All 100 ideasServers and DevOps
#76 of 100 · Servers and DevOps
Your own Vercel on your servers
An open-source Heroku or Netlify that deploys on git push to their own servers or cloud account and moves between providers.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay10%
- Want it local or private40%
- Object to subscriptions0%
- Want it open source or self-hosted70%
- Want AI to do it0%
Share of the 10 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Built, still asked for24 Show HN launches do this job, and 7 more do part of it. People still ask, so the launches are missed, unknown, or not what they want. Ask what they’re missing before you build.
- An open-source, self-hostable Heroku and Netlify alternative2021 · 345 pts
- Canine – A Heroku alternative built on Kubernetes2025 · 320 pts
- Coolify v2 – Open-source and self-hostable Heroku/Netlify alternative2022 · 158 pts
- PullPreview – Deploy previews for any application, on your servers2020 · 83 pts
- Open-source Railway, Render alternative running on Kubernetes clusters2024 · 50 pts
- Appwrite Sites – the open-source vercel alternative2025 · 44 pts
- Mist – a lightweight, self-hosted PaaS2026 · 14 pts
- Open-source alternative to Vercel, Render, Netlify2026 · 12 pts
Instead of: Heroku, Vercel, Netlify, AWS
The idea, as matched
An open-source, self-hostable Heroku/Netlify/Vercel-style platform that deploys apps on git push with preview environments and domains, on your own servers or cloud account, portable across providers.
Jev first matched 18 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 10 of 18.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Preview environments rarely mentioned.
- Dec 2025Wants an open-source container hosting system that fails over across providers, like the Vercel AI SDK for containers. Read it: a comment in “Cloudflare was down”
- Feb 2024Wants a self-hostable Netlify to run on cheap providers like Hetzner. Read it: a comment in “Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site”
- Oct 2023Wants an open-source DigitalOcean App Platform alternative for Hetzner with git-push deploys and domain handling. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Is there an open source alternative to Digitalocean app platform?”
- Apr 2022Wants a Heroku-like CLI, pipelines and review apps built on top of standard AWS services. Read it: a comment in “Why companies move off Heroku (besides the cost)”
- Jan 2021Wants a simple host for Docker containers, exposing a few ports, without AWS networking and permission complexity. Read it: a comment in “Launch HN: Seed (YC W21) – A Fully-Managed CI/CD Pipeline for Serverless”
- Oct 2019Wants an open-source Netlify alternative with automation for a Hugo site. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: Open-Source Alternative to Netlify”
- Jun 2019Wants a lighter alternative to Dokku for small sites on a droplet, ideally with a dashboard. Read it: a post: “A Better Alternative to Dokku?”
- Jun 2014Wants a Heroku alternative that makes launching services easy. Read it: a comment in “Goodbye Heroku”
- May 2013Wants a near fully Heroku-compatible open-source platform that runs on their own cloud. Read it: a comment in “Why I left Heroku, and notes on my new AWS setup”
- May 2011Wants an open-source or licensable Heroku-like platform for private internal use, and could find budget. Read it: a comment in “The future is DotCloud”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.