The Top 5 Reasons Why Organizations Choose HeroDevs for Never-Ending Support

End-of-life open source software traps enterprises in a no-win situation: spend tens of thousands of dollars per application on migrations and rewrites, or run unpatched software and risk compliance violations and cyberattacks. 

Over the past five years, over a thousand organizations, from financial services to healthcare to government, chose a third option: HeroDevs' Never-Ending Support (NES), a commercially supported path that keeps end-of-life open source software secure and compliant without forced migrations.

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Why Open Source Projects Stop Patching

When a vulnerability is discovered in open source software, the original project faces a decision: what versions to fix beyond the commitment to the latest and long-term support (LTS) versions. Is there time and resources to patch older versions? Most open source projects focus resources on supported releases. This is rational; maintenance burden increases exponentially with each version, and teams must balance security patching with new features and performance improvements. From a project sustainability perspective, declaring end-of-life is the right choice. But it leaves organizations with a problem: security patches stop, yet the software remains in production, sometimes for years.

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The Acceleration of Vulnerability Discovery

AI-assisted security tools helped identify, in 2025 alone, 48,185 CVEs, reflecting a 263% increase since 2020. Many more are being discovered and disclosed in 2026. Yet the labor capacity to analyze, triage, validate, and patch has not scaled accordingly, much less for legacy versions. 

Finding flaws and proposing fixes with AI models costs a fraction of the engineering effort required to validate, refine, test, and release a patch. For legacy open source software where the upstream project has reached end-of-life (EOL), whether it is AngularJS 1.8, Spring Framework 5.3, Spring Boot 3.5, .NET 6, jQuery 3.x, Vue 2.x, or many others, this creates a dangerous gap.

A newly discovered vulnerability in your EOL open source software could surface with no guarantee that the original project will backport a fix, and there’s no timeline for when one might appear. 

We’ll now review the top five factors that shaped the organization's decision to choose HeroDevs NES for their EOL open source software.

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1. Professional Expertise Commitment

HeroDevs operates differently. Vulnerability fixes come with documented turnaround SLAs mapped to severity with contractual guarantees. This is applicable to all EOL open source software in the NES portfolio, which includes AngularJS, Angular, Spring, Node.js, .NET, jQuery, Bootstrap, Vue, and 30+ more. 

The vulnerability discovery, back porting fixes across earlier versions, and security patches are built by engineers who specialize in the open source software they support. The HeroDevs engineering team is composed of experienced open source contributors and maintainers. Many of HeroDevs’ engineers have been core contributors to the very projects they support. They understand the architecture, the design decisions, and the historical context. You are getting a master watchmaker who can handcraft the gears, not a retail jeweler who follows the service manual. 

For instance, just recently the HeroDevs security research team uncovered a vulnerability in AngularJS, which has been EOL for years. As a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA), HeroDevs coordinated responsible disclosure of  CVE‑2026‑11998 with the CVE Program; no one in the world had discovered that, and HeroDevs now has a patch to address it. Many more examples are available, including the availability of patches for the surge of Spring CVEs, 67 in June alone; no other organization is keeping up with patching vulnerabilities in EOL software.

Notably, HeroDevs partners with open source foundations and maintainers. It operates a $20 million open source sustainability fund, providing grants ranging from $2,500 to $250,000 to open source projects that need financial support for maintenance, community building, and long-term viability. Your NES investment directly supports a company that puts resources back into the open source ecosystem for the continued development of open source technologies.

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2. Zero-Friction Drop-in Deployments

HeroDevs NES distributions can be used by apps in only a few seconds that take to update configurations to source from NES versions.  For AngularJS, Angular, Vue and other JavaScript applications, update the package.json file and install with npm. For Spring applications, swap the dependency in your Maven or Gradle configuration. For others, integrate the NES patched library the way you originally did. The same build configurations, CI/CD pipelines, and containerized deployments work without modification.

,Switching to a NES version is like replacing a light bulb. The socket, wiring, and switch all remain untouched. You simply screw in a new one in seconds, a seamless transition without disrupting operations.

Clear and complete documentation is available, and critically, all NES distributions are delivered from HeroDevs' secure, hardened registry infrastructure. Every patch is cryptographically signed and tamper-proof. Your software supply chain remains protected end-to-end. 

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3. Meet Compliance Requirements Immediately

Security scanning tools (Snyk, Sonatype, Mend, JFrog, BackDuck, etc.) do not distinguish between "abandoned" and "waiting for a volunteer patch." They flag package versions and disclosed CVEs. In the eyes of compliance standards, frameworks, or regulations like PCI DSS, SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, EU CRA (with a key deadline in September 2026), DORA, NIS2 Directive, among others, unpatched vulnerabilities fail compliance and have serious financial consequences. Internal security policies also require supported and patched software.

Whether you're a financial services firm managing 50 legacy apps, a mid-size retailer running a single critical AngularJS system, or a company of any size with customers or government security requirements, NES can close your compliance gaps immediately. 

Organizations that adopt HeroDevs NES install commercially supported, actively patched versions of their EOL open source as drop-in replacements. Scanners and pen tests stop flagging CVE alerts. The compliance finding closes, and audits move forward. For organizations that first need visibility into which components are affected, the free End-of-Life Dataset (EOL DS) tool scans a codebase and identifies unsupported open source dependencies.

