. Pick something small, move it to your chosen platform, learn the workflow, then migrate production systems.
Want to jump straight to a running app? Clone this starter and deploy it to your own cloud.