DEV Community

Cover image for Self-hosted alternative to Heroku - Ptah.sh
Bohdan Shulha
Bohdan Shulha

Posted on

1

Self-hosted alternative to Heroku - Ptah.sh

Hi there. :)

I am building a fair source alternative to Heroku / DigitalOcean AppPlatform.

GitHub: https://github.com/ptah-sh/ptah-server
WebSite: Ptah.sh

Creation Story

Back in 2020, my friend Andrii approached me with a proposal to start a new small startup — an esports statistics website. Knowing that Andrii is a master of strategic thinking, I had no doubt that the project wouldn’t take off, so I immediately agreed. We met at a restaurant where I, having watched too many Silicon Valley movies, drew the initial service architecture on a napkin. Overall, this says a lot about what we knew about the IT business in general at that time. :)

Throughout the history of running this website, I migrated between different clouds several times — from Heroku, through AWS, to DigitalOcean. Sometimes the reason was performance, sometimes cost, sometimes both.

Tired of constantly configuring everything and influenced by the #buildinpublic community on X (formerly Twitter), I decided to formalize my knowledge and skills in the form of a convenient (at least for me) service that would help me launch new subsystems for this project more easily.

As a result, we managed to save 82% of the monthly budget ($3.5k yearly) that we were using only for servers and databases.

If you like to see all-in-one video introduction, here’s the recording on YouTube!

Demo

More?

If you have any questions-suggestions, please don't hesitate to comment the post or follow me on X.

P.S.

I'm building a launch site for indie/solo devs. Subscribe for a launch :)

Image of Timescale

🚀 pgai Vectorizer: SQLAlchemy and LiteLLM Make Vector Search Simple

We built pgai Vectorizer to simplify embedding management for AI applications—without needing a separate database or complex infrastructure. Since launch, developers have created over 3,000 vectorizers on Timescale Cloud, with many more self-hosted.

Read more →

Top comments (0)

Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.

A Workflow Copilot. Tailored to You.

Pieces.app image

Our desktop app, with its intelligent copilot, streamlines coding by generating snippets, extracting code from screenshots, and accelerating problem-solving.

Read the docs