That has been the case for a very long time at this point, the Salesforce acquisition was a death knell. The only stuff i have left on Heroku are zombie projects I don't care about.

The Salesforce acquisition closed in 2010, when Heroku was barely three years old.

A whole lot of Heroku's best features shipped after they were acquired. They had a pretty good run under Salesforce for the first few years.

It would be interesting to hear a full oral history of when and where things went wrong after that. I expect the original founders leaving was a major factor.

I think a lot of people are under the misconception that the Salesforce acquisition happened a lot later than it really did. In particular, I think people often implicitly date it to the late-2010s-ish period when Heroku's product emphasis got more visibly enterprisey, and in particular when it started putting integrations with Salesforce's other products front and center.

Honestly if you're still using Heroku today it's because you haven't really caught up with what's going on around you

What's a better offering that makes it easier to push projects in production?

In 2026, every major cloud provider has a service that lets you just hand it a Docker container and let it figure out how to run it.

I loved Heroku, but moved away a couple of years back. Tried 3 major "alternatives" (dokku, Render, Fly.io), and the big clouds, and the only thing that made me happy at the end was Coolify. I do keep Netlify for FE-only projects though.

I get what you're saying but the onus is (and should) definitely be on the company to inform customers - and there's many laws to that effect.

What laws? As long as they fulfill Heroku fulfills the obligation in any contracts they have made, no law has been broken.

If you are paying month to month and actually check the Terms of Services of those services, most of them can shut down instantly without notice as long as they stop billing you.