# Northflank

9 Hacker News commenters recommended Northflank and 13 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended as an easier Heroku alternative that runs in your own cloud account; critics mainly cite a security breach.

## Why people recommend it

- Users happy after switching (3 comments): "I've been incredibly happy with Northflank since moving over a few years ago after Heroku got unreliable." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921736)) "We've been very happy with Northflank's blend of ease-of-use with configurability when you want it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46952634)) "We moved from Render to Northflank and couldn't be happier." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47498889))
- Easy migration from Heroku (2 comments): "I've been incredibly happy with Northflank since moving over a few years ago after Heroku got unreliable." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921736)) "northflank supports the same buildpacks that you run on Heroku, so it should be fairly straightforward." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46917612))

## What people warn about

- Security breach and poor response (5 comments): "I had my Anthropic key on Northflank set as an env var as-is and only found out about the incident from the HN front page 6 hours later" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50314036)) "trivial cross-tenant compromises are not egregious security failures demonstrating their systems are unfit for purpose" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50306427)) "Getting hacked while in the business of selling a secure sandbox isn't really a good look." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50306599))
- Mocked marketing tagline (3 comments): "The runtime platform for autonomous software" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50310062)) "wait, not THAT autonomous software!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50310326)) "Oh, it’s 100% Claude-slop." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50313535))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Railway](https://hackerapproved.com/p/railway.md): 94 recommend
- [Heroku](https://hackerapproved.com/p/heroku.md): 82 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

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://northflank.com/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Northflank", https://hackerapproved.com/p/northflank/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).