PaaS: guides & tutorials

Heroku's free tier was discontinued in 2022 and paid plans now start at $5/dyno/month — with no included databases, storage billed separately, and costs that compound quickly as you add apps and workers. Self-hosted PaaS tools replicate the Heroku experience (Git push to deploy, automatic SSL, web UI, database provisioning) on a VPS you control, at a fraction of the cost.

Vercel Pro costs $20/month per team member — and that's before you add bandwidth overages, concurrency limits, or a second project. If you're running more than a handful of apps, the bill grows faster than your team. Self-hosting a deployment platform on a $3.50/month VPS lets you deploy unlimited apps, keep your code and environment variables off a third-party cloud, and pay a flat monthly rate that doesn't scale with your headcount.

Coolify and Dokploy both turn a VPS into a Heroku-style platform: push code, get a URL, forget about Nginx configs and SSL certificates. Both are Apache-2.0 licensed, both install with a single command, and both support Docker Compose deployments, Let's Encrypt TLS, Git webhooks, and database provisioning. The difference is scale, maturity, and complexity tolerance.

TL;DR

• One docker-compose.yml deploys Authentik (SSO) + Outline (wiki) + shared PostgreSQL + Redis + Caddy; Coolify installs separately via its own script
• Measured idle RAM: ~2 GB (Authentik + Outline stack) + ~770 MB (Coolify stack) = ~2.8 GB total across the host
• Minimum Liquid Web tier: 8 GB Managed VPS (~$33–$40/mo); 16 GB recommended if you plan to deploy many apps via Coolify
• Replaces: Okta (~$20/mo for 10 users) + Vercel Pro ($20/mo) + Notion Team ($160/mo for 10 users) = $200/mo down to ~$33/mo

Most engineering teams pay three separate vendors with no shared identity layer tying them together: Okta handles SSO, Vercel handles deployments, and Notion holds documentation. Each has its own login, its own access controls, and its own billing. This guide deploys the open-source equivalents — Authentik for identity, Coolify for self-hosted PaaS deployments, and Outline for team wiki — on a single Liquid Web 8 GB VPS, connected through OIDC so all three share one set of credentials.

TL;DR

• One docker-compose.yml deploys Authentik (SSO) + Plausible (analytics) + Postal (SMTP) + shared PostgreSQL + MySQL + ClickHouse + RabbitMQ + Redis + Caddy; Coolify installs separately via its own script
• Measured idle RAM: ~4.6 GB total across the host (our Compose stack + Coolify's stack)
• Minimum Liquid Web tier: 16 GB Managed VPS (~$50/mo) — the 16 GB gives comfortable room for apps you deploy through Coolify
• Vercel Pro ($20/mo) + Auth0 Essentials ($23/mo) + Postmark ($15/mo) = $58/mo just for foundations; this stack: ~$50/mo with unlimited apps, SSO, pageviews, and email

This is the "meta stack" — the infrastructure layer you deploy before anything else. Every other self-hosted app you run needs a place to live (Coolify), a way to log users in (Authentik), a way to measure traffic (Plausible), and a way to send email (Postal, the open-source SMTP platform). This guide wires all four together on a single Liquid Web 16 GB VPS as a reusable foundation.