How I Handle Deployments and CI/CD for a $5/Month Production App

Running a production app with ~10,000 active users on a $5/month VPS sounds impossible. But it's not, if you're smart about your tooling. Here's my entire deployment setup: from code commit to production, backend to mobile OTA updates, and how I handle rollbacks when things break. Spoiler: I didn't compromise on automation. I just stopped paying for things I could self-host. The Stack Infrastructure: $5/month VPS (2 vCPU, 4GB RAM + swap memory) GitHub (free tier) Dokploy (self-hosted, free) Xavia OTA (self-hosted, open source) MongoDB Atlas (free tier) Cloudflare R2 (free tier) Total monthly cost: $5. That's it. Backend Deployment: Dokploy Does Everything I used to manually SSH into my VPS, pull code, restart services, and pray nothing broke. Now I use Dokploy —a self-hosted alternative to platforms like Railway or Render. What Dokploy does: Listens for commits on my GitHub repo Automatically builds the NestJS backend Deploys with zero-downtime (spins up new instance, switches traffic,