COOLIFY : THE DEPLOYMENT ARBITRAGE RECLAIMING STARTUP RUNWAY FROM VERCEL

Modern startups prioritize speed, often utilizing managed platforms like Vercel for their ease of use. However, these platforms can come with significant infrastructure markups as they scale. Vercel's pricing includes high per-user fees and expensive bandwidth and compute charges. This presents an opportunity to save money through self-hosting. Startups can achieve similar speed and convenience by moving to a self-hosted stack. This involves using open-source tools like Coolify and Nixpacks on their own hardware. Coolify is a user-friendly platform as a service and Nixpacks automates application builds. Startups can deploy on cost-effective VPS providers like Hetzner or DigitalOcean. Installing Coolify is simple and it integrates with GitHub for automated deployments. Coolify also manages databases and backups, including support for S3-compatible storage. Security is handled automatically with SSL certificates and Caddy for basic authentication. A team of ten can save over $190 per month by switching to a self-hosted solution.