104 engineers on Hacker News describe using Heroku first-hand: 24 endorse it, 22 regret it, 11 are mixed.
“I worked for a company that ran 10bn in revenue, with thousands of users, and Heroku just hummed along. It ran our business.”
endorse · production · kayo_20211030 · 2026-02-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have found Heroku to be going downhill a lot, but after moving away from it I often feel a bit of regret from this decision.”
mixed · production · rtpg · 2024-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Compared to every single support interaction I've ever had with Heroku for 10 years, and this was light years more friendly”
regret · production · 10 yr · karmelapple · 2024-06-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the platform itself was rock solid in my experience... The security issue that happened with Heroku back in April... made it so we had no choice but to migrate.”
mixed · production · hkhanna · 2022-10-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Heroku stack limitations, couldn't get http2, couldn't do custom monitoring / alerting, no access to LBs, no scalable DB hosting”
regret · production · hpeinar · 2022-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we started to see a lot of unreliable behavior on app launch that resulted in the app being unusable and the only fix was to close and open a new PR”
regret · production · 6 yr · geoffharcourt · 2022-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We moved off because of Heroku's constant instability and our increasing lack of confidence in them as a vendor.”
regret · production · everfrustrated · 2022-09-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We spend $5000 a month on Heroku... The hacks, the downtimes, the communication, the support, lack of security features, no innovation. You are pushing away everyone you have left.”
regret · production · rsavage · 2022-08-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In our case, this would mean increasing our Heroku bill by 400% (we run a few paid apps and >40 free dynos with super low monthly activity)”
regret · production · Varqu · 2022-08-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We're happily using Heroku in prod. ... It's a great product but I do hope they start innovating again.”
endorse · production · bvirb · 2022-06-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using it in prod for almost 10 years now, almost without issues. Personally I'm still a very happy customer.”
endorse · production · 10 yr · elsurudo · 2022-06-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“every month some part of Heroku is down or degraded. That and the huge price increase when jumping from the standard dynos”
regret · production · cjhowarddev · 2022-03-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've run a pretty similar stack on Heroku with very minimal pain.”
endorse · production · Ozzie_osman · 2021-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“That worked well for a while and let us serve tons of clients on a single Heroku dyno. The problem: memory.”
mixed · production · eldavido · 2021-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Heroku solved a lot of problems incredibly well but they seemed to lose any ambition to be more than a salesforce deployment platform”
mixed · production · jordanthoms · 2021-04-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Heroku really spends time making sure everything works out of the box, and that's what you're paying for.”
endorse · production · runako · 2021-03-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Heroku is great and I use it in production and pay them money every month, but man if it's not stuck in 2015.”
mixed · production · freehunter · 2020-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“There's very little reason to choose Heroku these days, and I say that as someone who has code running in production on Heroku's platform.”
regret · production · freehunter · 2020-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“heroku handles a lot of things we otherwise need to do ourselves”
endorse · production · rileytg · 2020-07-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Yeah, Heroku performance on shared dynos is really not great. The variability is very high also”
regret · production · jordanthoms · 2020-05-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“After failing with Heroku we migrated to using Dokku on DO.”
regret · production · jdance · 2020-02-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated our company webapp to Heroku last year. We pay about 8 times what a dedicated server would cost”
mixed · production · 1 yr · frenchman99 · 2019-09-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Heroku provided a much easier custom domain implementation process for the end user.”
endorse · production · chptung · 2019-02-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run it on Heroku on production quality dynos. Heroku came out to be a bottle neck.”
regret · production · kiechu · 2018-09-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“On Heroku we used to run up against their CPU burstability limits and would get throttled. Simple Queries for an indexed field would take 100ms+.”
regret · production · kareemm · 2018-01-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had to spend quite some time working around Heroku's limitations.”
regret · production · timewarrior · 2017-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My only "complaint" about Heroku is cost, it is quite expensive for memory heavy processes”
mixed · production · 1.5 yr · samwillis · 2017-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It's been nearly a zero effort, especially compared to doing it all myself.”
endorse · production · 10 yr · simplify · 2017-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we would consistently get request timeouts when under load (even if scaled up) until we moved to the single-tenant dynos.”
regret · production · jordanthoms · 2016-08-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Heroku is very, very expensive. We switched an early Discourse setup from Heroku to Digital Ocean”
regret · production · codinghorror · 2016-01-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Heroku for a Node apps and was sad that deploying Go apps required a custom buildpack.”
