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Aparna Pradhan
Aparna Pradhan

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COOLIFY : THE DEPLOYMENT ARBITRAGE RECLAIMING STARTUP RUNWAY FROM VERCEL

#vercel #coolify #selfhost #hetzner

For modern startups, speed is a survival mechanism. This need for speed has fueled the rise of managed platforms like Vercel, which offer a developer experience that is undeniably smooth. However, as teams scale, they often encounter the deployment arbitrage: the realization that managed convenience comes with a massive infrastructure markup. By shifting from managed platforms to a self-hosted stack using Coolify on private bare metal, startups can achieve the same push-to-deploy magic while slashing their monthly burn.

# THE VERCEL TRAP UNDERSTANDING THE PLATFORM MARKUP
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Vercel operates less like a simple host and more like a high-interest bank for your infrastructure. Their pricing model combines fixed monthly fees with granular, usage-based overages that can lead to unexpected bills as a project gains traction.

# THE PER-SEAT PENALTY
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On the Vercel Pro plan, startups are charged 20 dollars per month per user. While Vercel introduced free viewer seats for those who only need to see previews, any developer who needs to build, deploy, or update settings still incurs the 20 dollar fee. For a team of 10 developers, this is a 200 dollar monthly baseline before a single line of code is served to a customer.

# THE BANDWIDTH AND COMPUTE MARKUP
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Vercel includes 1 terabyte of bandwidth on the Pro plan, but overages are billed at 0.15 dollars per gigabyte. In contrast, a VPS provider like Hetzner offers 20 terabytes of inclusive traffic on its cloud servers, with additional bandwidth costing roughly 1.20 dollars per terabyte—a markup of over 100 times on the Vercel side. Additionally, Vercel charges for active CPU time at 5 dollars per additional hour and 0.40 dollars per million function invocations.

# THE ARBITRAGE STACK COOLIFY NIXPACKS AND BARE METAL
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To execute the arbitrage, startups are moving to an open-source platform as a service stack that mimics the managed experience on their own hardware.

# COOLIFY THE SELF-HOSTED ENGINE
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Coolify is an open-source, Docker-based platform as a service that acts as a user-friendly interface for managing applications and databases. It is free forever for self-hosters and includes all upcoming features without a paywall. For teams that prefer a managed control plane, Coolify Cloud costs just 5 dollars per month to connect two servers.

# NIXPACKS THE BUILD MAGIC
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The secret to replicating the Vercel experience is Nixpacks, an open-source project created by Railway. Nixpacks analyzes source code and automatically figures out how to build and containerize it, eliminating the need for manual Dockerfiles. It supports major frameworks like Next.js, Python, and Go.

# INFRASTRUCTURE COST SAVINGS
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Startups can own the entire CPU on high-performance VPS providers:

  • Hetzner CX23: 2 vCPU and 4 gigabytes of RAM for approximately 4.08 dollars per month.
  • DigitalOcean Droplets: Efficient virtual machines starting at 4 dollars per month. 
# STEP BY STEP DEPLOYMENT GUIDE
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Provisioning a production-ready server requires minimal effort using the following steps.

# 1 INSTALLATION
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On a fresh Ubuntu 24.04 server, the Coolify control plane is installed with a single command run as the root user:

curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash
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Once finished, the dashboard is accessible at port 8000 of your server IP.

# 2 GIT INTEGRATION AND AUTOMATION
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Coolify integrates directly with GitHub via a GitHub App. Once connected, it receives webhooks on every commit, automatically triggering a Nixpacks build and redeploy. You can customize build phases using a nixpacks.toml file in your repository:

[phases.setup]
nixPkgs = ["...", "ffmpeg"]

[phases.build]
cmds = ["echo building!", "npm run build"]

[start]
cmd = "npm run start"
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# 3 DATABASE MANAGEMENT AND BACKUPS
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Coolify provides one-click deployments for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis. It supports automated backups to S3-compatible storage like AWS S3 or MinIO.

# Manual PostgreSQL Backup Command
pg_dump --format=custom --no-acl --no-owner --username <username> <databaseName>
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# 4 ADVANCED SECURITY WITH CADDY
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Coolify handles SSL certificates automatically via Let is Encrypt. To protect internal tools, you can use Caddy basic authentication with hashed passwords:

# Generate a hashed password using Caddy in Docker
docker run --rm caddy caddy hash-password --pass mysecretpassword
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# BENCHMARKING THE SAVINGS FOR A TEAM OF 10
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For a startup with 10 developers and 1 terabyte of monthly traffic:

  • Vercel Pro: 200 dollars per month in seat fees plus usage costs.
  • Coolify plus Hetzner: 4.08 dollars for a CX23 server plus 5 dollars for optional Coolify Cloud.
  • Total Savings: Over 190 dollars per month, or 2,280 dollars per year . 
# THE FINAL ANALOGY
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Using Vercel is like staying in a luxury hotel where you are charged for every extra towel, every guest you bring to your room, and a premium for the water in the minibar . Self-hosting with Coolify is like owning a high-tech smart home on your own land. While you are responsible for occasional server maintenance, you have total privacy, unlimited guests, and no monthly bill for the right to walk through your own front door .

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