Heroku Is Officially Dead: Where to Migrate in 2026
Salesforce didn't pull the plug overnight — they slowly turned off the life support. In February 2026, Heroku officially entered “sustain mode,” halting enterprise sales and freezing all feature development. If you're still on Heroku, it's time to plan your exit. Here's where to go and how to get there.
What Happened to Heroku?
Heroku's decline wasn't a single moment — it was a slow bleed that played out over four years. Here's the timeline that brought us to where we are today.
Salesforce announced the removal of Heroku's free tier — free dynos, free Postgres, and free Redis. For millions of developers, Heroku was the free tier. It was where you deployed your first side project, your hackathon demo, your proof of concept. Overnight, the platform lost its biggest growth engine: the next generation of developers who would have grown into paying customers.
While competitors shipped feature after feature — Railway added databases, Render added cron jobs, Fly.io expanded globally — Heroku released almost nothing meaningful. No native container support, no modern build system, no edge computing. The buildpack system that was revolutionary in 2012 felt increasingly dated. Enterprise customers started asking uncomfortable questions about the roadmap.
Salesforce made it official. Heroku entered “sustain mode” — a corporate euphemism for “we're done investing in this product.” Enterprise sales were halted for new customers. Feature development was frozen. The remaining engineering team was reassigned or reduced to a skeleton crew focused solely on keeping the lights on. This wasn't a surprise to anyone paying attention, but it was the final confirmation.
What Sustain Mode Actually Means
Let's be clear about what's happening and what isn't. Heroku is not shutting down tomorrow. Your apps are not going to vanish next week. But the writing is on the wall, and understanding what “sustain mode” means in practice will help you decide how urgently to act.
- Existing apps keep running. Your dynos, databases, and add-ons will continue to function. Billing stays the same.
- Critical security patches. Salesforce will still patch severe vulnerabilities. They can't afford a security incident on a platform with millions of production apps.
- Support for existing enterprise contracts. If you have an active contract, Salesforce will honor it through its term.
- No new features. Period. No new runtimes, no new regions, no new integrations. What exists today is what you get.
- No new enterprise sales. Salesforce isn't onboarding new large customers. That's a clear signal about the platform's future.
- Shrinking ecosystem. Add-on providers are already migrating to other platforms. Expect some add-ons to deprecate their Heroku integrations over the next 12–18 months.
- Community momentum. Fewer blog posts, fewer tutorials, fewer Stack Overflow answers. When you hit a problem, the knowledge base stops growing.
Bottom line: Heroku is on maintenance-only life support. It won't disappear overnight, but every month you stay is a month you're building on a platform with no future. The best time to migrate was a year ago. The second best time is now.
5 Best Heroku Alternatives, Ranked
We evaluated each platform on what matters most to Heroku refugees: migration effort, developer experience, pricing transparency, and long-term viability. Here's where 2M+ Heroku developers are heading.
| Platform | Starting price | Free tier | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Railway | $5/mo + usage | $5 trial credit | Closest Heroku DX |
| Render | $7/mo | Yes (with limits) | Simple managed deploys |
| Fly.io | $0 + usage | Yes (3 shared VMs) | Global edge, containers |
| Coolify | Free (self-hosted) | Fully free (OSS) | Docker-native teams |
| VPS + DeployWise | $5–10/mo (VPS only) | DeployWise is free | Easiest migration, max savings |
The closest thing to a modern Heroku. Railway nails the developer experience — connect a repo, deploy in seconds, built-in databases and cron jobs. It's the most natural migration path for developers who loved Heroku's simplicity.
- • Heroku-like DX, modern UI
- • Built-in Postgres, Redis, MySQL
- • Usage-based pricing is transparent
- • Team collaboration features
- • Costs grow fast at scale
- • Bandwidth still costs $0.10/GB
- • No free tier (only trial credits)
- • Smaller community than alternatives
Render pitched itself as “the Heroku replacement” from day one, and it delivers on most of that promise. Flat-rate pricing on paid plans gives you cost predictability that Heroku never had. The managed database offering is solid, and deploys are straightforward.
- • Flat-rate plans, predictable bills
- • Free tier for hobby projects
- • Native cron jobs and workers
- • Managed Postgres included
- • Free tier has cold starts (~30s)
- • Bandwidth overage still applies
- • Build times can be slow
- • Limited regions compared to Fly.io
Fly.io takes a different approach — it runs your app in lightweight VMs (Firecracker) distributed across 30+ regions worldwide. If your app needs to be close to users globally, Fly.io is hard to beat. But it trades Heroku's simplicity for more power and complexity.
