# Heroku 82 Hacker News commenters recommended Heroku and 116 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 10 years (7 owners). **Verdict:** Recommended for its git push deployment and developer experience that hides server details; the most common caveat is rising prices and lock-in, with development stalling under Salesforce ownership. ## Why people recommend it - Hides infrastructure complexity from developers (8 comments): "PaaS platforms (Heroku, Render, Railway) can legitimately be operated by your average dev and not have to hire a dedicated person; those cost even more though." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46337425)) "That magic sauce is Devs don't have to think about container builds/finding a container registry and creating a Dockerfile." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47288440)) "the benefits of Heroku were precisely that it didn't need you to think about the guts of a system like Kubernetes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48899751)) - Git push deployment without server setup (5 comments): "there still really isn't in my mind a comparable offering to heroku's git push and go straight to a reasonable production" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921058)) "their Git Push Deployment was really a killer concept and a huge gateway for people just writing good apps" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46914455)) "The fact that it required nothing but 'git push heroku master' at the time was incredible" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926571)) - Pioneered PaaS and cloud practices (4 comments): "The shear number of engineering practices we take for granted today because of something like Heroku boggles my mind." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46927557)) "Heroku very much shaped how we think of "cloud applications", autoscaling, and containerization." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49480560)) "The original Heroku often gets praised here. Rightfully so. It inspired many." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46918846)) - Excellent developer experience and UI (3 comments): "They set the bar on how streamlined application deployment can be and a great UI to go along with it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46922135)) "they had an amazing developer experience… and gave everyone free compute and data transfer" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46920080)) "That's literally the UX I'm talking about and that's what other companies copied too" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921473)) ## What people warn about - Stalled development under Salesforce (8 comments): "Salesforce gradually shifted away from a dev-first platform toward click-based config and heavy reliance on middleware for all kind of integrations." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919785)) "I felt that it was irredeemable, and though it took a while, Salesforce did eventually succeed in running it fully into the ground." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47940125)) "From the outside, Heroku stalled and died because Salesforce prioritized everything else in its business above Heroku." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47942978)) - Price increases and rounded-up dyno costs (3 comments): "Heroku didn’t stay competitive price-wise with alternatives. And scaling even slightly from the basic dynos quadrupled (or whatever) the price." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921064)) "As a result, you ended up paying for dynos you weren't even using because they were now rounding up" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926613)) "I used to just throw everything up on a PaaS. Heroku/Render, etc. and pay way more than I needed to" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47826561)) - Vendor lock-in and hard to leave (2 comments): "the pricing is bonkers, and the vendor lock in makes it really hard to deal with annual price increases" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45871289)) "It was super annoying how delightful Heroku was, but how annoyingly locked-in and expensive it is." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46956411)) - Dyno cold starts and reliability (2 comments): "enjoying using the free tier of Heroku for my school projects but also the pain of dyno cold starts" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46920763)) "it wasn’t super reliable as heroku but they’re getting better at keeping the instances up" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919731)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Railway](https://hackerapproved.com/p/railway.md): 94 recommend - [Fly.io](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fly-io.md): 72 recommend - [Render](https://hackerapproved.com/p/render.md): 44 recommend - [Google App Engine](https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-app-engine.md): 11 recommend - [DigitalOcean App Platform](https://hackerapproved.com/p/digitalocean-app-platform.md): 11 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://www.heroku.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Heroku", https://hackerapproved.com/p/heroku/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).