Alternatives
Products that do what ZaneOps, a self-hosted alternative to Vercel, Heroku and Render does
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
- 1AO
2021 · coollabs.io
- 2

- 3MN
Hi guys, I've created an open source web builder framework (https://grapesjs.com) years ago, which I'm still maintaining, and now I'm excited to publish a side project based on it, Grapedrop (https://grapedrop.com). It's a simple web page builder which allows you to design and publish your web pages very quickly. The project is still in beta with a lot of stuff to improve but I'd really like to share it and hear what people think about it and maybe also get some constructive feedback.
2018
- 4HS
2023 · github.com
- 5HA
2017 · hasura.io
- 6AO
2020 · repobus.com
- 7

- 8SS
2020 · git.mysticmode.org
- 9AS
This is a proof of concept utility which allows you to expose local services to the internet at large: https://github.com/skx/tunneller In short it is a simple ngrok alternative, which you can self-host. Because it is a proof of concept it hasn't been tested extensively, but it seems like it will solve my immediate-needs. Of course it needs test, and structure added. But feedback can't hurt :)
2019
- 10AS
Hi! I am sharing this because it may be useful to others. I created a simple Docker image that lets you easily expose a web app running locally on your dev machine to the Internet, via a proxy server. It is a self hosted alternative to something like Ngrok, which is a paid service if you use custom domains. A small server is cheaper than Ngrok (I use Hetzner Cloud and the cheapest server costs me 3€ per month). I use this method in particular to test HTTP verification with Let's Encrypt for a SaaS app running on my Mac. Hope this is useful :) Code:…
2019
- 11IM
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
- 12IG
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
- 13HI
This is based on an approach I made for a very high performance message and video multiplexing server. The project died, but I'm glad I get to share the a basic version with some http test code now. I admit this is the second time I've tried to show this off here today; I posted earlier but it got lost when no-one was watching :(
2011 · github.com
- 14AP
Some folks at Tokyo just launched a Heroku alternative PaaS based on Docker containers called moCloud, what do you think? https://mocloud.io
2015
- 15

Hello Hacker News, this is Ashish. We started building Stackdome in 2024 as a hobby project. The idea was to package the tooling in the CNCF/cloud-native ecosystem into an opinionated platform, so that developers can get a well engineered platform without learning Kubernetes YAMLology or a dozen other projects from the CNCF landscape. Railway and Render did this well for their hosted products. I wanted to bring that level of polish and DX to something you can self-host. Stackdome uses Kubernetes underneath, but it's completely transparent to users. (I have some ideas for an expert mode…
25d ago · stackdome.com
- 16IM
2020 · thiicket.com
- 17SD
Hey HN! We're a small team of developers who, like many of you, love the power and convenience of Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) platforms. However, we've also felt the sting of vendor lock-in, wrestled with the complexities of self-hosting feature-rich open-source alternatives, and worried about unpredictable costs or the sudden disappearance of free tiers that many indie devs and small projects rely on. We believe developers deserve more control and simplicity without sacrificing functionality. After countless hours spent navigating these challenges, we decided to build the solution we wished…
2025 · selfdb.io
- 18IB
2015 · statusdeck.com
- 19IM
I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.
2024 · github.com
- 20IB
Recently moved all of my apps to a $4/mo VPS using Coolify Saved tons of $$, and can self-host my Ghost/Wordpress/Postgres instances etc. Built a tool to help others do the same
2024 · indiehost.io
- 21IL
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
- 22WO
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
- 23OP
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
- 24ZA
A while ago I started this side project to test if I could build a rich User Interface that would have about the same level of responsiveness than a "SPA-like" app, but using only htmx[1]... I still have plenty of stuff in my roadmap, but today it's in a playable state and I thought it could be interesting to share it - as it may be a nice demonstration of a relatively rich user interface powered by htmx :-) --> https://zakuchess.com As for the stack: it's built mostly with Django, htmx and Tailwind CSS. It uses a SQLite database, and is hosted (for free) at Fly. The characters'…
2024 · zakuchess.com
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