alt.hn

4/7/2026 at 1:42:40 AM

Dear Heroku: Uhh What's Going On?

 https://judoscale.com/blog/heroku-whats-going-on

by crcastle

4/7/2026 at 12:51:57 PM

What it seems like has happened, is that most or all Product Manager oversight was removed from the Heroku project, and an engineering team was given ownership of the whole thing, for the purpose of ongoing maintenance.

But, paradoxically, this has given those engineers free rein to make whatever improvements they deem fit - including things they may have been blocked from working on in the past due to Product meddling and/or corporate bureaucracy.

(Not speaking authoritatively - this situation just, from the outside, appears to have a lot of parallels to teams I've been on that owned "Legacy" services.)

by wavemode

4/7/2026 at 4:51:28 AM

Five bucks it’s this:

Management: “we’re going into maintenance mode”

Devs: “You mean we get to work on whatever we want?!”

by msteffen

4/7/2026 at 8:46:10 AM

100% management is gone, engineers took over

by hanspagel

4/7/2026 at 5:03:43 AM

Next week: “we are right-sizing the organization”

by msteffen

4/7/2026 at 12:40:05 PM

[dead]

by bigotiddies

4/7/2026 at 9:20:08 AM

I have built Cuber (https://github.com/cuber-cloud/cuber-gem) a few years ago as a replacement for Heroku and now we use it to deploy all our Rails applications on DigitalOcean Kubernetes. Extremely lower cost, better performance, less bugs, better support...

by collimarco

4/7/2026 at 11:01:14 AM

Is Heroku that expensive these days? What are extremely lower costs? In my experience DO is hella expensive.

by anonzzzies

4/7/2026 at 11:17:53 AM

Northflank is by far the cheapest alternative

by cristinaibunea

4/7/2026 at 9:37:48 AM

I long ago switched to Fly.io. It feels like the old days of Heroku.

by bovermyer

4/7/2026 at 10:07:19 AM

They might be dumping the last of the stuff that was already in the pipeline.

by dizhn

4/7/2026 at 9:06:45 AM

I don't understand who is still using Heroku today.

by elAhmo

4/7/2026 at 10:39:44 AM

The experience of "you push, provision databases & dependencies in 3 clicks, and it just works" is sadly still unmatched.

by nathanappere

4/7/2026 at 2:19:39 PM

Yep, even in the things that tried to copy Heroku

by frollogaston

4/7/2026 at 1:07:20 PM

Maybe true in 2010 but not today.

by fg137

4/7/2026 at 1:13:51 PM

Today, you get the more streamlined experience of push, 3 clicks to restart CI & container build, push 1000 yamls, click to restart the build again, cry when it all fails.

by teeray

4/8/2026 at 10:13:39 AM

Similar services I have used that are not called "Heroku" must be doing something magic.

by fg137

4/7/2026 at 3:02:47 PM

I understand Judoscale is a customer with apprehensions and is asking for clarity. That will definitely raise anxiety.

However, Heroku said they were changing focus. It’s entirely possible to change focus away from something and still do some of it. A focus on things other than new features doesn’t mean, necessarily, no new features at all. Heroku could probably save their customers and partners a lot of anxiety by being clearer and more explicit what they mean.

by cestith

4/7/2026 at 5:40:15 AM

The blog author isn’t understanding it but it’s quite simple: the product only matters in the context of large enterprise customers.

The large customers still get what they want as long as the ask isn’t too big and that’s why you see new features even though the product is in maintenance mode.

by dangus

4/7/2026 at 5:31:07 AM

What a weird article that's microanalysing language in Heroku's blog posts. I mean times are such that pivot-churn is becoming business as usual for most outfits these days so I wouldn't put any stock on C-Suite verbiage.

by N_Lens

4/7/2026 at 2:11:53 PM

It's an ad for the author's service, that's how all of these engineering blogs generally are.

by satvikpendem

4/7/2026 at 1:48:09 PM

Heroku > Vercel. Try again HN

by ziovercel

4/7/2026 at 6:25:10 PM

???

by youngtaff

4/7/2026 at 12:39:51 PM

[dead]

by bigotiddies

4/7/2026 at 1:50:54 PM

[flagged]

by slowvercel

4/7/2026 at 1:59:18 PM

[flagged]

by richwater

4/7/2026 at 2:00:03 PM

Where have you been the last year? It’s much more explicit elsewhere on social media.

by guzfip