Heroku has always marketed itself as the platform that hides the stack. And for small teams, that simplicity is gold. But once your company hits scale, the very things Heroku hides become the very things holding you back.
Let’s dive into exactly how Heroku starts to hold you back as you scale, with a real-life case study.
Why Some Companies Are Saying Goodbye to Heroku
The first pain point is control. On Heroku, your runtime is a black box. You can't fine-tune IAM roles, you can't set granular networking rules, and you can't adapt infrastructure to meet the needs of enterprise customers.
Heroku's permission model is coarse-grained at best, static team roles that don't evolve with your org's complexity. This might be enough when you have a handful of developers, but not when you need least-privilege access controls for dozens of teams or compliance with regulated industries.
Then there's compliance. While Heroku does support HIPAA, PCI, and other compliance standards through Heroku Shield, there's a catch: it costs thousands of dollars per month just to get started.
Shield Private Spaces, the foundation for any compliant application, are billed annually and require Heroku Enterprise subscriptions. Industry sources suggest costs ranging from $350 to over $5,000 monthly before you even deploy your first compliant application. For many startups, this pricing makes compliance a luxury rather than a necessity. Meanwhile, FedRAMP authorization remains completely unsupported, blocking any federal government opportunities.
Cost is another major pain point that extends beyond just compliance. Heroku's convenience comes at a premium, and as you scale, that premium turns into a runaway bill. You don't have visibility into resource consumption or the ability to right-size infrastructure.
Scaling dynos or add-ons means writing bigger checks without optimization or cost predictability. Real-world comparisons show companies spending $4,000 per month on Heroku for workloads that would cost $2,000 on equivalent native AWS infrastructure, and that's before factoring in compliance premiums.
Even migrations on Heroku become a nightmare. You don't control the underlying database engines beyond what Heroku provides.
If you need a custom Postgres extension, or if you hit limits with Redis, Kafka, or RabbitMQ add-ons, you're stuck. Many companies eventually face the same conclusion: the workloads themselves need to be moved into AWS-native services just to regain flexibility.
Finally, there's operational visibility. Heroku abstracts logging and monitoring to the point where you can't easily integrate with enterprise observability pipelines. Logplex, for example, is useful for quick debugging, but it doesn't provide the level of centralization or compliance visibility that most teams need. The lack of native hooks into modern DevSecOps practices turns into real operational risk as systems grow more complex.
Heroku was great when you were small. Now it's holding you back.
For over a decade, Heroku has been the go-to for startups. Git push, app live: it doesn't get easier. That simplicity made it perfect for prototypes, hackathons, and MVPs.
But if your company is scaling, you've already felt the limits:
- Compliance costs are prohibitive: Shield Private Spaces start at thousands per month, making HIPAA or PCI compliance unattainable for most startups. FedRAMP isn't supported at all.
- Costs creep higher every month, with zero visibility into the runtime. Real companies report 2x higher bills compared to equivalent AWS setups.
- You can't fine-tune IAM, networking, or observability - everything is abstracted away, limiting your ability to optimize or customize.
- Your enterprise customers and regulators start asking questions you can't answer, especially around advanced compliance and cost transparency.
That's where companies like Uniphore realized they needed to make the move.
Case Study: Uniphore
Uniphore is a global leader in conversational AI. They needed to migrate from a fragmented, opaque cloud setup into a unified, compliant AWS environment. Instead of wrestling with a long, risky project, they chose DuploCloud.
The outcome?
Migration completed in weeks, not months, using DuploCloud's automated migration playbooks. DuploCloud has migrated a ton of customers from Heroku to AWS and are experts in this.
HIPAA + SOC 2 compliance controls built in and automatically enforced from day one
Streamlined DevOps processes with automated deployment and monitoring at the click of a button
Engineers freed to focus on product innovation, not infrastructure tickets
With DuploCloud, Uniphore didn't just migrate, they modernized.
Why this matters if you're still on Heroku
Heroku was designed to hide the stack. That's fine when you're small, but at scale it becomes a liability. You're locked into a black box with expensive compliance add-ons, spiking costs, and coarse-grained access controls that simply don't meet enterprise needs.
The truth is, every Heroku workload maps cleanly into AWS. We've done this migration so many times that we've codified it into playbooks. Here's a general idea of what one of our playbooks looks like:
| Heroku | AWS Equivalent | Notes |
| Dynos (web/worker) | ECS on Fargate / EKS | Serverless containers; choose EKS if you need Kubernetes APIs |
| PostgreSQL Add-on | Amazon RDS / Aurora PostgreSQL | Multi-AZ, automated backups, compliance ready |
| Redis Add-on | ElastiCache for Redis | Fully managed Redis v6+ |
| Kafka | Amazon MSK | Auto-patching, fully managed |
| RabbitMQ | Amazon MQ | Active/standby brokers for HA |
| Buildpacks | Dockerfile + CodeBuild / AppRunner | Buildpacks → Dockerfiles; App Runner can auto-build |
| Scheduler | EventBridge Scheduler / AWS Batch | Cron jobs → EventBridge or Batch |
| Logging (Logplex) | CloudWatch Logs + FireLens | Route logs to S3/Elasticsearch/Kinesis |
| Metrics & APM | CloudWatch Metrics + AWS X-Ray | Distributed tracing + custom metrics |
| Config Vars | SSM Parameter Store / Secrets Mgr | Secure, encrypted secrets |
| SSL & Domains | ACM + ALB + Route 53 | Managed certs + DNS |
| Shield Private Space | VPC + compliance tooling | Native AWS compliance at fraction of the cost |
This isn't a theory. It's repeatable migration engineering.
The Bottom Line
Heroku was designed to help you launch fast. But at scale, its hidden stack becomes a liability: expensive compliance add-ons, skyrocketing costs with poor visibility, limited observability, and constrained service options.
That's why companies like Uniphore, a global leader in conversational AI, eventually moved off Heroku and into AWS. With DuploCloud, they were able to complete migration in weeks, achieve enterprise-grade compliance without the premium pricing, and unlock the full flexibility of AWS.
If your business is still on Heroku, the real question is not whether you should migrate, but how much it's already costing you to stay. Between Shield's thousand-dollar monthly minimums and 2x infrastructure costs, the migration pays for itself quickly.
Ready to see what your AWS migration could look like? Let's talk about turning your Heroku constraints into competitive advantages.
