Judoscale: One-Click Autoscaling for any hosting platform ✨

Howdy, Judoscalers! It’s that time of the month again… a fresh new edition of your favorite tiny-dev-team newsletter. 100% human (and 25% unhinged). The Judoscale News!!

We hope everyone’s had a wonderful start to their 2026 and, like us, you’re beginning to see inklings of spring weather appearing ☀️. Some interesting happenings in the meantime:

• 🟣⚠️ Heroku’s Ominous Blog Post
• 📝 Heroku: What’s Next?
• 🏟️ Judoscale’s Going on Tour?
• 🔢 PaaS Pricing Calculator Updated
• ➡️ Heroku Add-On to Direct-Account Migration Tool
• 📝 Choosing the Right Node.js Job Queue

Plenty to cover, let’s dive in!

🟣⚠️ Heroku’s Ominous Blog Post

In case you missed it, Heroku’s CPO (I don’t know what that means) dropped a surprise post on the Heroku blog a few weeks ago, ominously titled “An Update on Heroku”. It’s only a few paragraphs, contains some nonsensical verbiage (what does “sustaining engineering model” even mean?), and feels pretty hand-wavy, but our general takeaway is that Salesforce has decided to put Heroku into maintenance mode. With reports that they also laid off their entire enterprise sales team, trimmed down the engineering teams, and have canned their development roadmap, it’s been a surprising month indeed.

If that sounds alarming, hold that thought. We’ve got much more to share here!

📝 Heroku: What’s Next?

The good news following the above announcement is that your friendly neighborhood Judoscale team has your back. We’ve written up some pragmatic thoughts on that post, the urgency around it all, and what we believe it means for you (and us!). I’ll give you a key from the article here as a preview, though, “Heroku is not dying today, tomorrow, next month, or next year.” And that itself means something! Brew yourself a nice cup of tea and read all about it here:

🏟️ Judoscale is Going on Tour

As noted at the bottom of our article 👆, this isn’t going to be a musical tour of our wonderful kazoo music… this is a whole different type of tour. Essentially, for the sake of truly feeling out how the migration process and DX of living on each non-Heroku platform feels, we’re going to ‘go on tour’ and try each of them. A full migration, all of our actual production services, our whole production app — the whole shebang. A 3,000+ RPS production Rails app that needs to have near-zero downtime across the whole process. And we’re going to document all of that in a forthcoming series for you, dear reader!

Adam asked what particular things you want to know about the platforms we’re going to move to. If you have questions, opinions, or features that you find important on Heroku that you want to see on other platforms, drop a comment here:

🔢 PaaS Pricing Calculator Updated

Did you know we have a neat calculator that can tell you roughly how much you can expect to spend for the same application services across various hosts? We do! And it’s been updated! In line with a lot of the chatter around migrating off of Heroku, we added Amazon ECS Fargate, updated the Railway pricing accordingly, and factored in the logic behind Fly.io’s CPU time slicing that we’ve since learned about!

https://judoscale.com/tools/paas-pricing-calculator

➡️ Heroku Add-On to Direct-Account Migration Tool

After reading our “Heroku: What’s Next?” from above, you might be less worried about migrating to a new host. That’s great! But while you remain on Heroku, you might as well save a little cash in the meantime 😁. We recently created a direct-billing option for our Heroku-based customers which offers lower monthly subscription rates with no catch. Same service. Same Judoscale. Fewer dollars! We also now have a simple migration tool that can move your add-on-style account to direct-billing with ease. Check it out here:

📝 Choosing the Right Node.js Job Queue

Modern webapps almost always need a background job system — Node apps included. But choosing the right job queueing system isn’t always obvious or straightforward. There are several options, several generations of options, and many confusing details. Jeff took some time to break down a few concrete choices in his latest article: BullMQ, Bee-Queue, Agenda, and bigger message-broker setups like RabbitMQ and SQS. If you’re curious about how those various options land in terms of reliability, scaling, DX, and workflow, this is the article for you:

And that’ll do it for us this month! Hope everyone out there has a lovely weekend and gets some sunny, warm weather ☀️

— Jon & The Judoscale Team