Heroku’s Next Chapter Is Maintenance. Yours Shouldn’t Be

Heroku’s move to a “sustaining engineering” model was carefully worded. It avoids the term end-of-life. It reassures existing customers that nothing changes immediately. It emphasizes stability and support.

But if you read between the lines, the message is clear: there is no forward roadmap. There is no new feature investment. The platform is entering maintenance mode.

For teams running production systems, the real risk isn’t Heroku going offline. It’s standing still while the rest of the industry moves forward. Platforms rarely become risky overnight. They become risky when innovation stops. Teams need runtimes that stay current. They need security patches that ship one time. They need platform support for the frameworks and the tooling they’re actually adopting. When a platform is no longer investing, those gaps widen over time.

Heroku customers may not be panicking, but they are reassessing. And reassessing means confronting a hard truth: code portability may be high, but operational portability is not. Data migration, networking assumptions, service dependencies, and deployment workflows all require planning. The move doesn’t have to happen today. But the planning should.

“Just Migrate” Is Easy to Say. Harder to Do.

Heroku’s announcement triggered exactly what you’d expect: a wave of “just migrate to us” messaging from competitors hungry to capture new customers. What most of them leave out is whether their platform can handle the full architecture teams are actually running. ​​Moving in seconds makes for easy marketing, but it’s not a serious offer. Engineering teams evaluating their options need a credible path forward, not a marketing pitch.

Let’s be clear: most Heroku applications are not trivial. They include multiple process types, background workers, scheduled jobs, managed databases, Redis caches, CI/CD pipelines, environment configurations, DNS dependencies, and production traffic patterns. Migration is not just moving a web dyno. It is re-establishing a working architecture.

Any provider suggesting that complex production workloads can be moved with a few clicks is oversimplifying the problem.

DigitalOcean Is the Natural Successor

This is not the first time some Heroku customers have needed a path forward. When Heroku eliminated its free tier in 2022, DigitalOcean was already helping teams migrate their applications to App Platform. We walked developers through the process and built tooling to reduce friction. That was three years ago. We’ve been doing this since.

The reason the transition works is architectural. DigitalOcean App Platform was built on the same Cloud Native Buildpack model that made Heroku successful. That alignment is not cosmetic; it reduces friction materially. Applications that rely on Procfiles, environment variables, and buildpack-based deployment models generally run on DigitalOcean with minimal code changes. Developers can preserve the familiar code-first workflow without being forced to containerize immediately.

We’ve published a detailed migration guide that maps every Heroku concept—dynos, config vars, release phases, Heroku Scheduler, add-ons—to its App Platform equivalent, with step-by-step instructions for data migration, DNS cutover, and production validation.

This does not eliminate migration work. It reduces the surface area of change. That difference is significant.

But compatibility alone is not enough. The destination platform must have a future. And App Platform has been shipping aggressively:

• Native Bun runtime support. The most requested feature in the App Platform ideas portal, now auto-detected and zero-config

• Cron Jobs. Schedule recurring tasks directly on App Platform with cron expressions, no external scheduler needed.

• Environment support via Projects. Tag your apps as Development, Staging, or Production and manage them from a single view, with App Cloning to replicate environments in a few clicks.

• Outbound VPC integration. Connect apps privately to databases, Droplets, and Kubernetes across regions without exposing traffic to the public internet.

• MCP server deployment. Build and deploy remote MCP servers with HTTP response streaming and subdomain routing for AI-powered workflows.

• Native n8n template support. Deploy a production-ready n8n instance with one click, complete with managed PostgreSQL, SSL/TLS encryption, and automatic health monitoring.

• AI-assisted migration tooling. Use Claude Code, Cursor, or Gemini with DigitalOcean’s App Platform Skills to generate app specs, diagnose build errors, and deploy step by step.

• OpenClaw on App Platform. Run production-grade AI agents with elastic scaling and safe defaults, no infrastructure management required.

This is what an active roadmap looks like.

Beyond PaaS: A Full Cloud Platform

Heroku historically paired its runtime with a marketplace of add-ons. DigitalOcean provides integrated infrastructure across compute, managed databases, storage, networking, Kubernetes, serverless functions, and Gradient—our AI cloud for training, inference, and agent deployment—under a single control plane. We offer:

• Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis/Valkey, MongoDB, Kafka, and OpenSearch are first-party services.

• Object storage with CDN integration is native.

• Virtual private networking, cloud firewalls, and internal service routing are built in rather than premium upgrades.

• When workloads outgrow PaaS constraints, Kubernetes and Droplets are available without switching providers.

This matters during migration because teams are not just replacing dynos; they are re-establishing their data layer, networking topology, and operational tooling. It also matters long term. Customers are not landing on a constrained environment with limited growth paths.

Ready to Migrate? DigitalOcean Is Built for the Long Term.

DigitalOcean offers a comprehensive platform that preserves the developer simplicity that made Heroku attractive while providing a broader cloud foundation and an active roadmap behind it. We do not position migration as effortless. We approach it as a structured transition. That typically includes architectural inventory, staged deployment on DigitalOcean, managed database migration, performance validation, and controlled DNS cutover. Because of buildpack compatibility, code changes are often minimal, but operational planning remains essential.

To support teams making this decision, we are offering three months free for new workloads and, for migrations exceeding $2,500 in projected spend, direct assistance from our Solution Architects and trusted partners, providing architectural guidance, execution support, and oversight from planning through cutover. The objective is not simply to move workloads, but to move them safely and deliberately.

Heroku is not disappearing tomorrow. But when a platform signals that it is no longer investing in its future, customers must decide whether they are comfortable anchoring theirs to it.

If you are evaluating your options, we are ready to help you migrate in a way that is realistic, structured, and built for the long term. Get in touch.