Start with the honest part
If you are comparing self hosted PaaS cost by looking at software prices, stop reading and go install Coolify. It is free, it is excellent, and nothing in this post will change that arithmetic. Dokploy is free. CapRover is free. You will pay for a server and nothing else, and you will get container deployments, automatic TLS, previews, databases and a web UI that is genuinely good.
We should also disclose the obvious conflict of interest up front: Hostwares runs Coolify underneath. We are not a competitor to Coolify in any meaningful sense — we are a customer of it, at scale, and we have opinions about running it because we do it every day. If this post read as "self-hosting is risky, buy managed," you would be right to ignore it.
The real comparison is not software price. It is who does the work. That question has a defensible answer and it is not the same answer for everybody.
Prices verified 13 August 2026 from coolify.io/pricing, dokploy.com/pricing and caprover.com.
What the software actually costs
| Tool | Self-hosted | Hosted / cloud option |
|---|---|---|
| Coolify | Free forever, full access to all features, no limitations or restrictions | $5/mo base (connect 2 servers), then $3/mo per additional server |
| Dokploy | Free and open source | Hobby $4.50/mo per server (1 server, 1 user, 1 organisation, unlimited deployments); Startup $15/mo (3 servers, unlimited users, 3 organisations); additional servers $4.50/mo each |
| CapRover | Free, Apache 2.0 licensed | No hosted plan published |
Two things worth noting about the paid tiers. Coolify Cloud and Dokploy Cloud host the control plane — you still bring your own servers from whatever cloud provider you like. And at $5/mo and $4.50/mo, neither is a meaningful cost. Nobody has ever chosen self-hosting over Coolify Cloud to save five dollars.
What the software price leaves out
The line item you can look up is the server. We tried to verify current VPS pricing for this post and could not: Hetzner's cloud pricing page renders its prices client-side, so they are not readable from the page source, and we are not going to quote a number from memory. Check your own provider's current rates and slot the figure in yourself. Whatever it is, it is the same figure on both sides of this comparison — a managed platform also has to pay for compute — so it is not where the difference lives.
The difference lives in the work. Here is the honest inventory of what self-hosting a Coolify or Dokploy box means you own.
- OS patching. Unattended-upgrades handles most of it. It does not handle kernel updates needing a reboot, or the occasional package that breaks Docker's networking, or verifying that everything came back up after the reboot.
- Platform upgrades. Coolify and Dokploy both ship fast. Fast-moving open source is a feature — bugs get fixed in days — but it also means upgrades are frequent and occasionally require attention. Reading release notes before upgrading a box your customers depend on is part of the job.
- TLS renewal. Mostly automated via Traefik or Caddy, and mostly fine. The failure mode is silent: a renewal fails, nothing alerts, and you find out sixty days later when a certificate expires on a Sunday.
- Backups, and specifically restores. Configuring a nightly database dump is twenty minutes. Confirming that dump actually restores into a working database is the part almost everyone skips. A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis, not a backup.
- Monitoring. Disk filling with Docker layers and old images is the single most common way a self-hosted PaaS box goes down. Containers getting OOM-killed is second. Neither is hard to catch, but something has to be watching, and that something needs maintaining too.
- Incident response. The one that does not fit in a schedule. When the box goes down at 3am, the person who fixes it is you. There is no other person.
Putting hours on it
Here is our estimate for a single-server Coolify or Dokploy install running a handful of production apps, in steady state after setup. This is our own figure from running this infrastructure — not a survey, not a study, and you should argue with it rather than accept it.
| Task | Hours / month |
|---|---|
| OS patching and post-reboot verification | 0.5 – 1.0 |
| Coolify / Dokploy upgrades, reading release notes | 0.5 – 1.5 |
| TLS and cert failures (usually zero, occasionally not) | 0.0 – 0.5 |
| Backup verification and restore drills | 1.0 – 2.0 |
| Monitoring upkeep, disk cleanup, alert tuning | 0.5 – 1.0 |
| Incident response, averaged over a year | 0.5 – 1.5 |
| Steady-state total | 3 – 7.5 hours / month |
Plus a one-time setup cost of roughly one to two working days: provisioning, hardening SSH, firewall rules, installing the platform, wiring DNS, configuring backups, and standing up whatever monitoring you are going to trust.
Two caveats that cut in opposite directions. If you already run Linux servers for other reasons, the marginal cost of one more is much lower than this table suggests — you have the monitoring, you have the patching habit, you have the muscle memory. And if you have never operated a server before, your first six months will be well above the top of this range, because everything in it is a skill you are acquiring rather than exercising.
