Tried it for a bit. Paid one month of the subscription.
The dashboard is incredibly clunky and at the time they didn't have SSL for db connections (not sure about now). A lot of stuff you need to know what you're doing like configuring tags for Traefik etc.
The deal breaker was it didn't have zero downtime deploys. Any pending request when you update an app is simply killed.
I was expecting something like Heroku or Vercel but this ain't it.
Ended up concluding that if I wanted to run/deploy apps on my own VPS I'd just use Kamal or Dokku. Both have zero downtime deploys, certbot, proxy, etc.
W6zVktFA 3 minutes ago [-]
Coolify unfortunately didn't click with me, and I had a bad experience with a Redis database, so I stopped using it.
I would recommend Elestio (eles[dot]io) as an alternative which isn't open source, or self-hostable, but met my primary goal of drastically reducing cloud costs. And you can bring your own cloud/server, though I'm choosing to also rent from Hetzner through Elestio.
I'm running two redis databases on machines with 3 cpus, 4gb ram, and 80gb storage for about $80 total (the machines are billed hourly, but you get the max monthly bill up front).
amanzi 2 hours ago [-]
I've been using Coolify for about a year now and have been very happy with it. It's really low maintenance, it has built in backups for your apps and databases, decent security by default, and is super easy to use. I log into the underlying VMs once per month to do an apt update/upgrade, and that's about it.
ffsm8 55 minutes ago [-]
Btw, did you know about unattended upgrades?
Just curious as the stated reason for the stated reason would become almost unnecessary with that
Remember all those horror stories about ridiculous bills from public cloud providers? I also got $4.5k bill once for simple mistake on AWS.
So I decided to build Vercel for your own servers - DollarDeploy, which manages servers and deploys NextJS apps (without docker) and docker compose configs to your server. We don't have self hosted or open source but cloud version starts from $1/mo
52-6F-62 3 hours ago [-]
Now is a good time to sell licenses around the world.
Edit: just noticed you are in Finland. You might be exactly what I’ve been looking for lately
hk1337 4 hours ago [-]
I don't mean it as discouragement but, at least for me, I would choose Heroku or Netlify because I don't want to self host it. I want someone else to manage all those bits for me.
It's good experience building the app though and good to have alternatives available.
TheTaytay 53 minutes ago [-]
I use (and love) Heroku in my day job, but when experimenting with Hetzner servers (and the like), it’s nice to have a GUI/framework like Coolify to manage the servers in a similar manner.
colesantiago 4 hours ago [-]
I’m glad that the age of platform decay and VC backed companies that these OSS alternatives exist to counter this destructive trend of extraction based vendor lock in.
Vercel, Netlify and Heroku will inevitably not exist in 10-20 years but Coolify will, humming along on a regular VPS.
jbaber 4 hours ago [-]
As long as you "own" the domain name yourself, so can point anywhere, what's the problem with using a platform and expecting to have to move someday?
glenngillen 4 hours ago [-]
Heroku has been around for ~17 years at this point. Why do you think it disappears in the next 10?
anamexis 4 hours ago [-]
Because Salesforce decides it’s not profitable enough to be worth it, or they want to close Heroku off to Salesforce customers, or any number of other reasons
benatkin 2 hours ago [-]
Right, it should say that Heroku has already disappeared.
It's still there but feels like something different from what it once was.
schneems 58 minutes ago [-]
I work there. We are still around. Maybe not making waves as much as we used to but still hacking on stuff.
Right now I’m in the progress of rolling out a new platform powered by Cloud Native Buildpacks that allow you to build an OCI image locally. Here’s some language specific getting started (local) tutorials https://github.com/heroku/buildpacks#heroku-cloud-native-bui...
Nice to hear about the buildpacks. I use Containerfiles but since switching to Podman and Fedora/RockyLinux I've seen stuff about OpenShift which supports buildpacks. https://github.com/sclorg/s2i-base-container/
matt-p 4 hours ago [-]
I mean obviously we're not really privy to market share but I'd say they've had a pretty massive decline in say the past 5 years or so.
hk1337 4 hours ago [-]
That's great. I didn't mean any discouragement as much as to say, I would probably not promote its self hosting ability as much. Promote that it's open source and keep working on it because I am sure you'll learn a lot about the field space. If it comes down to it that Heroku, Netlify, Vercel, and all other PaaS companies are gone, I will most likely just do a VPS or server just for my app than launch my own PaaS.
tl;dr if I am looking for a PaaS, I don't care that it's self hostable. I don't want to host it, that's why I am looking.
benatkin 2 hours ago [-]
A good way to promote that it's open source is to describe it as being self hostable and have a get starting page that quickly says how to self host it.
As for user experience, Vercel has a lot of UX talent but it hasn't been a great user experience for me. I had a glitch on their end that prevented the dashboard from loading for me and it took over a week to resolve, and transferring a domain out turned out to be a manual process. Meanwhile I have had great user experiences with spartan open source projects.
bofadeez 3 hours ago [-]
The point is the UX is identical with Coolify on a cheap VPS compared to overpriced Heroku/Netlify/Vercel.