mixed · personal · chrisfosterelli · 2015-07-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Heroku has dramatically reduced the amount of time we spend around devops to the point that most months it approaches 0.”
endorse · production · noahc · 2014-11-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“there wasn't enough added value from Heroku to justify the abstractions”
regret · production · numlocked · 2014-08-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the PaaS I used (Heroku/EngineYard/AWS) don't perform good enough compared to VPS or servers at "traditional vendors" or things like DigitalOcean.”
regret · production · msikkes · 2014-05-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Heroku for a while now, and the service just keeps getting better.”
endorse · personal · rdegges · 2013-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This is one of the areas where heroku does a great job.”
endorse · production · ollysb · 2013-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“their performance has served me well in the past; could be worth looking into for you.”
endorse · production · notduncansmith · 2013-10-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“reduce our Heroku bill by a couple hundred dollars a month.”
endorse · production · aculver · 2013-05-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I would complain about h12 errors, they would tell me to upgrade my resources and/or that it was my problem and there was nothing they can do.”
regret · production · 1.3 yr · WillieBKevin · 2013-02-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“After spending a few weeks working with Heroku support... we moved to raw AWS and our performance problems disappeared. I want to love Heroku, but it doesn't scale for Rails apps.”
regret · production · michaelrkn · 2013-02-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I much prefer using Heroku and not having to worry about it”
endorse · production · yesimahuman · 2012-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use heroku for prototyping, which it is great for. I would not use it for larger projects in production... heroku had much more downtime”
mixed · production · oellegaard · 2012-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our site was down 2 days but we moved to Heroku afterwards. No problems since”
endorse · production · redegg · 2012-10-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“since the move to Heroku I'd say we saved amour 20 monthly hours.”
endorse · production · Vitaly · 2012-03-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Coming next week: How we moved off Heroku onto AWS after the Heroku outage.”
regret · production · casca · 2012-01-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The advantage with Heroku over services such as GAE is that no component of our stack is proprietary”
endorse · production · iamclovin · 2012-01-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Heroku and MongoLab's plugin, all for free. It can get expensive after lots of data”
mixed · personal · DanielRibeiro · 2011-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Heroku has had too much downtime for our company.”
regret · production · bradleyland · 2011-06-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I want to be able to install the heroku deployment process on my own servers.”
endorse · production · ddemchuk · 2011-06-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've told a few people that we run on Heroku and had them respond "Really? Isn't that expensive?"”
endorse · production · snprbob86 · 2011-03-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Auto scaling turned out to be a huge pain and waste of time for me. I ran out of patience and moved my Ruby code”
regret · production · stephth · 2010-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been a big evangelist of Heroku since we migrated over last year, but I'm getting deeply concerned about the elevated error rate”
mixed · production · 1 yr · ayb · 2010-10-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In the long term you're likely better on Heroku, for small companies at least.”
endorse · production · gfunk911 · 2010-10-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Now we use heroku. For a small/medium sized project it is just perfect... I cannot recommend it enough.”
endorse · production · yogsototh · 2010-09-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This setup has quite frankly blown me away.”
endorse · production · ollysb · 2010-08-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run our entire backend / platform on Heroku... saved us from needing any type of sys admin work at all.”
endorse · production · kineticac · 2010-05-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My company's a paying customer and we migrated from EY to Heroku. I think they're roughly comparable but the deal breakers for me were Postgres, Addons, and the Git Workflow.”
endorse · production · andrewvc · 2010-05-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Yeah I got started on heroku too.”
neutral · personal · hangrybear666 · 2026-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched to it from Heroku in 2021.”
neutral · production · pgm8705 · 2026-02-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We used to be on Heroku and the cost wasn't just the high monthly bill”
neutral · production · zachlatta · 2025-10-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated microservices from Heroku to Porter, and also from standalone VMs and K8s running on AWS to Porter.”
neutral · production · jedwhite · 2024-05-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated from Heroku to Porter at work (at my behest). Still one of the better bets I’ve taken.”
neutral · production · hahahacorn · 2024-05-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At HomeLight we migrated from Heroku to Porter and it has been great.”
