Companies Using Heroku

With 10+ years in web crawling and technographic data analysis, I've spent months watching Heroku's numbers slide. Founded in 2007 by James Lindenbaum, Adam Wiggins, and Orion Henry, Heroku was Y Combinator's largest exit when Salesforce bought it for $212 million in 2010. The company had roughly 30 employees at the time. This analysis draws on 1,318 enriched company profiles matched from our detection of 2,179 active Heroku domains (55.5% match rate), cross-referenced with G2 reviews, ZoomInfo technographic data, and vendor-published case studies, as of our March 2026 crawl.

Growth trajectory

Our detection data picked up Heroku in August 2012 at 12 domains. It climbed to 2,256 by November 2024. That's slow. A platform that's been around since 2007 and had Salesforce's backing should have grown faster, and the chart shows why it didn't: years of flat periods punctuated by occasional jumps. The biggest was July 2018 (534 to 1,141 in one month). Since November 2024, active domains dropped 29% to 1,602. Then on February 6, 2026, Nitin T. Bhat (who leads Heroku's business unit, per DevClass) confirmed the platform is entering "sustaining engineering" mode. No new features. No new enterprise contracts. Gartner had named Heroku a Leader in their Cloud-Native Application Platforms Magic Quadrant just six months earlier, in August 2025.

"The most telling number isn't the 2,179 active domains. It's the 23,689 that left. For every domain still on Heroku, roughly 11 have already moved on." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales Signal: Heroku's shrinking addressable market creates a double opportunity. Migration service providers can target the 2,179 remaining customers who will eventually need to move. Sales teams selling competing PaaS solutions should filter for Heroku detections on TechnologyChecker.io, since these companies already understand PaaS concepts and have a built-in reason to switch.

Customer profile

73.5% of Heroku customers have 1-10 employees. Add the 11-50 range and you hit 85.8%. This is a solo-dev and micro-team platform. Companies founded in the 2010s make up 59.2% of the base. The enterprise slice (10,000+ employees, just 2.2%) includes Roche, Eli Lilly, British Airways, and Honda in our crawl data, plus Toyota, Citrix, and Macy's per ZoomInfo. But look at the detection URLs: carpooling-test.roche.com, staging-9to5.redbull.com, projects.hackathon.amgen.com. These are hackathon projects and internal tools, not production infrastructure. Heroku's own case studies tell the same story: Audata (media SaaS, projecting 50% revenue growth) and Hotel Engine (hospitality startup) are small companies that grew on the platform. Wunderman Thompson is the only large agency featured.

Sales Signal: The typical Heroku customer is a small tech company with under 10 employees that needs managed hosting without a DevOps team. They value simplicity over cost optimization. Companies staying on Heroku past the 2026 announcement likely have legacy apps that work and lack engineering bandwidth to migrate.

Industry and geographic concentration

Software Development (11.16%), Tech/Internet (8.01%), and IT Services (5.11%) combine for 24.3% of the customer base. That's expected for a developer-focused PaaS. What's less expected: Construction (2.21%) and Real Estate (2.13%) both crack the top 10. These aren't companies building complex SaaS, they're likely running simple web apps or client portals on Heroku's easy deployment model. Geographically, the US dominates at 52%, with the UK at 7.6%. English-speaking countries account for over 65% of all customers. France and Brazil each hold about 3%, giving Heroku modest international presence but nothing close to global distribution.

Sales Signal: Non-tech industries like construction and real estate on Heroku represent companies with limited technical resources. They probably won't migrate on their own, which makes them targets for managed migration services or simpler PaaS alternatives like Railway or Render.

Migration patterns

756 companies switched from Heroku to Vercel. 22 went the other way. That's a 34:1 loss ratio, and it's getting worse: 317 of those Vercel switches happened in the last year alone. Netlify pulled 454 companies (18:1). Render took 308 (103:1, since only 3 came back). All three platforms absorbed over 1,500 former Heroku customers combined. The timing lines up with two events: Heroku's November 2022 free tier removal and the broader shift toward edge-first platforms that started around the same period. Railway (19 lost) and Platform.sh (12 lost) show smaller but identical patterns. GitHub Pages is the only platform where Heroku netted positive (+19), probably because static-site owners kept Heroku for dynamic backends.

