Coolify Has a Free Self-Hosted Platform — Here's How to Deploy Apps Without Paying for Vercel

A solo developer told me: 'I had 3 Next.js apps on Vercel. My bill hit $120/month for hobby projects. I moved everything to a $5 VPS with Coolify. Same auto-deploy, same HTTPS, $5/month total.' What Coolify Offers Coolify is a self-hosted, open-source Vercel/Netlify/Heroku alternative: Deploy anything — Node.js, Python, Go, Rust, Docker, static sites Git push to deploy — automatic deployments from GitHub/GitLab Free HTTPS — automatic Let's Encrypt certificates One-click databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, MariaDB Reverse proxy — Traefik built in API — manage everything programmatically Docker Compose support — deploy complex stacks Runs on any VPS — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, etc. Quick Start # Install on any Ubuntu/Debian VPS curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash # Access dashboard at http://YOUR_IP:8000 Deploy a Next.js App Connect your GitHub repo in Coolify dashboard Coolify auto-detects Next.js Set environment variables Click Deploy Push to main → aut