It was one of the reasons Podia was able to iterate so quickly and avoid spending too much time thinking about infrastructure. And, in the places that

Moving off Heroku, slowly

submited by

Style Pass

2024-10-31 15:30:04

It was one of the reasons Podia was able to iterate so quickly and avoid spending too much time thinking about infrastructure. And, in the places that Heroku couldn’t support our use case, like providing custom domains for our users, we had to expend considerable effort and stress managing servers. It sucked and Heroku proved its worth.

For many years after the acquisition by Salesforce, Heroku was an outlier: an acquired company that kept iterating and didn’t get shut down, or enshittified by the parent company. It was a miracle! I can’t remember the exact date but that all seemed to change once Heroku started requiring a salesforce login prompt and everything was stamped with the Salesforce branding (and the sales team became much much worse). From that point onwards, Heroku seem to calcify and my enthusiasm transitioned to “it’s fine”.

Our escape plan for Podia since Day 1 has always been “when our Heroku bill hits ~$20k/mo, that would fund two engineers to manage our infrastructure instead”. We’ve not hit that level in 9 years and so, even with the stagnated platform, it made sense to stay.