Alternatives
Products that do what better-paas does
Deploy like Vercel but full-stack applications + databases.
- 1IO
Hi HN, I'm Mohammed, a technical founder who loves shipping and giving back to the community. I'm open-sourcing the full-stack engine that powers my B2B product, apflow.co. What it is: A production B2B starter with a Go backend and Next.js frontend. Both are fully Dockerized with separate containers. No Vercel. No Supabase. Deploy the whole thing on a $6 VPS, or split frontend and backend across different providers. You own the infrastructure. The problem I was solving: Every SaaS starter I evaluated had the same issue: they locked me into someone else's platform. Vercel for hosting.…
Dec 2025 · github.com
- 2
- 3SV
Hi HN, I've been waiting to post what I've been working on for a few weeks now:) Today we're launching LayerVault, which is a version control system made for designers. The URL is http://www.layervault.com LayerVault keeps track of what you're working on without adding extra steps to your process. The app runs in your toolbar and tracks changes you make to your files. Basically — each time you create or modify a file you’re working on, LayerVault saves a copy. You can then login, flip through its versions, and download a version from a few weeks ago. It's pretty neat — and we’ve built some…
2011
- 4IV
For the last several years I've been creating a ERP platform, Stockor. While I'm going to continue offering it as a SaaS, I've decided to also open-source it. I'm hopeful that by doing so it will: 1) Grow it into a Wordpress size juggernaut with a plugin for any business process under the sun. 2) Bring me interesting consulting gigs. The open-source site is at stockor.org. There's a demo up at stockor.com/demo as well. Looking forward to hearing HN's thoughts!
2014
- 5CL
Hey people! I have been compiling a database of opensource alternatives and I'm super proud of it so far. It serves as a searchable directory for high-quality opensource. After tons of hours I've managed to compile a database of 1000+ opensource software. I've seen other sites which have the same premise and all the GitHub Awesome Lists, but they lack in showing if the repo is active, abandoned, experimental, buggy/unstable, has a restrictive license or corporate influence like this does. Thanks for your time, if you have any recommendations for features/additions I'd love to hear.
Feb 2026 · opensrc.me
- 6IG
Hey HN, For years, my local development setup has been a fragile mess of tools that never quite played nicely together. On my mac, it was a constant battle with Homebrew services starting (or not starting) on boot, conflicting PHP and Node versions managed by `asdf` or `nvm`, and a collection of `docker-compose.yml` files that I'd copy-paste and tweak for every single project. The cognitive load was just too high. Setting up SSL was another chore involving `mkcert`. Sharing a quick demo with a colleague meant firing up ngrok. And if I wanted to run two projects that needed different versions…
Oct 2025 · servbay.com
- 7IM
Been using it for about a year now in production, but rewrote it completely in golang. My first go project so far. I wanted to have something that would make my life easier. A lot of tools nowaday kinda push you towards functional deployments and that usually doesn't work for me since I like stuff like LiveView by Phoenix and Websocket stuff in general. Old vercel deployments back when they allowed to deploy docker containers was a godsend, but since they don't offer that anymore I had to use services like fly.io(which is amazing) or heroku. However I wanted something selfhosted that I could…
2024 · deploywithjig.askh.at
- 8OS
I got tired of collecting open source projects in my chrome bookmarks so I decided to compile a curated list of: - Recently active projects on GitHub - Mostly dev tools (but also productivity, analytics) - Projects which are "Alternative to X software" My bookmarks are finally empty:D If you have a great open source tool you use, I'd be glad to hear your suggestions. Also, any feedback is greatly appreciated.
2025 · alternativeoss.com
- 9IB
There are plenty of ways to deploy your apps. PaaS options like Vercel or Netlify are convenient but can get pricey as projects scale. VPS hosting is cheaper, but setting it up (Linux, networking, SSL, etc.) can be daunting. That’s why glueh-wyy-huet (https://github.com/glueh-wyy-huet) and I (https://github.com/biersoeckli) built QuickStack during our bachelor studies at Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences. QuickStack simplifies deployment by letting you deploy directly from a Git repo or Docker registry to any VPS. It’s free, open source, and…
2025 · quickstack.dev
- 10OP
Hey HN, I posted Out Plane here last week. Wanted to share an update because I've been shipping a lot. I started this because deploying side projects was killing my motivation. Build something fun over a weekend, then waste two days on Dockerfiles, nginx, and SSL. So I built what I wanted — connect GitHub, push code, get a URL. Done. Since December I've added managed PostgreSQL, managed Redis with RedisInsight built in, Dockerfile auto-detection that pre-fills your config, real-time metrics, and scale to zero — no traffic means no bill. Per-second pricing, not hourly. Same Next.js + Postgres…
Feb 2026 · outplane.com
- 11IB
I got sick of: - Re-writing the same Terraform for the same common AWS infrastructure - Re-writing the same Rails code to build the same webapp - Re-configuring the same monitoring systems & CI/CD pipelines - Spending a week in dependency & configuration hell wiring it all together When I was launching my first two startups, I wished I had a strong starting point with all of the best practices & technology configured out-of-the-box. Every tool I found wanted to lock me in to some PaaS provider (that might not even exist in a year) who wanted to take a premium on my infrastructure spend…
2024
- 12WW
Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community
2016
- 13WB
