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Comment by hk1337 | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean it as discouragement but, at least for me, I would choose Heroku or Netlify because I don't want to self host it. I want someone else to manage all those bits for me.

It's good experience building the app though and good to have alternatives available.

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I’m glad that the age of platform decay and VC backed companies that these OSS alternatives exist to counter this destructive trend of extraction based vendor lock in.

Vercel, Netlify and Heroku will inevitably not exist in 10-20 years but Coolify will, humming along on a regular VPS.

Heroku has been around for ~17 years at this point. Why do you think it disappears in the next 10?

Because Salesforce decides it’s not profitable enough to be worth it, or they want to close Heroku off to Salesforce customers, or any number of other reasons

Right, it should say that Heroku has already disappeared.

It's still there but feels like something different from what it once was.

I work there. We are still around. Maybe not making waves as much as we used to but still hacking on stuff.

Right now I’m in the progress of rolling out a new platform powered by Cloud Native Buildpacks that allow you to build an OCI image locally. Here’s some language specific getting started (local) tutorials https://github.com/heroku/buildpacks#heroku-cloud-native-bui...

Sweet. I know. I even have the $5/mo plan just to keep https://anigram.herokuapp.com/ online :)

Nice to hear about the buildpacks. I use Containerfiles but since switching to Podman and Fedora/RockyLinux I've seen stuff about OpenShift which supports buildpacks. https://github.com/sclorg/s2i-base-container/

Migration to fly.io is simple enough ... it is much closer to the original Heroku both technically and as company (if you ever need to contact them)

For me the heroku database and heroku add-ons were essential, if I was going to use Heroku. Without that I may as well use a IaaS.

Because it was acquired by Salesforce.

And that happened 15 years ago

I mean obviously we're not really privy to market share but I'd say they've had a pretty massive decline in say the past 5 years or so.

As long as you "own" the domain name yourself, so can point anywhere, what's the problem with using a platform and expecting to have to move someday?

Money, I suppose? Heroku is notoriously trivial to use, and notoriously expensive for the amount of storage and compute you get.

A semi-successful but not heavily monetized side project on Heroku could cost you an arm and a leg, while running the same thing on some Hetzner box under Dokku, along with a couple of others, may be not that much noticeable.

That's great. I didn't mean any discouragement as much as to say, I would probably not promote its self hosting ability as much. Promote that it's open source and keep working on it because I am sure you'll learn a lot about the field space. If it comes down to it that Heroku, Netlify, Vercel, and all other PaaS companies are gone, I will most likely just do a VPS or server just for my app than launch my own PaaS.

tl;dr if I am looking for a PaaS, I don't care that it's self hostable. I don't want to host it, that's why I am looking.

A good way to promote that it's open source is to describe it as being self hostable and have a get starting page that quickly says how to self host it.

As for user experience, Vercel has a lot of UX talent but it hasn't been a great user experience for me. I had a glitch on their end that prevented the dashboard from loading for me and it took over a week to resolve, and transferring a domain out turned out to be a manual process. Meanwhile I have had great user experiences with spartan open source projects.

The point is the UX is identical with Coolify on a cheap VPS compared to overpriced Heroku/Netlify/Vercel.

Just comparing exact performance and price and features.

A blank linux VPS has a different UI/UX.

Why does it seem like you're deliberately misunderstanding? Do you work for a platform?

I feel like you got lost in my example/rambling that I probably shouldn't have said like that.

If I am a user looking for some place to host my application, I do not care that one service can be self hosted. I have already made my decision that I am going to host it somewhere else, so I am not going self host the PaaS just to host my application myself.

It can still be self hostable, just put it in the developer documentation and not necessarily promoting it so much on the main page.

I use (and love) Heroku in my day job, but when experimenting with Hetzner servers (and the like), it’s nice to have a GUI/framework like Coolify to manage the servers in a similar manner.

> I would choose Heroku or Netlify because I don't want to self host it

Why are people so afraid to self-host? It's usually cheaper and runs better than the hosted services. Get a cheap dedicated server from Hetzner, and you can run all your services there. Servers tend to keep working (usually longer than those cloud services do).

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