"A 34:1 loss ratio to Vercel doesn't just suggest preference. It suggests an industry verdict. Developers have voted with their deployments." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales Signal: The migration corridors point to exactly which competitors are winning and why. Vercel wins frontend and JAMstack projects. Render wins backend services and databases. Netlify wins static and marketing sites. Sales teams selling migration services should segment by these patterns. Companies that haven't migrated yet but show declining Heroku usage are warm leads.

Technology ecosystem

Amazon S3 CDN (45.1%) tops the co-occurring tech list. Heroku runs entirely on AWS, so high S3 and CloudFront (16.9%) adoption is expected. On analytics, Hotjar (10.55%) and Google Analytics Classic (8.12%) tell us most Heroku apps are customer-facing. The JavaScript story is the real tell. AngularJS leads at 6.76%. Not Angular (the modern rewrite). AngularJS, which Google stopped maintaining in 2021. Styled-components (5.24%) and Emotion (4.71%) show some React adoption, but the stack overall skews toward code written years ago and left running.

Sales Signal: The AngularJS prevalence means a chunk of Heroku's remaining customer base has legacy apps that need modernization. Companies running AngularJS on Heroku are prime candidates for full-stack migration services that bundle infrastructure and frontend upgrades together.

G2 review signals

Heroku has 146 G2 reviews with a 4.2/5 rating. The top pro is ease of use, confirming that developer experience remains the platform's core value proposition. Deployment simplicity and multi-language support are consistent themes. The top con, poor customer support, aligns with our migration data: when companies hit scaling problems or billing disputes and can't get help, they leave. Authentication issues and difficult debugging were also flagged. These pain points map directly to the complaints on Reddit threads about Heroku's declining quality under Salesforce's ownership.

Sales Signal: G2 reviews confirm the migration trigger. Companies that cite support quality issues are the most likely to switch. Sales teams selling alternatives should lead with support SLAs and responsive customer success, since that's Heroku's weakest point.

Key takeaways

1. Heroku is in managed decline. The February 2026 "sustaining engineering" announcement confirmed what the data already showed: no new features, no new enterprise contracts, just maintenance.

2. The customer base is 73.5% micro-businesses (1-10 employees), heavily concentrated in US-based tech companies founded in the 2010s.

3. Enterprise names like Roche and British Airways use Heroku for internal tools and experiments, not primary infrastructure.

4. Migration is one-directional. Vercel (756 lost), Netlify (454), and Render (308) are absorbing former Heroku customers at accelerating rates.

5. The legacy tech stack (AngularJS, RequireJS) suggests many remaining apps haven't been actively maintained, which makes migration harder but more inevitable.

6. Heroku's competitive moat was developer experience. Vercel, Railway, and Render have matched or exceeded it while offering better pricing and active development.

Sales applications

Outreach template: "Hi [Name], I noticed your company still runs [app] on Heroku. With Salesforce moving Heroku to maintenance mode this February, many teams are evaluating migration paths. Our data shows 756 companies have already moved to Vercel and 308 to Render in the past year. Would it be helpful to discuss what that transition looks like for a team your size?"

Targeting strategy: On TechnologyChecker.io, filter for Heroku detections with 11-50 employees in Software Development or IT Services. These companies are large enough to have budget for migration but small enough to feel the impact of Heroku's declining support quality.

Competitive angle: Companies that switched from Heroku to a competitor in the last 12 months are warm leads for complementary services (monitoring, CI/CD, database migration). The 317 that moved to Vercel in the past year alone represent a concentrated pool of recently-migrated teams that may need help optimizing their new setup.

Explore the full dataset of 2,179 Heroku customers with enriched company data on TechnologyChecker.io.