Salesforce has signaled a major strategic shift for its long-standing cloud platform Heroku by ending sales of new Heroku Enterprise contracts and moving the service into a maintenance-focused “sustaining engineering” phase.

“Today, Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support…. Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers,” Nitin T Bhat, chief product officer at Heroku, wrote in a blog post.

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Analysts are reading the change in Heroku’s status as preparations for phasing out the once high-profile platform-as-a-service (PaaS) as the company pivots to AI-led growth.

Sustaining engineering, according to Greyhound Research chief analyst Sanchit Vir Gogia, is rarely a stable equilibrium, rather a holding pattern that makes eventual absorption or shutdown less disruptive for the parent company, in this case, Salesforce.

When a product or platform enters the sustaining engineering phase, engineering focus shifts from building new value to containing risk, momentum fades, product, sales, partnerships, and talent move elsewhere, and in fast-evolving cloud ecosystems, the platform steadily loses relevance for developer workflows, and when a platform loses internal political capital, reversal is uncommon, Gogia added.

Similar cadences, historically, Pareekh Jain, principal analyst at Pareekh Consulting, noted, have preceded managed decline scenarios across the industry.

“There are many well-known precedents where vendors moved products into sustained engineering. IBM shifted Bluemix into maintenance as it pivoted decisively to Red Hat OpenShift, while VMware placed Pivotal Cloud Foundry into sustain mode before fully absorbing it into Tanzu. Google App Engine’s standard environment remains technically available, but innovation stalled once Google reoriented around Kubernetes and GKE,” Jain said.

Giving more examples, Jain highlighted Microsoft Silverlight, which spent years in a “supported but frozen” state before eventual retirement, along with Oracle’s Solaris, Atlassian’s Fisheye, and Adobe’s Flash — all of which were left behind or stalled for strategic relevance.

Why did Heroku lose relevance?

Heroku’s struggle to keep pace with new requirements of cloud platforms, such as competitive landscape and cost economics, appears to be the main reason behind its reprioritization.

Two structural challenges stand out, according to Chandrika Dutt, research director at Avasant.

First, the competitive landscape now includes alternatives like Render, Railway, Fly.io, Vercel, and Supabase that are more nimble, modular, and cost-effective for modern development patterns.

Second, the underlying Postgres ecosystem has broadened dramatically, with specialized hosted Postgres and backend services reducing the value of Heroku’s integrated stack.

“The combination of declining innovation, rising relative cost, and growing opportunity cost of engineering resources likely informed Salesforce’s decision to shift investment toward higher-growth priorities, including AI-centric services and broader cloud integrations,” Dutt pointed out.

In contrast, when Salesforce bought Heroku in 2011, it provided advantages, such as easy application deployment and hosted Postgres, which Salesforce used as a route to capture developer-led cloud workloads and extend its ecosystem, Dutt added.

Greyhound’s Gogia, too, seconded Dutt: Heroku once served as Salesforce’s bridge to the broader developer ecosystem but later Salesforce outgrew the problem Heroku was built to solve and strategically shifted its focus from attracting developers to controlling and monetizing enterprise AI outcomes.

As the company shifted toward large enterprise deals, platform consolidation, and AI-led differentiation, Heroku’s positioning became increasingly unclear — too independent to be tightly integrated into Salesforce, yet too branded to remain a neutral developer platform, Gogia said.

Efforts to “enterprise-grade” it improved compliance and networking capabilities but diluted its original developer appeal, and later modernization could not reverse the ecosystem drift, Gogia noted, adding that by the time Salesforce centered its narrative on AI and data platforms, Heroku was no longer core to the story.

Heroku’s future

However, the sustaining engineering phase, by no means, Salesforce said, is an immediate wind-down.

“There is no change for customers using Heroku today. Customers who pay via credit card in the Heroku dashboard—both existing and new—can continue to use Heroku with no changes to pricing, billing, service, or day-to-day usage,” Bhat wrote in his blog post, assuring customers of continued support and even encouraging customers to renew their contracts.

Despite those assurances, analysts suggest the shift warrants closer scrutiny from enterprise customers planning long-term roadmaps.

The absence of strategic investment materially increases long-term platform risk, Dutt noted, adding that customers should avoid net-new strategic development on Heroku as the signals are consistent with a platform entering a sunset trajectory, not a renewal phase.

Gogia, too, warned that CIOs should start treating Heroku as legacy infrastructure.

“Do not assume runtime parity with the broader ecosystem will persist indefinitely. Inventory dependencies, especially data services and integration points. Ensure backups and exports are routine, not aspirational,” Gogia said.

“Prototype at least one viable alternative deployment path so migration effort is understood, not guessed. The biggest risk is not an abrupt shutdown. The biggest risk is complacency, where teams wake up one day to discover that the cost, effort, and organizational friction of moving has grown far larger than it needed to be,” Gogia added.

Similarly, Dutt pointed out that enterprises that start planning a migration will have an advantage as operational leverage will still be with them than any vendor or Salesforce till the time Heroku’s sunset is announced. From a Salesforce perspective, Jain said, Heroku’s Postgres, which seems to be its most durable asset, is likely to be absorbed into its Data Cloud as a managed offering and the dyno-based compute layer will be phased out as Salesforce steers AI and agentic development through a combo of Agentforce and the Data Cloud.