Hi HN. Today we released Dagster Cloud to general availability [1], which includes a new feature you can try that we're calling Branch Deployments. Branch Deployments were inspired by Vercel's Preview Deployments feature and deep GitHub integration. We're hoping we can bring a similar developer experience improvement to the data domain. Let us know your feedback! [1] https://dagster.io/blog/dagster-cloud-ga-launch
2022 · twitter.com
- 14IM
Hello everyone. I'm a relatively new developer and I started my first project to go full production recently. It is a directory of payment processors and payment service providers. It's free to use and gives detailed info on their pricing, business model, supported business types, available countries, prohibited businesses and high risk business support. So far only 40 have been added with more to come. And I allow processors to contact me so that they're details can be added to the database. I'll eventually automate this and add verification the months to come. I hope you'll find it useful.…
2025 · sourcefees.com
- 15IM
Hey HN, When I was learning to code I was always intrigued to see the guys on twitter making money with a SaaS. I always wondered how to make them and after a few months I developed my own. I wanted to share a Boilerplate for any new devs who are wondering how to start their own SaaS or wonder how things work. Boilerplate comes with Auth, Payments, UI and all the good stuff. Ali
2024 · github.com
- 16IL
My name is Elliott. For the last three years, I’ve been building a DevOps platform on the best-in-class open source platforms (Kubernetes, Elixir, PostgreSQL, Grafana, etc.). The goal is to give engineering teams access to a modern DevOps infrastructure without needing to have a full SRE/DevOps team dedicated. It’s also open source /fair source - all the source code is here → https://github.com/batteries-included/batteries-included I shipped a public beta today and would love to hear initial reactions, thoughts, and feedback. Here are details of the platform: *…
2024 · batteriesincl.com
- 17IJ
.env files have always felt archaic, insecure, clunky and honestly just not fun to work with. I see my friends (and myself) accidentally committing them all the time. Managing secrets across projects becomes a mess of copy-pasting keys into scattered env files with no real way to sync anything. So I built better-env: a secure, developer-friendly alternative to .env. Store your secrets once in a global encrypted store, and load them per-project at runtime. I’d love feedback on whether this feels useful beyond solo devs, and what you’d want for teams or CI setups. Fully open source:…
Nov 2025 · better-env.dev
- 18
- 19WO
I built it for myself because ngrok didn't let me add one more domain unless I paid $12 more. I probably should've looked for alternatives before building my own, but my grudge got in the way . Once I started, I wanted to make it better than the other options. Silly, I know. No one probably cares. I plan to open source it sometime next year because I’ve got other projects to finish first. It's free until I deplete my cloud credits, then it will switch to a tier-based model with a free option.
Oct 2025 · wsgrok.com
- 20WJ
We've been having a hard time getting feedback on our docs. Some people post GitHub issues or send us pull requests, but we've heard that the friction is too great for little things like typos, etc. We thought Vercel's preview might be a decent solution to lower the friction for people with Vercel accounts. Vercel injects a code bundle into the site, similar to a browser extension, automatically setting up a commenting system and UI for us. If you want to see how it looks, check it out here: https://docs.plasmo.com/
2022
- 21HO
Hi HN! Ben here from hyprsqrl, and I just open-sourced something we’ve been quietly running in production: *hyprsqrl is a self-hostable bank. Think Revolut (if you know it), but every line of code is MIT/AGPL, you can run it on your own box, and the crypto bits stay hidden under the hood. --- ### Why we built it Moving money between USD and EUR still means wire fees, surprise freezes, and “call your bank” hoops. Fintechs like Revolut help—until their pricing changes or a regulator knocks. hyprsqrl aims for the resilience of self-hosting *without* forcing users to study crypto. Two…
2025 · github.com
- 22IB
I built a minimal opensource CMS, I use it myself for my blog and for other SaaS. l love blogging, and sometimes I post random thoughts on my blog. The only thing is, I always did it with .md files, which is fine too However, I was excited about the idea of using a CMS that was very minimal and avoiding the option of connecting something like WordPress or other big platforms. Open source (if you want to fork it or contribute) and free to use (unless I see you have a million views haha). Star the repo if you like it!
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 23IB
Hey everyone! My name is Will. I’ve been leading engineering teams for over two decades. Also, first time HN user here! One of the common pains I’d encounter in nearly every product I managed was alerting end users to infrequent events like outages, global announcements, beta launches, planned maintenance, etc. We’d always need to deploy custom, one-off modals or other alerts and then have to remember to revert them later. It was always a time sink for a developer to put aside what they were working on to make this happen. This Is Not A Drill! is a simple-to-install JS SDK that makes it…
2024
- 24ZA
As a self-hoster myself, I've been missing some of the nicer features for other PaaS and wanted to have them for my own side projects, so i set out to build a custom platform as a service that is self-hosted. Today after a whole year of working on it and using it for all my projects, I put out an initial stable version for the project for everyone to try. website link : https://zaneops.dev repo link : https://github.com/zane-ops/zane-ops (PS: yes, the website for zaneops is hosted on zaneops) Would love to hear your thoughts
2025 · zaneops.dev
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