Heroku was founded in 2007 by James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, and Orion Henry in San Francisco. It started as a platform for Ruby on Rails applications and quickly became one of the most beloved developer tools of its era. The “git push heroku main” deployment experience was revolutionary — it made deploying web applications accessible to developers who didn’t want to manage servers.
Salesforce acquired Heroku in 2010 for $212 million. Under Salesforce, Heroku expanded beyond Ruby to support Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, Go, Scala, and Clojure. The platform introduced concepts that became industry standards: buildpacks, dynos (containers), add-ons marketplace, and the Twelve-Factor App methodology (authored by Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins).
Heroku’s add-on ecosystem was particularly influential. Developers could provision databases, caching layers, monitoring tools, and other services with a single command. Heroku Postgres became one of the most popular managed PostgreSQL services.
However, Heroku’s story isn’t entirely positive. Under Salesforce’s ownership, the platform received less investment than many users hoped for. The free tier was eliminated in 2022, and a security incident involving OAuth token theft shook user trust. Many developers migrated to newer alternatives like Railway, Render, and Fly.io.
Despite these challenges, Heroku still serves hundreds of thousands of applications and remains a viable option for small to mid-size projects. Salesforce has announced renewed investment in the platform, including updates to the runtime and integration with Salesforce’s broader ecosystem.
Heroku operates as a Salesforce division, with engineering and product teams distributed across multiple locations.
