I love Heroku, I still use it to this day for a couple databases. That being said, when a company stops innovating you know it's just a matter of time until they're left in the dust. The thing is, Heroku is currently increasing profits, they could use that money to innovate if they wanted to. They just seem stagnant, which is never appealing as a customer (at least to me).

It is combination of no innovation and the pricing model. The pricing model only ever made sense for hosting RoR applications due to particular sub-optimal performance characteristics of RoR at the time. Ten years ago you could get one meaningful VM instance for the price of one dyno and host anything you want on that but you had to somehow make that work. Today the price of one heroku dyno buys you one or two VMs where you just deploy docker compose or whatever (as long as it does not involve etcd, because then you are outside of the "free/cheap VM instance" category) and are done with it.

For me the notorious price tag of Heroku is enough to keep me from using it for new projects, even though I like the Heroku workflow and I think it's perfectly suited for many web apps.

Dynos specs are pretty miserable, need a 4GB dyno? that will be $500/month

Heroku had developer mindshare 10+ years ago that could, in some alternate universe, have made it end up competitive with AWS/GCP/Azure. Heroku is probably worth a billion dollars, which is impressive, but it could have been a hundred billion. It’s worth asking why that didn’t happen.

> It hasn't changed much, like the article says, and that's fine.

I think that is the problem. On the outside it has not changed much and thereby loosing traction and customers.

They have added things but apart from pipelines quite a few years ago nothing revolutionary has been added.

The only thing I can think of is that they made it harder to use when they changed the pricing for their free tier to be per user and not per app.