Price your own hour
We are not going to tell you what your time is worth. Multiply the range by your own number:
3 - 7.5 hours/month at various hourly rates
$0/hr (it is your hobby, you enjoy it) $0/mo
$25/hr (side project, opportunity cost) $75 - $188/mo
$50/hr (freelance junior rate) $150 - $375/mo
$100/hr (senior contractor rate) $300 - $750/moThe $0 row is not a joke and it is not a rhetorical device. For a large number of developers, running their own infrastructure is the enjoyable part, they would be doing it anyway, and assigning an opportunity cost to it is simply wrong. If that is you, self-host. The rest of this post is not aimed at you.
The rows that matter are the middle two. At $50/hr, four hours a month is $200 — which is more than most managed hosting bills for a comparably sized workload. That is the whole argument, and it is entirely a statement about your time, not about the software.
Where the decision actually flips
Three things flip it, and none of them is price.
Whether anyone else depends on it. A side project going down for six hours costs nothing. A client's site going down for six hours costs the client relationship. The moment your uptime is someone else's problem, you have implicitly signed a support contract with yourself, and self-hosting means you are the only person who can honour it.
Whether you can be unreachable. This is the underrated one. Self-hosting is fine right up until you want a two-week holiday with bad signal. There is no rota. A managed platform is, in large part, a way of buying permission to be unavailable.
Whether the work is interesting to you. Some people find server operations genuinely satisfying and learn a great deal from it. Others find it a tax on the work they actually want to do. Both are legitimate and they lead to opposite conclusions, so be honest about which one you are before you optimise for the wrong thing.
Where self-hosting is straightforwardly the right call
Not hedging here — these are real and common:
- You want to learn. Running Coolify on a VPS teaches you more about Docker, reverse proxies, TLS and Linux operations than any amount of reading. That education has value beyond the project.
- You need data residency or air-gapping that a managed provider cannot offer, or you have a contractual requirement that the infrastructure be under your control.
- You are running many apps on one big box. Self-hosting's economics improve dramatically with density. Thirty small services on one well-specified server is where per-slot managed pricing loses on cost, and it loses clearly.
- You already operate servers. The marginal burden is small and the marginal cost is near zero.
- Your workloads tolerate downtime. Internal tools, batch jobs, staging environments, things where an outage is an inconvenience rather than an incident.
If two or more of those describe you, install Coolify and do not think about this again.
Where managed wins
The mirror image, equally specific:
- You have paying customers and a small team, and every hour spent on infrastructure is an hour not spent on the product.
- You are the only technical person, and "the only person who can fix it" is a single point of failure you cannot mitigate.
- You are running few enough services that a big shared box is mostly idle — density is what makes self-hosting cheap, and you do not have density.
- You want backups you did not configure, monitoring you did not set up, and patching you did not schedule, and you would rather pay than think about any of it.
What Hostwares is, precisely
Since we run Coolify, it is worth being exact about what you are paying for, because it is not the software.
You are paying for someone else to own the six bullet points in the inventory above. We patch the hosts, upgrade the platform, watch the certificates, run and test the backups, keep the monitoring honest, and answer the 3am page. Packs start at $2/mo for Micro (0.25 vCPU, 256 MB), $3 for Starter (0.5 vCPU, 512 MB, 10 GB), $7 for Standard (1 vCPU, 2 GB, 25 GB), $18 for Performance (2 vCPU, 4 GB, 50 GB) and $35 for Business (4 vCPU, 8 GB, 100 GB). One pack is one deployment slot and runs any app type. Managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Redis and MongoDB start at $3/mo with automated backups. Bandwidth is not metered and seats are not charged. The CLI, REST API, MCP server and the AI DevOps agent are included rather than sold separately.
What you give up is control. You cannot SSH into the host. You cannot install an arbitrary system service outside a container. You cannot pin the platform to a version you have tested. For some readers those are dealbreakers, and if they are dealbreakers for you, that is a correct reason to self-host and we would rather you did.
The one-line answer
Coolify, Dokploy and CapRover are free, and the software is not what you are choosing between. You are choosing between three to seven hours of your month and a monthly bill. Work out what your hours are worth, be honest about whether you enjoy the work, and be honest about whether anyone else is depending on your uptime. Those three answers decide it, and for a lot of people they correctly point at self-hosting.
Prices verified 13 August 2026 against coolify.io/pricing, dokploy.com/pricing and caprover.com. VPS pricing was not verifiable at time of writing because Hetzner's cloud page renders prices client-side; use your own provider's current figures.