Just comparing exact performance and price and features.
A blank linux VPS has a different UI/UX.
Why does it seem like you're deliberately misunderstanding? Do you work for a platform?
hk1337 3 hours ago [-]
I feel like you got lost in my example/rambling that I probably shouldn't have said like that.
If I am a user looking for some place to host my application, I do not care that one service can be self hosted. I have already made my decision that I am going to host it somewhere else, so I am not going self host the PaaS just to host my application myself.
It can still be self hostable, just put it in the developer documentation and not necessarily promoting it so much on the main page.
Most of these projects are maintained by a single maintainer; for business critical apps look elsewhere.
networked 2 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the links.
I didn't know about SwiftWave.
I have a page with a comparison table of self-hosted PaaS on my site: https://dbohdan.com/self-hosted-paas.
It only covers options that don't use Kubernetes.
I have just added SwiftWave.
whydid 2 hours ago [-]
Because businesses always support their software better than individuals?
cchance 2 hours ago [-]
The amount of random 1 man opensource projects holding up industries is shocking XD
sublinear 2 hours ago [-]
It's worse for corporate private source projects. Often the docs are lacking and it's essentially a 0-man project.
dv_dt 2 hours ago [-]
0 man + one accounts dept
edoceo 2 hours ago [-]
Bus factor maybe? Which is mitigated by good community/contributors
icelancer 33 minutes ago [-]
Had a bunch of problems trying to host / run this on an internal-only network.
maelito 4 hours ago [-]
Also checkout Dokploy. Incredible to leave Vercel.
aaomidi 1 hours ago [-]
I've been fascinated by how little developers know how to take a service they have, and make it accessible on something like their home network.
It's honestly a shocker to me. There's so much knowledge about the stack that gets lost with these services.
dan_can_code 4 hours ago [-]
Very cool options here. I'm always looking for options to throw something on a spare raspberry pi and this looks like a great tool to self-host.
ezekg 4 hours ago [-]
Does this project make its money via the cloud offering, or via sponsors? It's kind of unclear.
kikki 4 hours ago [-]
Both - but primary the cloud offering. The main author (https://x.com/heyandras) is pretty open about the project revenue its sources. If I remember correctly they're at about 10k MRR mostly from Coolify Cloud.
I appreciate the caution - and although they're close in spelling, I'd wager coolify is recognized by the majority as adding the suffix 'ify' to 'cool' rather than the term you've highlighted.
dkkergoog 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rob 2 hours ago [-]
Well then, luckily the name is "Coolify" and not "Coolie."
0xbadcafebee 4 hours ago [-]
As usual, a weird lets-try-to-get-paid-for-open-source SaaS that doesn't tell you how it actually works.
After some digging, apparently it's a PHP frontend that you run with Docker Compose on a VPC. That PHP app will do a lot of stuff for you (like run builds, deploys, set up web servers, etc), presumably through a host mount to Docker (but maybe not?). If they really put a lot of effort into the functions here, this could really handle a lot of manual work for you, which is nice.
But the thing it doesn't do are things like... maintenance on the VPC you're running it on (EOL distros, security patches, backups, etc), or whatever servers you add to it. There's no staff to manage things like nodes going down. And unless it also has cloud integrations, you'll have to do things like add servers/storage/etc yourself.
If I want to self-host, I'd probably rather set all this stuff up myself, so that I actually know what went into it and can fix it if it gets broken. If Coolify stops working, now I have to dig into how Coolify works to try to fix Coolify. I've gotten to the point in my life where I'd rather pay someone else for all this. Hence the point of Heroku, Netlify, Vercel, etc.
I wish there were still just 2000s era CGI-BIN shared web hosters that charged you $15/month to take care of everything. I just want to FTP my python files over and hit reload in my browser, drop a .htaccess file to control the web server. SQLite would work perfectly as a MySQL/Postgres replacement. edit Ah, they still have them, fantastic!!! https://www.free-webhosts.com/free-cgi-web-hosting.php (those are free ad-supported hosters but they always have paid plans too)
matt-p 3 hours ago [-]
Firstly I think it's a little impolite to frame a opensource project trying to find a sustainable funding model as "weird", whatever your concerns this is still much better than closed source.
I don't think the number of people who want to FTP stuff is very high anymore, we are all storing our code in git and therefore want to deploy on a commit or tag. We probably care about SSL, maybe we need to build our code before it can be deployed and so on.
Sleepful 6 minutes ago [-]
This is true for any self-host OSS project. You are pointing at the grass and warning people that it is green.
slig 3 hours ago [-]
I believe that Opalstack is what you're looking for. I've used their service for a while.
The dashboard is incredibly clunky and at the time they didn't have SSL for db connections (not sure about now). A lot of stuff you need to know what you're doing like configuring tags for Traefik etc.
