Canine – A Heroku alternative built on Kubernetes
Hello HN! I've been working on Canine for about a year now. It started when I was sick of paying the overhead of using stuff like Heroku, Render, Fly, etc to host some web apps that I've built. At one point I was paying over $400 a month for hosting these in the cloud. Last year I moved all my stuff to Hetzner. For a 4GB machine, the cost of various providers: Heroku = $260 Fly.io = $65 Render = $85 Hetzner = $4 (This problem gets a lot worse when you need > 4GB) The only downside of using Hetzner is that there isn’t a super straightforward way to do stuff like: - DNS management / SSL…
In plain words
Canine is a Kubernetes-based platform that provides Heroku-like deployment features for bare metal servers, significantly reducing hosting costs. It handles DNS management, SSL certificates, team access, and GitHub integration on affordable infrastructure like Hetzner, where a 4GB machine costs $4 monthly compared to $260 on Heroku. The tool is designed for developers who want simplified application hosting without the premium overhead of traditional platform-as-a-service providers.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hello HN! I've been working on Canine for about a year now. It started when I was sick of paying the overhead of using stuff like Heroku, Render, Fly, etc to host some web apps that I've built. At one point I was paying over $400 a month for hosting these in the cloud. Last year I moved all my stuff to Hetzner. For a 4GB machine, the cost of various providers: Heroku = $260 Fly.io = $65 Render = $85 Hetzner = $4 (This problem gets a lot worse when you need > 4GB) The only downside of using Hetzner is that there isn’t a super straightforward way to do stuff like: - DNS management / SSL certificate management - Team management - Github integration But I figured it should be easy to quickly build something like Heroku for my Hetzner instance. Turns out it was a bit harder than expected, but after a year, I’ve made some good progress The best part of Canine, is that it also makes it trivial to host any helm chart, which is available for basically any open source project, so everything from databases (e.g. Postgres, Redis), to random stuff like torrent tracking servers, VPN’s endpoints, etc. Open source: https://github.com/czhu12/canine Cloud hosted version is: https://canine.sh
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