Coolify

Coolify is an open-source, self-hostable Platform-as-a-Service that reproduces the deploy experience of Heroku, Vercel, or Railway on infrastructure you own and control. It follows a bring-your-own-server model: point Coolify at any SSH-accessible Ubuntu or Debian machine (a Hetzner, DigitalOcean, or Hostinger VPS, bare metal, a homelab box, or even a Raspberry Pi) and it installs itself and takes over deployment, build, and routing duties for that server.

Once connected, Coolify handles the parts of self-hosting that are normally manual: it builds and deploys applications from a connected Git repository (via Nixpacks, Dockerfile, or Docker Compose), provisions databases, issues and renews Let's Encrypt SSL certificates automatically, and gives every deployment a dashboard for logs, environment variables, and health checks. Beyond custom applications, Coolify ships with a library of 280+ one-click services — things like Plausible, Uptime Kuma, Supabase, n8n, and Vaultwarden — that can be spun up on the same server with a single click, similar to a self-hosted app-store layer on top of Docker.

Coolify is explicitly not a hosting provider itself: it has no compute of its own and does not compete with VPS or cloud providers. It is software installed on top of a server you already have, turning raw compute into a managed-feeling deployment target. This makes it a natural companion to budget VPS providers rather than an alternative to them — a common pattern is Coolify running on a single Hetzner or DigitalOcean instance to self-host an indie project's full stack (app, database, and a handful of internal tools) for the price of one VPS instead of several PaaS subscriptions.

The self-hosted version is fully open source (Apache 2.0) and free with no feature gating. Coolify Cloud, a managed dashboard hosted by the Coolify team that still deploys to the user's own connected servers, is available as a paid convenience option.