Why I built Clever Deploy

I built Clever Deploy because every time I wanted to ship a small side project, the deploy story turned into a project of its own.

The two problems I kept hitting

1. Surprise bills. I'd push a side project to a "free tier"
platform, forget about it, and three months later get a $40 invoice
because something I didn't fully understand auto-scaled, or a build
ran 200 times, or bandwidth crossed a line I didn't know existed.
The pricing pages all looked simple. The actual bills never were.

2. Complexity. I've setup Jenkins in Kubernetes for clients - believe me, you don't want that kind of complexity.

What I wanted was simplicity and no unexpected bills.

What Clever Deploy is

A deploy platform with two rules:

• Click Deploy, pick a repo, get a live HTTPS URL. The defaults are right for 95% of projects, and you can override them later if you're in the 5%.
• Pricing you can predict before you click. A flat number. No metered surprises hiding behind "fair use" footnotes. If a project is going to cost you money, you know exactly how much, before it's running.

That's the entire pitch. Everything else — the build pipeline, the
TLS automation, the subdomain routing, the GitHub App integration —
is plumbing in service of those two promises.

Why now

Hosting has gotten better and cheaper every year for a decade. The
ergonomics of hosting have not. The big platforms keep adding
features for the top 1% of users (edge functions, regional
replication, AI gateways) and quietly making the on-ramp harder for
everyone else.

I wanted the deploy experience I had in 2018 with Heroku free dynos, without the 2022 ending where the free dynos got turned off and nobody had a good answer for the small-project niche.

Where I'm at

Clever Deploy works end-to-end live: GitHub auth, build pipeline, live deploys, build logs, an admin dashboard. However, it's not open to the public yet - I'm letting people in from the waitlist as I shake out edge cases.

If predictable costs and one-click deploys sound like your kind of
boring, I'd love to get your feedback on it. Sign up at the waitlist at https://cleverdeploy.com/ and I'll make sure you get 50% off your first year if you decide to use us for real.

— Wasim