PaaS: guides & tutorials

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.

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.

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.