Let me tell you a story.
Last year, my team's Vercel Pro bill hit $1,200/year for five users — and that was before bandwidth overages. Meanwhile, a side project on Heroku's Eco dynos quietly burned through $600/year for ten basic apps. We weren't running a data center. We were deploying a few Next.js apps and a couple of Node APIs.
Sound familiar?
Managed PaaS platforms made sense when infrastructure was scary. In 2026, that equation has flipped. A $6–14/month VPS from Hetzner or DigitalOcean can host a dozen containerized apps, and open-source PaaS tools have closed the UX gap so well that the deployment experience is nearly indistinguishable from Vercel or Netlify.
Here are the best self-hosted alternatives I've evaluated — and which one fits your workflow.
