What's happening at Heroku, and what does it mean for your team?

https://judoscale.com/blog/heroku-whats-next

Thoughts on env vars as I spend some time with Fly...

I actually like that Fly separates env vars and secrets as distinct concepts. Secrets get extra protection, env vars are for config.

What I don't like: Env vars require a code change. And for secrets, I actually had to *destroy* my machines after I unset a couple.

Heroku might be the only platform where you can change an env var and it just restarts. Just works, and fast.

Easy to overlook until you don't have it.

I love how Northflank's pricing page lets you choose the timeframe for the metered pricing.

All metered pricing should have this.

I just updated our PaaS Pricing Comparison Calculator:

- Added Amazon ECS Fargate
- Updated pricing for Railway
- Factored CPU time-slicing for Fly shared machines

Heroku still stands out as the most expensive, but the others are very competitive!

Idea: The Judoscale Platform Tour...

We deploy our 3,000+ RPS Rails app across each of the fully-managed hosting platforms and write up our experience in detail.

Things I'd want to cover:

- cost
- performance
- DX/vibes
- review apps
- release phase/migrations
- setup
- env/secrets
- scaling

What else would you want to see?

Everyone is freaking out the Heroku blog post. Take a breath.

There's no way Heroku shuts down anytime soon.

The post confirms they won't be making improvements... how is that any different from the last decade?

Migrate eventually, but take your time. You literally have YEARS.

If you're thinking of leaving Heroku, here's a simple mapping:

If you want the easiest switch, go with Render.

If you want Docker and more flexibility, go with Fly.

If you want to be a sysadmin, use a VPS (don't need to scale) or Amazon ECS (do need to scale)

Something a bit different on the Judoscale blog—Jon Sully interviewed ME to get my thoughts on hosting in 2026.

Really happy how this turned out!

https://judoscale.com/blog/black-box-hosting-vs-glass-box-hosting-an-interview-with-adam

Two identical production apps running in parallel—or as Jon calls it, "scaling sideways"... just little technique we use to efficiently scale.

https://judoscale.com/blog/scaling-sideways-why-you-might-want-to-run-two-production-apps

On @searls latest podcast he mentioned "Heroku" and "price", so I can't help but respond. I made the post public since I think it's a really useful pattern.

tldr: Got a high-memory job that pushes you to perf dynos? Isolate it and scale to zero.