Heroku is in maintenance mode, is your business next?
For over a decade, Heroku provided businesses with a critical competitive advantage, speed to market. By eliminating infrastructure bottlenecks, it allowed organisations to rapidly launch web applications and execute complex Salesforce data integrations.
But the cloud landscape has shifted. On February 6, 2026, Salesforce announced that Heroku is officially transitioning to a “sustaining” engineering model. While the platform isn't shutting down tomorrow, its focus will now be strictly limited to stability, security, and reliability, meaning no new feature development. Furthermore, Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers.
For small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) that have built their foundations on Heroku, this announcement should be a wake-up call. Staying on a platform in maintenance mode carries real, compounding risks for your business's future, particularly as the AI revolution accelerates.
Here is why forward-thinking organisations need to consider an early migration path to AWS, and how to navigate that transition seamlessly.
The Hidden Costs of a Sustaining Platform
Heroku may still power your core portals and data integrations without immediate disruption, but remaining on a platform in 'maintenance mode' carries a massive opportunity cost. Your infrastructure is effectively becoming a legacy system, permanently cut off from future cloud innovation.
- Missing Out on the AI Revolution: innovation with AI relies heavily on data and modern infrastructure. While Heroku has introduced some managed inference add-ons, the core PaaS environment itself is no longer evolving. To truly harness the power of generative AI, large language models (LLMs), and autonomous agents, you need a flexible, cloud-native architecture that natively integrates with advanced AI tools. Staying on a stagnant platform means your competitors will outpace you in leveraging AI for operational efficiency and customer experience.
- The Escalating Cost of Support and Compliance: over time, as engineering talent and investment shift away from Heroku toward other high-growth Salesforce products, the risk profile of depending on it grows. Security and compliance expectations are rising globally. Running your backend on a platform with declining innovation could raise serious red flags during independent vendor assessments or security reviews. Furthermore, as Heroku enforces forced upgrades on its deprecated data stores (like older versions of Postgres and Redis), the maintenance burden on your team will inevitably increase.
- The Graduation Problem: Heroku's pricing is straightforward initially, but as your application scales, it becomes notoriously expensive. You are paying a premium for an abstraction layer that is no longer being enhanced. AWS, on the other hand, offers granular usage-based pricing, auto-scaling, and discount programs (like Savings Plans) that can reduce infrastructure costs over 70% at scale.
The AWS Advantage: Control, Scale, and Innovation
The cloud infrastructure market has matured dramatically since Heroku’s heyday. AWS now offers a spectrum of deployment services that bridge the gap between Heroku's simplicity and enterprise-grade control.
- AWS App Runner: for teams prioritising speed, App Runner delivers a Heroku-like experience. It is a fully managed service that deploys containerised web applications and APIs directly from source code, automatically handling scaling, load balancing, and networking.
- Amazon ECS with Fargate: for teams needing a balance of operational ease and enterprise control, ECS Fargate provides serverless compute for containers. It removes the need to manage underlying EC2 instances while allowing granular resource allocations, perfectly for background workers and microservices.
- Seamless Data Integration: many Heroku users rely heavily on Heroku Connect to sync CRM data with Heroku Postgres. AWS offers mature, high-performance database alternatives like Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora, which integrate securely into comprehensive data lakes and analytics pipelines.
Why Gen25 is Your Ideal Migration Partner
Migrating off Heroku is a strategic architectural decision that requires more than just a lift-and-shift approach. Rebuilding data integration layers, especially those tied to Salesforce, requires careful planning, testing, and execution to avoid downtime or data loss.
At Gen25, we bring a unique intersection of expertise. As a certified partner for Salesforce, Heroku and AWS with a track record of over 400 successfully delivered projects, we understand the nuances of your current ecosystem. Here is how we ensure a successful transition:
- Actionable Diagnostics: we support and assess your current Heroku architecture, evaluate your Salesforce integration requirements, and design an AWS infrastructure tailored to your exact needs.
- Zero-Downtime Migrations: moving large Postgres databases requires precision. We utilise advanced replication tools and strategies to ensure your data is migrated securely with minimal to zero disruption to your business operations.
- No Internal DevOps Required: the biggest hurdle in moving to AWS is the DevOps gap. Gen25 provides ongoing managed services and cloud consulting, meaning you get the immense power, security, and AI capabilities of AWS without needing to hire a massive internal infrastructure team.
The Bottom Line
Heroku's development freeze is a catalyst for re-engineering your business for the modern era. Don't wait for the official End of Life announcement to force your hand, by then, the best migration windows will have closed. Take control of your infrastructure today. Partner with Gen25 to transform this transition into a strategic upgrade, unlocking scalable growth, cost control, and the AI-driven innovations your business needs to thrive.
Ready to explore your migration path? Contact Gen25 and lets see how we can help you on this journey.
