My first job out of college was at Heroku. I couldn't believe how lucky I was to work alongside people who brought taste, creativity, and exceptional design to a part of the developer toolchain that had rarely received such care.
For nearly two decades, Heroku was where you shipped your first app, launched your startup, and fell in love with building for the web. It earned a place in the hearts of an entire generation of developers, and rightfully so.
Heroku didn't just build a platform. It proved something: that powerful tools for developers could be simple to use. Before Heroku, the default path for deploying an app was wrestling with servers and manually configuring infrastructure. You had to spend days on work that had nothing to do with your actual product. The Heroku founders looked at that workflow and thought that deploying an app should be as simple as git push. That idea changed the industry.
Building on Heroku’s legacy
Several of us at Render are Heroku alumni. We know firsthand what made it special, and we carry that understanding into the work we do every day. But alongside the nostalgia, there's also a sense of momentum.
The cloud has changed since Heroku's early days. Modern applications are AI-native and more complex, evolving and growing in minutes, not months. They are stateful, real-time, and highly distributed. Building for the future requires innovative, flexible infrastructure, not one-size-fits-all. But the market is moving too quickly to waste time setting this up yourself.
You need long-running workflows, powerful background workers, private networking, autoscaling, infrastructure-as-code, sandboxes, larger databases, and more—and you want these services to work together intuitively, on one platform.
This is the future we are building Render for.
For those still running on Heroku
Today, Render supports over 4.5 million developers, with over 250,000 new users joining us every month. They’re building everything from global digital retail experiences to AI-native platforms like Base44, serving millions of users. Developers always tell us the same thing when we ask why they chose Render: Render offers the simplicity they remember, with the reliability, flexibility, and rapid innovation that modern teams demand.
For those of you still running applications on Heroku, we understand that the update from Heroku raises difficult questions about your next steps. For developers and businesses considering moving their workloads to Render, we want to help make the transition as easy as possible. To support you, we’re offering:
- Low-downtime migration services for Heroku customers with large, multi-terabyte databases. We know this is a pain point, particularly when you can't afford downtime. Our team has helped many customers navigate these transitions with minimal disruption, and we'll work closely with you to plan a migration that fits your timeline and requirements.
- Up to $10,000 in Render credits for customers migrating. Typically, customers see a significant reduction in cloud costs just by switching to Render, but we know that the effort to migrate represents a real cost. We are offering credits to help reduce any financial burden. Get in touch with our team to request migration credits.
If you're ready to explore what a migration looks like, here's how you can get started:
- Self-serve: Our migration guide walks you through the process step by step.
- Hands-on support: Talk to our team to discuss your migration, request credits, and get personalized guidance for your setup.
Heroku showed the world what developer experience could look like. We're honored to carry that work forward. If you're looking for a home for your applications, we'd love to help you build what's next.