DEV Community

Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

Posted on

Coolify Has a Free Self-Hosted Heroku Alternative — Deploy Apps Without Vendor Lock-in

#devops #cloud #selfhosted #opensource

A developer was paying $50/month on Heroku for 3 small apps. Then Heroku killed free dynos.

The PaaS Tax

Heroku, Railway, Render - easy but expensive: $5-25 per app per month.

Coolify is a free, self-hosted PaaS with Heroku-like deployment on YOUR server.

What Coolify Offers for Free

  • Git Push Deploy - Connect GitHub/GitLab, push to deploy
  • Docker and Compose - Deploy any Dockerized app
  • Buildpacks - Auto-detect Node.js, Python, Go, Ruby, PHP, Rust
  • Free SSL - Automatic Let us Encrypt certificates
  • Database One-Click - PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis
  • Preview Deployments - PR previews like Vercel

Quick Start 

curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Cost Comparison

Setup Monthly Cost
Heroku (3 apps) $21-75
Coolify + VPS $5-10

GitHub: coollabs/coolify - 35K+ stars

Need to monitor and scrape data from multiple web services automatically? I build custom scraping solutions. Check out my web scraping toolkit or email me at spinov001@gmail.com for a tailored solution.

Top comments (0)