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4. Security Risk Reduction for Business Continuity

There is a hidden cost embedded in every migration: the engineering sprint cost of major-version refactoring, testing, and production validation. For instance, a typical enterprise-scale migration from AngularJS 1.x to Angular 19+, or Spring Boot  2 to 3, consumes thousands of hours in engineering labor per application. Migrations also introduce regression risk. Teams working under deadline pressure are more likely to discover bugs in production. Production incidents from hasty upgrades could cost tens of thousands in lost revenue and emergency response labor.

HeroDevs NES eliminates the forced migration deadline. Instead of being pressured by an EOL event, organizations sequence their open source software upgrades on their own schedule, based on business priorities. 

The financial case is straightforward: a single year of HeroDevs NES for EOL open source software costs a fraction of one emergency engineering sprint. NES pays for itself on the first application and buys the organization strategic control over when and how the remaining applications transition without disrupting business continuity.

“We were caught in the classic technology dilemma – spend valuable engineering time updating a legacy system we were already planning to replace, or accept increasing security risk. Neither option aligned with our business objectives. … [With NES] we maintained our security posture without compromising our strategic roadmap, all while achieving substantial cost savings.”

Statista

Markus Wolf, Architect

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The Risk of Vulnerability Exploitation

A single unfixed vulnerability is an active door left open for threat actors. Modern cyberattacks rarely depend on a single exploit; attackers chain vulnerabilities of all severity levels together to escalate privileges, move laterally across systems, and establish persistent access deep within an organization's infrastructure. 

Threat actors exfiltrate customer data, encrypt critical systems for ransom, or both. The financial impact could be catastrophic: a 2025 IBM study found that the average cost of a data breach in the United States reached a record $10.22 million, and while organizations are increasingly declining to pay ransom (63%), the average cost of extortion or ransomware incident remains high. 

:Financial damage only captures part of the story. Regulatory fines, for example, GDPR violations can reach €20 million or 4 percent of global annual revenue, HIPAA penalties can exceed $2.1 per violation category annually, and PCI DSS non-compliance can ultimately result in losing the ability to process card payments. Beyond fines, there are customer lawsuits and class action litigation. The reputational damage can be permanent: a brand associated with a major breach struggles to regain customer confidence for years, if ever. 

For most organizations, the economic case for staying on unpatched EOL open source is not even close: the expected cost of a breach far exceeds the cost of either upgrading to a supported version or deploying HeroDevs NES before attackers can exploit it and disrupt business continuity.

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5. Trust in HeroDevs The Company Behind Never-Ending Support

HeroDevs is backed by serious institutional investors and proven financial discipline. Together with engineering depth, it has the stability to be there when new vulnerabilities are disclosed.

In 2025, HeroDevs announced $125 million in strategic growth investment from PSG, a leading growth equity firm that specializes in partnering with software and technology-enabled services companies to capitalize on transformational growth. That capital has funded rapid growth: the team added experienced open source contributors and experienced professionals across all business functions. The NES portfolio spans thirty-plus open source technologies, and the customer base has grown to serve over thousands of organizations globally, including nearly a third of the Fortune 100.

More importantly for customers' security and compliance concerns, HeroDevs operates with security as a first-class requirement. The company maintains SOC 2 Type II certification and operates a bug bounty program with HackerOne. Security patches from HeroDevs are delivered through hardened, cryptographically signed registries with full integrity verification.

HeroDevs' financial stability, security certifications, first-rate customer success team, complete documentation, and engineering depth provide the assurance to customers that NES will be there not just next year, but for as long as your legacy open source software remains in production. Never-ending support really means indefinite support without scheduled end dates. 

Think of your EOL open source software like a vintage car. The original manufacturer stopped making parts, but HeroDevs is the ultimate engineer/mechanic with the expertise and tools to keep it running safely. You can drive that car for as long as you want. 

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“By leveraging HeroDevs’ extended support, we were able to mitigate security risks, continue safe operation of the legacy application, and gain valuable time to plan a more sustainable long-term migration strategy — all without compromising on client experience or regulatory requirements.”

Sanlam Private Wealth

Financial services

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Secure Your Organization Today

Don’t wait for the next audit or worse, a cyberattack. Vulnerability discovery is accelerating, not decelerating. Each quarter you delay is more CVEs risked. Explore HeroDevs NES, some of our case studies or contact our team to start patching EOL software in hours, not months. 

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Frequently Asked Questions

Which open source frameworks does HeroDevs NES cover?

HeroDevs provides Never-Ending Support for AngularJS, Angular, Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Node.js, Express, .NET, jQuery, Bootstrap, Vue 2, and 20+ other frameworks. Visit our product catalog to see the complete list of supported frameworks and versions.

Can I deploy HeroDevs NES without modifying my application code?

Yes. NES packages are drop-in replacements that preserve the exact public API of the original framework. For AngularJS, update your npm dependency. For Spring, swap the Maven or Gradle dependency. For jQuery or Bootstrap, use the patched version as you did the original. No code changes required.

What happens to my NES distribution if a vulnerability is never discovered in my specific version?

NES remains active and ready. You continue to receive proactive monitoring, updates to HeroDevs' hardened registries, and access to patches the moment a vulnerability is identified. We all sleep better knowing the coverage exists.

Do I have to migrate my applications off legacy frameworks eventually?

Not necessarily. HeroDevs NES allows you to keep legacy frameworks in production indefinitely, while the business prioritizes which applications to upgrade and when. Many organizations continue running legacy frameworks with NES for years, upgrading only when business value aligns with technical work.