It helps that you separate sustaining engineering from a shutdown and point out that the October update still shipped Postgres 18 and Cloud Native Buildpacks. A lot of the panic in team chats comes from reading "maintenance mode" as "shutdown".

The heroku-22 date is the most useful part for teams who were not planning to act. If the stack upgrade in April 2027 already means touching the build and dependencies, it is worth deciding now whether to do that work once on a new platform, or twice.

When teams ask Ascendra Ventures about moves like this, we try to scope it as one job with a clear finish line: the app running on the target with the same behaviour, a rehearsed rollback, and the old platform switched off. Without that finish line, migrations tend to stay half done for months.

For apps that score low on the checklist, would you still recommend running a copy elsewhere just to know the cost?