Dokku Has a Free PaaS — Your Own Heroku on a $5 VPS

Dokku is a self-hosted PaaS — deploy apps with git push, just like Heroku, on your own server.

What You Get for Free

• Git push deploy — git push dokku main = deployed
• Buildpacks — auto-detect language (Node, Python, Go, Ruby, etc.)
• Docker support — deploy any Dockerfile
• SSL — automatic Let's Encrypt certificates
• Databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB plugins
• Domains — custom domains with automatic routing
• Zero-downtime deploys — blue-green deployment built-in
• Process management — scale with dokku ps:scale app web=2
• App management — dokku apps:create, dokku config:set

Quick Start

# On your VPS (Ubuntu)
wget https://dokku.com/install.sh
sudo bash install.sh

# On your laptop
git remote add dokku dokku@your-server:my-app
git push dokku main
# App deployed with SSL at https://my-app.your-domain.com

Why Developers Switch from Heroku

Heroku's free tier is dead and paid plans start at $7/dyno:

• $5/month — run 5-10 apps on one VPS
• No vendor lock-in — your server, your data
• Git push deploy — same Heroku workflow
• Unlimited apps — limited only by server resources

A developer paid $35/month for 5 Heroku dynos. After Dokku on a $6/month DigitalOcean droplet: same 5 apps, same git push workflow, 83% cost reduction.

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