[HN Gopher] Coolify: Open-source and self-hostable Heroku / Netl...
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Coolify: Open-source and self-hostable Heroku / Netlify / Vercel
alternative
Author : vanschelven
Score : 40 points
Date : 2025-04-02 12:41 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (coolify.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (coolify.io)
| dan_can_code wrote:
| Very cool options here. I'm always looking for options to throw
| something on a spare raspberry pi and this looks like a great
| tool to self-host.
| interestica wrote:
| Just as a word of caution: the word "coolie" (and it's varied
| spellings, including "cooli") is a racial slur.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coolie
| tabarnacle wrote:
| I appreciate the caution - and although they're close in
| spelling, I'd wager coolify is recognized by the majority as
| adding the suffix 'ify' to 'cool' rather than the term you've
| highlighted.
| hk1337 wrote:
| I don't mean it as discouragement but, at least for me, I would
| choose Heroku or Netlify because I don't want to self host it. I
| want someone else to manage all those bits for me.
|
| It's good experience building the app though and good to have
| alternatives available.
| colesantiago wrote:
| I'm glad that the age of platform decay and VC backed companies
| that these OSS alternatives exist to counter this destructive
| trend of extraction based vendor lock in.
|
| Vercel, Netlify and Heroku will inevitably not exist in 10-20
| years but Coolify will, humming along on a regular VPS.
| jbaber wrote:
| As long as you "own" the domain name yourself, so can point
| anywhere, what's the problem with using a platform and
| expecting to have to move someday?
| glenngillen wrote:
| Heroku has been around for ~17 years at this point. Why do
| you think it disappears in the next 10?
| anamexis wrote:
| Because Salesforce decides it's not profitable enough to be
| worth it, or they want to close Heroku off to Salesforce
| customers, or any number of other reasons
| matt-p wrote:
| I mean obviously we're not really privy to market share but
| I'd say they've had a pretty massive decline in say the
| past 5 years or so.
| hk1337 wrote:
| That's great. I didn't mean any discouragement as much as to
| say, I would probably not promote its self hosting ability as
| much. Promote that it's open source and keep working on it
| because I am sure you'll learn a lot about the field space.
| If it comes down to it that Heroku, Netlify, Vercel, and all
| other PaaS companies are gone, I will most likely just do a
| VPS or server just for my app than launch my own PaaS.
|
| tl;dr if I am looking for a PaaS, I don't care that it's self
| hostable. I don't want to host it, that's why I am looking.
| bofadeez wrote:
| The point is the UX is identical with Coolify on a cheap
| VPS compared to overpriced Heroku/Netlify/Vercel.
|
| Just comparing exact performance and price and features.
|
| A blank linux VPS has a different UI/UX.
|
| Why does it seem like you're deliberately misunderstanding?
| Do you work for a platform?
| hk1337 wrote:
| I feel like you got lost in my example/rambling that I
| probably shouldn't have said like that.
|
| If I am a user looking for some place to host my
| application, I do not care that one service can be self
| hosted. I have already made my decision that I am going
| to host it somewhere else, so I am not going self host
| the PaaS just to host my application myself.
|
| It can still be self hostable, just put it in the
| developer documentation and not necessarily promoting it
| so much on the main page.
| ezekg wrote:
| Does this project make its money via the cloud offering, or via
| sponsors? It's kind of unclear.
| kikki wrote:
| Both - but primary the cloud offering. The main author
| (https://x.com/heyandras) is pretty open about the project
| revenue its sources. If I remember correctly they're at about
| 10k MRR mostly from Coolify Cloud.
|
| Edit: Latest "post" (xeet?)
| https://mobile.x.com/heyandras/status/1901894087604916396 I
| could find about revenue
| cedel2k1 wrote:
| Love my Coolify Setup!
| maelito wrote:
| Also checkout Dokploy. Incredible to leave Vercel.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| As usual, a weird lets-try-to-get-paid-for-open-source SaaS that
| doesn't tell you how it actually works.
|
| After some digging, apparently it's a PHP frontend that you run
| with Docker Compose on a VPC. That PHP app will do a lot of stuff
| for you (like run builds, deploys, set up web servers, etc),
| presumably through a host mount to Docker (but maybe not?). If
| they really put a lot of effort into the functions here, this
| could really handle a lot of manual work for you, which is nice.
|
| But the thing it doesn't do are things like... maintenance on the
| VPC you're running it on (EOL distros, security patches, backups,
| etc), or whatever servers you add to it. There's no staff to
| manage things like nodes going down. And unless it also has cloud
| integrations, you'll have to do things like add
| servers/storage/etc yourself.
|
| If I want to self-host, I'd probably rather set all this stuff up
| myself, so that I actually know what went into it and can fix it
| if it gets broken. If Coolify stops working, now I have to dig
| into how Coolify works to try to fix Coolify. I've gotten to the
| point in my life where I'd rather pay someone else for all this.
| Hence the point of Heroku, Netlify, Vercel, etc.
|
| I wish there were still just 2000s era CGI-BIN shared web hosters
| that charged you $15/month to take care of everything. I just
| want to FTP my python files over and hit reload in my browser,
| drop a .htaccess file to control the web server. SQLite would
| work perfectly as a MySQL/Postgres replacement. _edit_ Ah, they
| still have them, fantastic!!! https://www.free-webhosts.com/free-
| cgi-web-hosting.php (those are free ad-supported hosters but they
| always have paid plans too)
| slig wrote:
| I believe that Opalstack is what you're looking for. I've used
| their service for a while.
| matt-p wrote:
| I don't think the number of people who want to FTP stuff is
| very high anymore, we are all storing our code in git and want
| to deploy on a commit or tag. We probably care about SSL, maybe
| we need to build our code before it can be deployed and so on.
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