Two things pushed us into it. The first is the bill. Not the price, the surprise. The second is that every self-hosted alternative we tried assumes you enjoy debugging a compose file at midnight. We don't. So we built the one we wanted to use.
Talking more precisely, Deplo is an open source platform you install on your own server. Connect a repo, pick a server, and it builds it, runs it, puts it behind a domain, gets the certificate and keeps it alive. The rule we set ourselves is that you never need Docker knowledge, SSH or hand-edited YAML to get full value out of it. The shell is there as an escape hatch if you want it, never as a requirement.
What's in it today:
Deploy without Docker, SSH or YAML - connect a repo, pick a server, and you're live
Share servers across teams, with granular control over who can deploy where
