Salesforce has decided to stop developing new features for its Heroku platform-as-a-service.
Senior VP and general manager at Salesforce Nitin T. Bhat delivered the news with a late Friday afternoon post – timing that public relations types call “taking out the trash” because they hope releasing bad news at the end of the working week means it goes unnoticed.
Bhat also used some very indirect language to describe what Salesforce is doing, kicking off with, “Today, Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support.”
He described the platform’s new status as an “actively supported, production-ready platform, with an emphasis on maintaining quality and operational excellence rather than introducing new features.”
Existing customers can continue to use Heroku and renew subscriptions, but Salesforce won’t offer enterprise contracts to new customers.
Heroku is a PaaS layer that runs atop AWS’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and relies on a version of PostgreSQL. Salesforce acquired Heroku in 2010 and for years suggested it as the ideal environment in which to build and run custom apps for its CRM and other SaaS-y applications, despite also offering its own Force.com app development and hosting platform. In recent years, Salesforce has pushed its Agentforce service as its premier offering for custom development, as it’s an agentic-AI-centric offering and the company is all-in on AI.
Heroku wasn’t immune to that push and has added AI features.
Bhat’s post suggests Salesforce has tired of maintaining multiple development platforms for AI apps, as his post poses the question “Why this change?” and answers it by stating “We’re focusing our product and engineering investments on areas where we can deliver the greatest long-term customer value, including helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted way.”
Independent analyst Michael Warrilow told The Register, “Developers loved Heroku. Exorbitant pricing killed it and Agentforce put the nail in the coffin.”
He advised migration away from Heroku. “Thankfully, Salesforce is giving existing customers a window to act,” he said.
Providers of Heroku alternatives are already spruiking their wares, and users are reminiscing about good times using the platform and mourning its imminent irrelevance.
And plenty are criticizing Salesforce’s decision.
“Salesforce spent the last two years putting Agentforce on every keynote stage and earnings call,” wrote CTO advisor Keith Townsend, a consultant to IT execs. But Townsend thinks Agentforce is missing important features – namely “a governance-aware execution layer that constrains what AI-generated applications can do, enforces policy at the point of creation, and preserves auditability by design.”
He believes “Heroku was closer to being that layer than almost anything else in the market. Salesforce just never saw it that way,” and that the SaaS giant may therefore come to regret its decision to put the product out to pasture.
“That underinvestment may turn out to be one of the most expensive strategic misreads in enterprise AI.”
Ivan Burazin, CEO of daytona.io, an outfit that provides infrastructure and sandboxes to run AI-generated code, also thinks Salesforce has made a poor decision.
“Startups are raising millions to build ephemeral environments for agents, while one of the OG sandbox providers is exiting the race. Instead of evolving Heroku into a definitive infrastructure for the agentic AI era, Salesforce is letting a developer goldmine wither away,” he wrote, before concluding, “Never doubt big tech’s ability to kill great products!” ®