neutral · production · malyk · 2024-05-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We also moved off of Heroku, but instead of a home server, we moved to Hetzner”
neutral · production · awsidiqi · 2024-02-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I'd previously used a lot of Heroku so the habits developed there paid off in our codebase”
neutral · production · ceejayoz · 2023-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we moved to Nuxt server side rendered on Node (Heroku)”
neutral · production · drewrbaker · 2023-07-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“can sustain nearly 400 RPS through a Rails app on a single Performance-L Heroku dyno without a sweat”
neutral · production · wlll · 2022-10-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run a Next app on Heroku and we had to disable such component”
neutral · production · mr90210 · 2022-07-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We moved off Heroku about 2 years ago and use gcp.”
neutral · production · lostsoul8282 · 2022-05-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Right now I'm on my third job in my career where we've migrated off from Heroku.”
neutral · production · mosburger · 2022-03-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We rely on Heroku for all our backend services and been using for the last 24 months.”
neutral · production · 2 yr · deepak_sozial · 2021-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've hosted on full servers, on shared servers, and on Heroku.”
neutral · production · TheRealDunkirk · 2021-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it seemed a lot more useful to deploy webapps for dev projects but there didn't seem to be a way for us to leverage in in prod”
neutral · personal · dnilasor · 2021-09-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“other services on AWS EKS K8S that we migrated from Heroku using Porter”
neutral · production · jedwhite · 2021-06-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Vercel and AWS Lambda are much cheaper than Heroku.”
neutral · production · 4 yr · giorgioz · 2021-03-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My company migrated our ~2TB postgres db from heroku to AWS”
neutral · production · mijoharas · 2020-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've migrated from Heroku to EKS using Terraform to set it up.”
neutral · production · dtech · 2020-06-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Heroku instead of a custom AWS setup”
neutral · production · vendiddy · 2019-12-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“just today we migrated our site to Netlify from Heroku and the second I wanted to demo it my boss”
neutral · production · sergiotapia · 2019-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it feels nice to be running on the smallest Heroku dyno”
neutral · production · pier25 · 2019-06-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated from Heroku to Lambda in 2016”
neutral · production · adzicg · 2018-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“As part of dropping Heroku for our own platform”
neutral · production · tty7 · 2018-03-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched MindMup from Heroku to AWS Lambda”
neutral · production · adzicg · 2018-02-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I change platforms, say from heroku to deis.”
neutral · production · sheraz · 2016-11-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“migrated our application from Heroku”
neutral · production · sorich87 · 2016-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched off of heroku recently and its been a very similar experience”
neutral · production · ggrochow · 2016-10-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We reduced our service server costs to 1/6th by moving from Heroku to Lambda.”
neutral · production · pksunkara · 2016-10-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run 100s of dynos for our service, but could probably run just a couple if we moved to elixir/otp.”
neutral · production · matthewrudy · 2016-06-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We deploy to Heroku so we use the Heroku docker image to give us (what is hopefully) as close to production environment in dev as possible.”
neutral · production · jamesRaybould · 2015-07-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we deploy on AWS in prod, and spin up Heroku apps for sharing prototypes”
neutral · production · sjtgraham · 2015-05-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use NewRelic for our Rails application on Heroku and pump Heroku data into Librato”
neutral · production · fmotlik · 2014-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run on Heroku and most of our saas cost is a dyno ($35)”
neutral · personal · hectormalot · 2014-03-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've only ever used Flask in production on Heroku”
neutral · production · ihatehandles · 2013-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“And it has a command to export your env to Heroku or upstart.”
neutral · personal · JangoSteve · 2013-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We mainly started with services we use, we'll be adding more rapidly”
neutral · production · triaged · 2013-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“this ability is one reason we moved off Heroku.”
neutral · production · bad_user · 2013-06-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“dynamic pages served off Heroku are faster if they're not stuck behind CloudFlare.”
neutral · production · blakefrost · 2013-01-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Dnsimple for quite a while to host root domains on heroku.”
neutral · production · aneth4 · 2012-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I only know how to use the basics, pushing to github and heroku, and I've been using it for a long time.”
neutral · personal · TommyDANGerous · 2012-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Heroku and AWS to drive 100% of our platform, but we're also not mobile (yet).”
neutral · production · cwilson · 2012-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run on Heroku, so we must allow our customers to bypass our server when uploading videos.”
neutral · production · aculver · 2011-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I pull the updated REE package from Phusion/let Heroku figure it out.”
neutral · production · bonzoesc · 2011-08-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“with a web app running on a heroku server”
neutral · personal · guynamedloren · 2010-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have 5 minute watchdogs on all of my 3 sites in production with Heroku, and none of them pinged me.”
neutral · production · aarongough · 2010-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?