Coolify Has a Free Self-Hosted PaaS — Deploy Apps, Databases, and Services Like Heroku on Your Own Server

A friend ran three apps on Heroku at $25/month each. After they killed the free tier, he was paying $75/month for hobby projects. I told him about Coolify. Now he runs all three apps plus PostgreSQL, Redis, and a monitoring stack on a single $5 VPS. Coolify gives him the same git-push-deploy workflow Heroku had — on hardware he controls. What You Get Free Coolify is open-source (Apache 2.0). Self-host on any VPS: Git-push deploys — connect GitHub/GitLab, auto-deploy on push Docker-based — any Dockerized app works out of the box Built-in databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis one-click setup SSL/TLS — automatic Let's Encrypt certificates Reverse proxy — Traefik or Caddy, auto-configured Multiple servers — manage fleet from one dashboard Backups — scheduled database backups to S3/MinIO Monitoring — built-in metrics and logs Webhooks — trigger deploys from any CI/CD Environment variables — managed per app, per environment Preview deployments — branch-based previews like Ve