2022 was a transformational year for Heroku. In this post, we share how we’ve been enriching the Heroku developer experience in 2022, especially since committing to Heroku’s Next Chapter. We are dedicated to supporting our customers of all sizes who continue to invest and build their projects, careers, and businesses on Heroku.

Public Roadmap

As part of our commitment to increase transparency, the Heroku roadmap went live on GitHub in August 2022. The public roadmap has grown with the participation of many of our customers. Thank you for engaging with us about the future of Heroku. We want to hear from you! Today, we have approximately 70 active roadmap cards, most of which have an assigned product owner. We have 24 cards in-flight and have shipped 28 projects. Please continue to contribute and share your ideas. The roadmap is your direct line to Heroku.

Focus on Mission-Critical Stability

At Salesforce and Heroku, Trust is our #1 value. To us, trust means being transparent with you about the security incident in April 2022 that affected Heroku and our customers. After taking necessary remediation steps to bring Heroku back to a stable state, we committed to invest in Heroku to improve resilience and strengthen our security posture. We did invest, are investing, and will continue to invest in operational stability in order to maintain your trust. Here is a sampling of our 2022 highlights in this area:

• Adopting a data deletion program
• Improved internal access restrictions
• Infrastructure availability and hardening
• Credential handling improvements
• Observability improvements
• Partner and vendor changes

As part of operational stability, we instituted an inactive account data deletion program. Customers who go a year or more without logging into their Heroku account and are not on any paid plans will receive a notification giving them 30 days to log in to prevent their account’s deletion. Prior to launching this program, millions of stale Heroku accounts and apps were no longer in use, but we were still keeping the lights on, which came with a cost. Deleting inactive accounts also reduces the risks associated with storing our customer’s data, which sometimes includes personal data and other data customers want to keep private. This change allows us to better maintain effective data hygiene practices and safeguard our customers’ data so it doesn’t sit online indefinitely. It also aligns with Salesforce’s commitment to data minimization and other important global privacy principles.

Mission-critical changes for Heroku are always added to our changelog.

Ending Free Plans

In 2022, ending our free plans was an intentional change to focus Heroku on mission-critical availability for our paid customers. We ended our free plans for Heroku Dynos, Heroku Postgres, and Heroku Data for Redis®. We completed this work in December 2022. We understand that adapting to this change wasn’t easy for many of you and there was work required for you to accommodate the low-cost plans into your development cycles. We appreciate your su