2024 is going to be an exciting year at Heroku. Before we jump into 2024, let’s take a look back at 2023 and show you how we’re empowering developers to deliver amazing apps. First of all, we want to take a moment to thank you, our customers, partners, employees, and extended communities. Your passion for Heroku and the developer community makes our work possible.
Customer Success
Our teams continued to grow to meet the demands of our many existing and new customers in 2023. Customers who do things like make safer cars, bring us live music, deliver last-minute items to our door, and ensure that more people get the affordable healthcare they need. The many ways that Heroku serves as the catalyst for businesses across the globe never fails to amaze our employees.
One example is HealthSherpa who enrolled 6.6 million individuals and families into Affordable Care Act health insurance during the 2024 open enrollment period. The enrollment made up 40% of the total enrollments completed through the Federally Facilitated Marketplace.
Equally exciting is the way that Live Nation brings entertainment to the world using Heroku. The Live Nation team joined us on stage at Dreamforce and shared how they use Heroku and Salesforce to create a custom concert planning system. The Heroku app shaved off 15+ hours from the old process for mounting a tour and ensured that everyone from roadie to food vendor to artist is paid a fair wage.
Delivering Innovations
2023 marked a year of delivering on customer requests about how we can improve the product. We started with the release of larger Postgres plans. Larger plans have been a popular request for a long time and we were excited to deliver it last year.
Our global footprint has been front and center with requests for additional Private Space regions. Now you can launch a Private Space in Canada and India, and we’ll continue to listen for other country requests.
Our customers were very vocal in 2023 about their need to innovate efficiently and economically on Heroku. We listened and added Basic dynos for Enterprise customers. Customers in India can once again pay for services via credit card. We also eliminated fees for Heroku CI and large teams.
Salesforce and Heroku announced a brand new partnership with AWS at the end of 2023. Now customers can purchase Heroku on the AWS Marketplace. The partnership lets us accelerate our innovation in AI and offer more flexible compute and storage for products like Heroku Postgres by leveraging Amazon Aurora.
We believe Heroku has a key role to play in the future of AI apps. As we’ve done for general application development, we’re making the hard things easy and letting our customers focus on experiences that differentiate them. We closed out the year by launching the support for pgvector. pgvector allows Heroku Postgres to quickly find similar data points in complex data, which is great for applications like recommendation systems and prompt engineering for large language models (LLMs). This is just the beginning of what it looks like to bring the Heroku developer experience to AI.
These innovations are just the highlights. We shipped over 200 changes to the platform, ranging from small to large improvements that keep our customers focused on delivering great experiences.
Growing the Community
We know that many communities learn to code on Heroku. In 2023 we provided over 27,000 students access to Heroku through the GitHub Student program. You can learn more about our involvement in the GitHub student program or enroll as a student here. We extended our student program and are now offering 2 years of Heroku credits to learn with Heroku. We're passionate about the open-source community, and in 2023, we proudly supported 28 projects through our new Open Source Credits program. One of these standout projects is Ember.js, a powerful frontend framework run entirely by volunteers. The team uses Heroku to show up just like giant projects with big corporate budgets backing them!
Our teams were at EmberConf, RubyConf, KubeCon, TrailblazerDX, Dreamforce, and AWS re:Invent in 2023. Heroku’s CTO & SVP of Engineering Gail Frederick spoke at re:Invent about database innovation. Each event brought us closer to the developer community and new opportunities to learn. The reception from our customers at these events has been amazing and validates how important it is for Heroku to represent not just at Salesforce events but broader industry events as well. We can’t wait to meet more of you in 2024!
We’re looking forward to engaging with our customers and partners in 2024, starting with our Heroku Developer Meetup on March 5, 2024 and TrailblazerDX on March 6-7, 2024. We’re hosting six sessions including developing AI apps with Heroku, and so much more. If you have product-specific questions, come meet our technical team at our demo booths. We’re following up TrailblazerDX with KubeCon in Paris as we embark on our renewed commitment to Cloud Native.
Want to learn more about what’s to come and how to interact with us? Follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn, X. To see what else we’re working on, or to suggest enhancements and new features for Heroku, check out our public roadmap on GitHub.