The deal breaker was it didn't have zero downtime deploys. Any pending request when you update an app is simply killed.
I was expecting something like Heroku or Vercel but this ain't it.
Ended up concluding that if I wanted to run/deploy apps on my own VPS I'd just use Kamal or Dokku. Both have zero downtime deploys, certbot, proxy, etc.
I would recommend Elestio (eles[dot]io) as an alternative which isn't open source, or self-hostable, but met my primary goal of drastically reducing cloud costs. And you can bring your own cloud/server, though I'm choosing to also rent from Hetzner through Elestio.
I'm running two redis databases on machines with 3 cpus, 4gb ram, and 80gb storage for about $80 total (the machines are billed hourly, but you get the max monthly bill up front).
Just curious as the stated reason for the stated reason would become almost unnecessary with that
https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades
So I decided to build Vercel for your own servers - DollarDeploy, which manages servers and deploys NextJS apps (without docker) and docker compose configs to your server. We don't have self hosted or open source but cloud version starts from $1/mo
Edit: just noticed you are in Finland. You might be exactly what I’ve been looking for lately
It's good experience building the app though and good to have alternatives available.
Vercel, Netlify and Heroku will inevitably not exist in 10-20 years but Coolify will, humming along on a regular VPS.
It's still there but feels like something different from what it once was.
Right now I’m in the progress of rolling out a new platform powered by Cloud Native Buildpacks that allow you to build an OCI image locally. Here’s some language specific getting started (local) tutorials https://github.com/heroku/buildpacks#heroku-cloud-native-bui...
Nice to hear about the buildpacks. I use Containerfiles but since switching to Podman and Fedora/RockyLinux I've seen stuff about OpenShift which supports buildpacks. https://github.com/sclorg/s2i-base-container/
tl;dr if I am looking for a PaaS, I don't care that it's self hostable. I don't want to host it, that's why I am looking.
As for user experience, Vercel has a lot of UX talent but it hasn't been a great user experience for me. I had a glitch on their end that prevented the dashboard from loading for me and it took over a week to resolve, and transferring a domain out turned out to be a manual process. Meanwhile I have had great user experiences with spartan open source projects.
Just comparing exact performance and price and features.
A blank linux VPS has a different UI/UX.
Why does it seem like you're deliberately misunderstanding? Do you work for a platform?
If I am a user looking for some place to host my application, I do not care that one service can be self hosted. I have already made my decision that I am going to host it somewhere else, so I am not going self host the PaaS just to host my application myself.
It can still be self hostable, just put it in the developer documentation and not necessarily promoting it so much on the main page.
K8S-based -
https://github.com/cozystack/cozystack
https://github.com/kubero-dev/kubero
https://github.com/pluralsh/plural
DCR-based -
https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify
https://github.com/dokku/dokku/
https://github.com/Dokploy/dokploy
https://github.com/swiftwave-org/swiftwave
Most of these projects are maintained by a single maintainer; for business critical apps look elsewhere.
I have a page with a comparison table of self-hosted PaaS on my site: https://dbohdan.com/self-hosted-paas. It only covers options that don't use Kubernetes. I have just added SwiftWave.
It's honestly a shocker to me. There's so much knowledge about the stack that gets lost with these services.
Edit: Latest "post" (xeet?) https://mobile.x.com/heyandras/status/1901894087604916396 I could find about revenue
After some digging, apparently it's a PHP frontend that you run with Docker Compose on a VPC. That PHP app will do a lot of stuff for you (like run builds, deploys, set up web servers, etc), presumably through a host mount to Docker (but maybe not?). If they really put a lot of effort into the functions here, this could really handle a lot of manual work for you, which is nice.
But the thing it doesn't do are things like... maintenance on the VPC you're running it on (EOL distros, security patches, backups, etc), or whatever servers you add to it. There's no staff to manage things like nodes going down. And unless it also has cloud integrations, you'll have to do things like add servers/storage/etc yourself.
If I want to self-host, I'd probably rather set all this stuff up myself, so that I actually know what went into it and can fix it if it gets broken. If Coolify stops working, now I have to dig into how Coolify works to try to fix Coolify. I've gotten to the point in my life where I'd rather pay someone else for all this. Hence the point of Heroku, Netlify, Vercel, etc.
I wish there were still just 2000s era CGI-BIN shared web hosters that charged you $15/month to take care of everything. I just want to FTP my python files over and hit reload in my browser, drop a .htaccess file to control the web server. SQLite would work perfectly as a MySQL/Postgres replacement. edit Ah, they still have them, fantastic!!! https://www.free-webhosts.com/free-cgi-web-hosting.php (those are free ad-supported hosters but they always have paid plans too)
I don't think the number of people who want to FTP stuff is very high anymore, we are all storing our code in git and therefore want to deploy on a commit or tag. We probably care about SSL, maybe we need to build our code before it can be deployed and so on.