On 6 February, Heroku’s chief product officer announced that the platform was moving to a sustaining engineering model. In his words, the focus would be stability, security, reliability and support, and Enterprise Account contracts would no longer be offered to new customers. Eight months on, no end-of-life date has been given, and the platform is running normally.
That does not mean nothing has changed. The announcement changed what a Heroku commitment is worth, and that matters most when a contract comes up for renewal.
What was announced
Salesforce was careful to say this is not an immediate wind-down. It said customers using Heroku today would see no change, that customers paying by card in the dashboard, existing and new, would continue with no change to pricing, billing or service, and it encouraged customers to renew. Analysts quoted in the same InfoWorld report read the decision as a sign that Salesforce is reducing the priority of Heroku as the company turns toward AI-led growth.
What stays the same and what stops
Applications keep running, and existing Enterprise contracts can renew. Salesforce has not announced a separate end of life for Heroku Connect, which many organisations use to synchronise Heroku Postgres with Salesforce.
What stops is new development and new Enterprise sales. One independent review notes that if your organisation is not already an Enterprise customer, there is now no route to become one. It also points out that runtime end-of-life dates, cipher changes and buildpack lag become your incident to manage rather than an item on a vendor roadmap.
Why this is a renewal question
A frozen roadmap does not break anything today, but commentators warn that the platform will fall behind the wider ecosystem. A multi-year renewal ties you to a product that is no longer developing, while a short renewal may cost you discounts or leave you without leverage at the next date. Neither is wrong. The right balance depends on how important the workload is and how hard it would be to move.
There is a practical point about growth too. Existing Enterprise accounts can renew, but it is unclear how easily they can expand. If you plan to add business units, new applications or more capacity under your current agreement, ask now whether that is still possible, and on what terms.
What sustaining mode means in practice
A platform in sustaining mode still moves, because the world around it does. Language runtimes reach the end of their lives, operating system stacks are retired, and security standards change. Heroku will keep dealing with the security side, but the work of keeping your own applications on supported versions stays with you. The difference is that you can no longer count on new platform features arriving to make that work easier.
It also changes the nature of the vendor relationship. Support and security patches are the product now. That makes the quality of your support terms, response times and escalation paths more important than they were when you were buying a growing platform, and it is a good reason to read them carefully before you renew.
Questions to put to Salesforce
Ask whether you can add capacity, users or new applications under your existing Enterprise contract. Ask what notice period Salesforce will commit to before any end of sale, end of support or end of life affecting your services. Ask for a written statement of the support and security commitments that apply during your term, and for price protection at renewal. Ask what help you can expect with data export if you decide to leave, and what the position is on Heroku Connect if you rely on it.
Written answers matter more than reassurance. Statements made on a blog or a call do not bind Salesforce at renewal, so ask for the commitments you rely on to be added to the order or an amendment.
Practical steps
Start with an inventory. Find out which of your Heroku applications are on Enterprise contracts and which are paid for by card, because the position differs. Identify which applications are critical, which integrate with Salesforce through Heroku Connect, and which could move easily.
Then decide application by application. Low-risk applications may be fine to leave where they are for some time. Critical ones deserve a migration plan and a budget, even if the move is a year or more away. Aligning contract end dates with that plan, and keeping the right to exit, stops the contract driving the timetable.
What a migration involves
If you do decide to move, it helps to know what the work looks like. The application code and its configuration are usually the easy part. The harder parts are the database, any add-ons the application relies on, build and deployment pipelines, scheduled jobs, and anything that connects the application to Salesforce, such as Heroku Connect. Each of those needs to be replaced or re-pointed, tested, and cut over in a way that does not interrupt users.
A realistic plan allows time for each of these, includes a period of running both environments in parallel, and puts a cost against the parallel running. Moving a small, simple application can take days. Moving a business-critical one with a large database and several integrations is a project, and projects that start under time pressure tend to cost more than those planned well ahead.
Conclusion
Heroku is not being shut down, but it is no longer being developed, and it is no longer available as a new Enterprise purchase. For existing customers the main effect is on renewals, growth and long-term planning.
Treat the next renewal as a decision rather than a formality. Know what you run, ask Salesforce for written commitments on support and notice, and plan an exit in proportion to how much the application matters.
