DevOps for Startups: Moving Away from Vercel Without Complicating Things 🛠
How to get Vercel's convenience without vendor lock-in: self-hosted PaaS, VPS, and simple CI/CD for MVPs
Authors: slavb18
DevOps for Startups: Moving Away from Vercel Without Complicating Things 🛠
We in the team don't look for easy ways - most of the time we set up "adult" pipelines with deployment to k3s. It's reliable, scalable, and correct... but for small MVPs at the start, it's often overkill.
Clients regularly ask:
"We'd like something simpler, but not painful later on."
And here lies the trap. "Simpler" almost always means Vercel + Cloud DB:
- quick start
- minimum effort
- but → vendor lock-in
- and → growing costs with scaling
At the same time, a regular VPS is almost always cheaper and gives full control. There's only one problem - nobody wants to set up a server manually.
Solution: Self-hosted PaaS
We looked into self-hosted PaaS and compared two popular players:
- Coolify
- Dokploy
🏆 Our Choice - Dokploy
Why it appealed to us more than Coolify:
✅ Interface - cleaner and more intuitive, less "visual noise" ✅ Lightweight - Dokploy itself consumes fewer resources ✅ Functionality - monitoring and GitHub integration work "out of the box"
Our Workflow
We ended up with a simple and reliable scheme:
1️⃣ Project build via GitHub Actions 2️⃣ Docker image published to GHCR (GitHub Container Registry) 3️⃣ Dokploy catches the webhook and automatically updates the container on the VPS
No manual SSH, no magic, no pain.
Conclusion
We got:
- Vercel-level convenience
- our own VPS with low cost
- zero vendor lock-in
- transparent and controlled deployment
For MVPs and early-stage startups - a real must-have if you want fast, cheap, and without future migration headaches.