Back in May, I wrote about my enthusiasm to be part of the Heroku story, and I remain just as passionate today about helping write the next chapter. I’ve had many customer meetings over the past few months, and the theme is consistent — you want to know where we are taking Heroku. We want to be clear: The priority going forward is to support customers of all sizes who are betting projects, careers, and businesses on Heroku. These are companies like PensionBee, who help people manage their pensions; MX, who help small businesses with loans; Furnished Quarters, who built a portal for corporate clients booking short-term rentals; and EIGENSONNE, who built an app to connect with their customers and local solar craftsman on one platform.
Salesforce has never been more focused on Heroku's future. Today, we're announcing:
- Public roadmap: launch of our interactive product roadmap for Heroku on GitHub.
- Focus on mission critical: discontinue free product plans and delete inactive accounts.
- Student and nonprofit program: an upcoming program to support students and nonprofits in conjunction with our nonprofit team.
- Open source support: we will continue to contribute to open source projects, notably Cloud Native Buildpacks. We will be offering Heroku credits to select open source projects through Salesforce’s Open Source Program Office.
Public Roadmap
You asked us to share our plans on Heroku’s future, and we committed to greater transparency. Today we are taking another step by sharing the Heroku roadmap live on GitHub! We encourage your feedback on this new project, and welcome your comments on the roadmap itself. We’ll be watching this project closely and look forward to interacting with you there.
Focus on Mission Critical
Customers love the magically easy developer experience they get from Heroku today. Going forward, customers are asking us to preserve that experience but prioritize security innovations, reliability, regional availability, and compliance. A good example of security innovation is the mutual TLS and private key protection we announced in June.
As a reminder:
As we believe RFC-8705 based mutual TLS and private key protection for OAuth, as well as full fidelity between the Heroku GitHub OAuth integration and the GitHub App model provides more modular access privileges to connected repositories, we intend to explore these paths with GitHub.
Our product, engineering, and security teams are spending an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans. In order to focus our resources on delivering mission-critical capabilities for customers, we will be phasing out our free plan for Heroku Dynos, free plan for Heroku Postgres, and free plan for Heroku Key-Value Store, as well as deleting inactive accounts.
Starting October 26, 2022, we will begin deleting inactive accounts and associated storage for accounts that have been inactive for over a year. Starting November 28, 2022, we plan to stop offering free product plans and plan to start shutting down free dynos and data services. We will be sending out a series of email communications to affected users.
We will continue to provide low-cost solutions for compute and data resources: Heroku Dynos starts at $7/month, Heroku Key-Value Store starts at $15/month, Heroku Postgres starts at $9/month. See Heroku Pricing Information for current details. These include all the features of the free plans with additional certificate management and the assurance your dynos do not sleep to help ensure your apps are responsive.
If you want a Heroku trial, please contact your account executive or reach us here.
Students and Nonprofit Program
We appreciate Heroku’s legacy as a learning platform. Many students have their first experience with deploying an application into the wild on Heroku. Salesforce is committed to providing students with the resources and experiences they need to realize their potential. We will be announcing more on our student program at Dreamforce. For our nonprofit community, we are working closely with our nonprofit team, too.
Open Source Support
We are continuing our involvement in open source. Salesforce is proud of the impactful contribution we’ve made with Cloud Native Buildpacks. We are maintainers of the Buildpacks project, which takes your application source code and produces a runnable OCI image. The project was contributed to the CNCF Sandbox in 2018 and graduated to Incubation in 2020. For most Heroku users, Buildpacks remove the worry about how to package your application for deployment, and we are expanding our use of Buildpacks internally in conjunction with our Kubernetes-based Hyperforce initiative. For a more technical Hyperforce discussion, click here.
If you are a maintainer on an open source project, and would like to request Heroku support for your project, contact the Salesforce Open Source Program office.
Feedback Please
As always, you can offer me feedback directly. I also look forward to reading your contribution to the Heroku public roadmap project on GitHub. Refer to FAQ for additional information.