heroku dev center

Heroku Beta Features

Last Updated: 03 January 2014

beta

Table of Contents

What does beta mean?

Heroku believes that obtaining customer feedback during development is critical to developing products that our customers love. As part of our development lifecycle, we will periodically release new features to customers for their feedback and testing. Any features marked beta are intended as early access for use in non-production environments. Use of beta features means that you agree to provide testing and feedback of these features to help Heroku improve our product.

Because we believe strongly in this process, we have also mandated that all add-on providers wishing to release new add-ons must follow the same process.

A stack, language or feature may all be beta separately. For example it’s possible to have a beta language on a released stack.

Beta features and add-ons do not guarantee their interfaces. This means that developers doing active development may find that versions & APIs change during the beta process, potentially breaking their application if they do not stay on top of the changes.

Billing

Heroku features

Heroku features that are in beta are charged normally unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Add-ons beta

During Beta, all add-ons are free. During beta only the test plan is available. Once an add-on comes out of beta, new plans will be introduced and existing beta users will be required to migrate to one of the new plans. In some cases this may require manual migration of data. This will be dependent on the individual add-on provider.

How long will it be in beta?

A product or feature will leave beta status and become fully released when we have complete confidence in its readiness for broad production use. The duration of the beta phase depends on how quickly beta developers adopt the feature and how many changes are required to address issues.

While we make no commitments about timeline, Heroku features have typically spent 2 - 6 months in public beta before going to GA.

Private beta

New features from Heroku are first released into a private beta, before entering the public beta described above. The private beta program is a small set of users who commit to providing feedback in the form of direct comments, surveys, and user testing. If you would like to participate in this beta, and are willing to commit to providing helpful feedback and testing new features as they are released, please apply here. Include an explanation of why you would make a good beta tester, and what features you are interested in.