In a move that has sent ripples throughout the developer community, Salesforce has confirmed it is ceasing all new feature development for its pioneering platform-as-a-service, Heroku, effectively placing the once-beloved tool into maintenance mode. The company announced its decision to transition the platform to a “sustaining engineering model,” a strategic shift that prioritizes stability and security for existing customers over innovation and growth. This pivot is designed to free up significant product and engineering resources, which will now be channeled directly into Salesforce’s burgeoning agentic-AI platform, Agentforce. While the company frames this as a forward-looking investment in the future of enterprise AI, the decision has been met with widespread criticism from industry analysts and tech executives who view it as a shortsighted dismantling of a uniquely valuable asset at a critical moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence. The move signals a clear end to an era for Heroku, leaving its dedicated user base to contemplate their next steps on a platform now set on a course toward eventual obsolescence.
A Strategic Shift to AI and Maintenance Mode
Salesforce’s official rationale for sidelining Heroku is rooted in a calculated reallocation of resources toward what it perceives as the next frontier of enterprise technology. Senior Vice President Nitin T. Bhat articulated that the company is concentrating its investments in areas promising greater long-term value, with Agentforce at the epicenter of this new strategy. Agentforce is being positioned as the company’s premier solution for building and deploying sophisticated, enterprise-grade AI applications. By halting new feature development for Heroku, Salesforce is making a definitive statement about its priorities, betting heavily that the future of its ecosystem lies in generative and agentic AI rather than the foundational PaaS layer that Heroku provides. This transition means that while the lights will stay on for Heroku, its evolution has come to an abrupt stop. The focus of the remaining engineering team will be strictly limited to maintaining the platform’s core reliability and patching security vulnerabilities, ensuring it remains operational for its current clientele without any further enhancement.
The implications for Heroku’s extensive user base are significant and immediate, as the platform’s new status as a legacy system changes its value proposition entirely. Current customers will be able to continue using the service and can still renew their existing subscriptions, ensuring a degree of operational continuity for the near future. However, Salesforce has drawn a firm line in the sand by announcing it will no longer pursue or sign new enterprise contracts for the platform. This effectively caps Heroku’s growth and signals to the market that it is no longer a strategic asset for the company. Independent analyst Michael Warrilow noted that the platform was already struggling under the weight of “exorbitant pricing” and that the aggressive push for Agentforce was the “nail in the coffin.” For businesses currently relying on Heroku for critical applications, this development serves as a clear directive to begin exploring and planning for an eventual migration to alternative platforms, as the long-term support and viability of Heroku are now fundamentally in question.
A Calculated Risk or a Costly Misread
A powerful consensus is forming among industry experts that Salesforce’s decision to abandon Heroku represents a profound strategic miscalculation, particularly given the current technological landscape. Critics argue that the company is underestimating, or perhaps failing to recognize, Heroku’s immense untapped potential as a crucial component in the very AI ecosystem it aims to dominate with Agentforce. Keith Townsend, a respected CTO advisor, contends that while Salesforce is heavily promoting its new AI platform, Agentforce currently lacks an essential “governance-aware execution layer.” Such a layer is critical for managing, constraining, and auditing the applications and agents generated by AI, preventing them from operating without necessary oversight. Townsend posits that Heroku was perfectly positioned to evolve into this foundational governance layer, providing the sandboxed, controlled environment needed to safely run AI-driven code. From this perspective, Salesforce already owned the solution to one of Agentforce’s biggest challenges but chose to discard it, a move Townsend labels the “most expensive strategic misread in enterprise AI.”
The sense of a missed opportunity is echoed by other leaders in the development space, who point to the irony of Salesforce’s timing. Ivan Burazin, CEO of daytona.io, highlighted the paradox of the company abandoning one of the original sandbox environment providers just as a new wave of startups is raising millions in capital to build similar ephemeral platforms tailored for AI agents. These new tools are designed to provide the exact kind of isolated, temporary environments where AI can build, test, and execute tasks safely—a capability that was core to Heroku’s DNA. Burazin views the decision as Salesforce allowing a “developer goldmine wither away” instead of adapting it for the agentic AI era. This sentiment reflects a broader theme in the criticism: that this is a classic example of “big tech’s ability to kill great products” through a failure of vision. The decision to sideline Heroku was not seen as an innovative leap forward but as the unfortunate consequence of a large corporation failing to appreciate the synergistic potential of its own assets, ultimately choosing to dismantle a valuable tool rather than evolve it.
