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Comment by xp84 | Hacker News Reader

I assumed the value prop of being on Heroku in 2023 was purely "not having to do the pain in the butt to migrate your legacy app that you made on Heroku in the pre-2010 era" - in other words, I would be really shocked if Heroku got significant new business or any growth at all, now that it's just expensive AWS with some basic CI integration points.

I also assume Salesforce only bought them as a cash generator and has no interest in investing in it. So if they saved bottom line from this move, that's a win for them.

(Feel free to correct my assumptions if I'm very wrong)

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"Pre-2010"? Heroku only launched in April 2009. So I would assume the vast majority of current customers are not actually from a "pre-2010 era". Heroku didn't even have a postgres add-on until November 2010 -- the salesforce purchase went through in Dec 2010. In fact, the heroku "golden years" were mostly during the early salesforce period. (Heroku put matz, creator of ruby, on staff in July 2011; there was no Heroku API until 2014!). (source for timeline: https://www.heroku.com/about)

Heroku is still quite a bit of value-added over "AWS with some basic CI integration", people chose it and still choose it because it requires a lot lot lot less in-house expertise and management hours than AWS for most kinds of standard apps. (I'm not totally sure what AWS services/architecutres you are thinking of when you say that; but I'll say: for pretty much all of them.)

(Heroku def has more competition in that space than it did 10 years ago, opinions differ on the relative merits)

AWS of course already existed when Heroku was launched, so if you do consider them just "AWS with some CI integration" then I guess they would have been from the start? What would have made that true now if it wasn't then?

I think Salesforce thought it would somehow be more "synergistic" with their other offerings than it has turned out to be. That they'd get Salesforce customers on heroku when they needed something beyond the "no-code" tools Salesforce already provided, or that they'd do better at converting heroku customers to salesforce customers than they have been. It does seem to be true that salesforce stopped really investing in new heroku features or improvements some years ago, and seem to be looking to minimize costs while continuing to collect revenue, I agree. (Sometimes I'm not even sure how much they care about continuing to collect revenue...)

Sorry, my memory on the dates was wrong.

> it requires a lot lot lot less in-house expertise and management hours than AWS

Yeah, you're not wrong there. I do worry though that it's still too complex to really trust someone with no devops bg to be fully responsible for, and at the same time, it's so outmoded (just meaning, it's not that popular now besides for legacy projects) that you aren't going to find a lot of good candidates who are expert with Heroku compared to expert with AWS.

So to me, Heroku is a gamble that you can get by indefinitely with only what you(r existing eng staff) know how to do in Heroku. Which for some projects, maybe that's a decent gamble for the payoff of easier admin in the short term.

> if you do consider them just "AWS with some CI integration" then I guess they would have been from the start? What would have made that true now if it wasn't then?

Yeah good point -- Let's see if I can try to explain my claim better. I think in 2009 using AWS was completely inelegant in every way, it was pretty barebones and basically just "Rent an EC2 server and do whatever you want, good luck." Heroku had a unique (at that time) approach which made cloud hosting much simpler and more abstract. AWS today at least offers a few ways you can host an application on AWS while doing less server maintenance than you'd have needed in '09. Infrastructure As Code is also something I think has a lot of popularity today that wasn't really a thing in 2009, and Heroku if I remember correctly, isn't really about that. So there isn't as much repeatability on that platform, it's more "click around and build your stuff out in the GUI." Which again, is cool in the short term to bootstrap, but can be painful at a bigger scale.

I used Heroku’s free tier for small projects/prototype. I continue to use their cheapest offering for new projects because it saves me time. If a project grows, I can reevaluate my choice. I don’t think anything in Heroku is a pain to migrate away from. I would miss the intuitive/familiar UI.

Check out render.com, it's a solid alternative.

We currently use render. Its excellent, but is missing a couple key features: like Heroku's continuous rollback protection. If they offered this they'd be head and shoulders better.

(Render CEO) We're actively working on Point-in-Time Recovery and hope to launch it in early access soon.

Think we (Crunchy Data) has been mentioned a few times below and have near feature parity with Heroku Postgres (only thing missing is dataclips coming this quarter). We've got folks that migrate the DB to us then use a whole host of other options including Fly, Railway, Render, etc.

> Salesforce on bought them as a cash generator

As an early Heroku employee, this gave me quite the chuckle.

Same - wasn’t an employee but used it often in ~2013-2015 timeframe. I’m pretty sure the valuation was many many many multiples of any sort of revenue based metric, wasn’t it?

Yep.

Also re the timeline, the acquisition was announced in 2010. So your own usage was already a few years post.

Sorry, I should have guessed that wasn't accurate. But like, surely after they stopped doing any investment in the platform, didn't it start to generate profit easily? How could reselling AWS resources with a premium UI not be profitable?

I just imagined Benioff going "Cool, we can buy this and continue to collect the checks every month, while not developing the UI or integrating it in any way into our business." Basically the same thing they did with Exact Target.

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