- • Global edge deployment (30+ regions)
- • Generous free tier (3 shared VMs)
- • Built-in Postgres with read replicas
- • Excellent for latency-sensitive apps
- • Steeper learning curve (CLI-heavy)
- • Requires Dockerfile for most apps
- • Pricing can be confusing
- • Occasional reliability concerns
Coolify is an open-source, self-hosted PaaS that gives you a Heroku/Vercel-like dashboard on your own server. It supports Docker, Docker Compose, and buildpacks. If your team is comfortable with containers and wants full control, Coolify is an excellent option.
- • Completely free and open source
- • Full control over your infrastructure
- • Supports Docker, Compose, buildpacks
- • Built-in SSL, databases, monitoring
- • Requires Docker knowledge
- • You manage the server yourself
- • More complex initial setup
- • Smaller community for troubleshooting
The lowest-cost, highest-control option — and the easiest migration from Heroku. DeployWise automates everything you'd normally need to set up manually on a VPS: Node.js, PM2 process management, Nginx reverse proxy, SSL via Let's Encrypt, and auto-deploys from GitHub. No Docker, no buildpacks, no YAML. Connect your repo and your server — that's it.
- • Cheapest option ($5–10/mo total)
- • No Docker or container knowledge needed
- • PM2 + Nginx + SSL fully automated
- • 20TB+ bandwidth included with VPS
- • DeployWise is free forever
- • Single-region (no global edge)
- • You choose and pay for your own VPS
- • No built-in managed database
- • Best suited for Node.js/Next.js apps
Migration Checklist: What to Handle Before You Leave
Heroku made things easy, which means a lot of your infrastructure is implicit. Before you migrate anywhere, audit these five areas.
Export your Heroku Postgres data with pg_dump. If you're using Heroku Redis, export your data or accept a cold start. For your new platform, decide between a managed database service (like Neon, Supabase, or PlanetScale) or running Postgres directly on your VPS. For most apps, a managed option is worth the small cost for automated backups and scaling.
Run heroku config -a your-app to get every env var. Copy them all into your new platform's environment configuration. Watch for Heroku-specific variables like DATABASE_URL (which uses Heroku's internal hostname) and PORT (which Heroku sets dynamically). These will need updating.
Heroku buildpacks are proprietary. None of the alternatives use them (except Coolify, which has optional support). The good news: you probably don't need them. If you're running a Node.js app, a simple npm install && npm run build && npm start replaces your buildpack. Make sure your package.json has proper build and start scripts. Most apps already do.
If you're using Heroku Pipelines for staging/production promotion, you'll need to replace this. Most alternatives support deploy-on-push from GitHub natively. For staging environments, use branch-based deployments (e.g., deploy main to production, staging to a separate environment). DeployWise supports this out of the box.
Update your DNS records to point to your new platform instead of Heroku's load balancers. If you're using Heroku's ACM (Automated Certificate Management), you'll need SSL on your new platform — Railway and Render handle this automatically, and DeployWise provisions Let's Encrypt certificates during setup. Lower your DNS TTL before switching to minimize downtime.
The VPS Approach: Cost Savings Breakdown
Here's what the migration looks like financially for a typical Heroku app — a Node.js/Next.js project on Heroku Standard-1X with a Postgres add-on.
| Cost category | Heroku Standard | VPS + DeployWise |
|---|---|---|
| App hosting (dyno / VPS) | $25/mo (Standard-1X) | $5–10/mo (VPS) |
| Database (Postgres) | $9/mo (Mini) – $50/mo (Basic) | $0 (on-VPS) or $5/mo (Neon) |
| SSL certificate | Included | Free (Let's Encrypt) |
| Bandwidth | 2TB soft limit | 20TB+ included |
| Extra workers / dynos | $25/mo each | $0 (PM2 processes) |
| Deployment tooling | Included | Free (DeployWise) |
| Monthly total | $59–100/mo | $5–15/mo |
| Annual cost | $708–$1,200 | $60–$180 |
That's a 75–90% cost reduction depending on your current Heroku plan. And unlike Heroku's dyno model, your VPS runs 24/7 — no sleeping, no cold starts, no “scaling to zero” surprises. PM2 keeps your Node.js processes alive and automatically restarts them if they crash.
The migration with DeployWise is designed to be frictionless: connect your GitHub repo, add your VPS SSH credentials, and the platform automatically sets up Node.js, PM2, Nginx as a reverse proxy, and SSL certificates. No Dockerfile, no buildpacks, no Procfile. Most developers coming from Heroku are up and running in under 2 minutes.
For Heroku developers specifically, the biggest mental shift is moving from dynos to processes. Instead of scaling by adding more dynos at $25 each, PM2 runs multiple instances of your app on a single server using Node.js cluster mode. A $10 VPS with 2 vCPUs can handle what 2–3 Heroku Standard dynos do — at a fraction of the cost.
Ready to leave Heroku behind?
Deploy to your own VPS in under 2 minutes. No Docker, no buildpacks, no Procfile. Free forever, open source.
Try DeployWise Free