Vercel charges $20/seat/month.
Netlify charges $20/month.
Heroku killed its free tier entirely.
And if you go over your bandwidth? Surprise bills. Sometimes thousands of dollars.
There is an open-source alternative to all three. For $0.
It is called Coolify. 53,000+ stars on GitHub.
You install it on any server you own. A $5 VPS. A Raspberry Pi. An old laptop. Anything with SSH.
Then you deploy everything:
- Static sites
- Full-stack apps
- Databases
- APIs
- 280+ one-click services (WordPress, Ghost, Plausible, n8n, Supabase, and more)
Here’s the wildest part:
It does things the paid platforms charge extra for.
- Free SSL certificates, auto-renewed
- Automatic database backups to S3
- Pull request preview deployments
- Real-time server terminal in your browser
- Push-to-deploy from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket
- Server monitoring with Discord/Telegram/email alerts
No vendor lock-in. All your configs live on your server. If you stop using Coolify, everything still runs.
The $20/month you pay Vercel? That is per seat. A 5-person team pays $100-500/month depending on usage.
With Coolify on a $5 Hetzner VPS, that same team pays $5/month. Total.
Apache-2.0 licensed. Self-hosted. Free forever.
100% Open Source
Repo
https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify
