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Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

blog.api-fiddle.com

21–30 of 65 posts

Re: Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

#21
post #3

Coolify is awesome! We use it for lots of things at Svelte Society. From self-hosting marketing and analytics to running our own Nextcloud instance as well as a bunch of other stuff.

I've missed the Vercel/Coolify hype train, the last "seamless" deployment platform I touched was Heroku. What makes Coolify so useful? It's never taken me more than 30 minutes to deploy self-hosted tools, from Nextcloud to Prosody, even without Docker. These "serverless" platforms certainly aren't any cheaper than bare metal and are at best marginally quicker to deploy, so what makes Coolify so useful to you? Is it e…

It's easier for me to spin up postgres and redis with automated backups using coolify than manually write a deploy/backup script.

Outside that I deploy apps outside coolify as it doesn't scale automatically.

Re: Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

#22
post #3

Coolify is awesome! We use it for lots of things at Svelte Society. From self-hosting marketing and analytics to running our own Nextcloud instance as well as a bunch of other stuff.

I've missed the Vercel/Coolify hype train, the last "seamless" deployment platform I touched was Heroku. What makes Coolify so useful? It's never taken me more than 30 minutes to deploy self-hosted tools, from Nextcloud to Prosody, even without Docker. These "serverless" platforms certainly aren't any cheaper than bare metal and are at best marginally quicker to deploy, so what makes Coolify so useful to you? Is it e…

(not coolify)

Solutions like Coolify help to save more than 30 minutes.

I have recorded a sample of my own herokulikeinspiredbycoolifysuccesssaas where I deploy a WordPress instance (with MySQL and ability to enable backups with 1 click) in less than 3 minutes, including introduction, explanations and afterword.

https://youtu.be/k34Zdwcsm6I

Having the right app template allows to easily spin any number of services you need in an ultra-short time.

Mine is based on the Docker Swarm, so you're getting the proven solution under the hood.

Re: Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

#24

Shameless plug but I built https://flexstack.com for similar reasons. I wanted a Render/Vercel alternative on my own AWS account and all of the other options either didn't go far enough or were way too expensive for someone bootstrapping.

Marketing developer tools is commonly much harder than developing them.

The hard thing about adopting a product like yours is that as a potential customer you never know whether the thing you want to do is actually going to be easy or hard or impossible or time consuming.

The home page preaches all the right things, but it's very busy and information dense and yet nothing on the home page gives me enough detail for me to know if it will actually work for me for real.

Figuring out whether a product like this will actually work for me is the real cost I'm looking at, not the $10/month cost. At present, the figuring out if it will work for me cost looks arbitrarily high, because I have no information to go on on the home page without trying to work through an actual deployment on my own.

The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool. It needs to focus instead on explaining things. Adding words, either spoken or on title cards, would help significantly. Yes, I understand there are words in the video - they are words that talk about goals of your company, not words that tell me what is going on in the video. I see lots of things that I recognize or that make sense, but I don't know where it's going or what I'm watching when it starts, so I have no schema in my mind to organize what I'm watching. Getting rid of the "music," or replacing it with much less distracting audio, would help as well - it makes it much harder to concentrate on trying to understand what I'm seeing. Remember, I am watching the video with the goal of understanding "will this do the specific things I need it to do" not "do we agree on the high level goals of what would be great to have."

Coolify is winning today, not because its tech is better than competitors, but because it's tech is more understandable than competitors.

Re: Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? Corporations ruining open source is the norm in 2024, indie devs hiding their source code from corps takeover is the new free software.

>indie devs hiding their source code from corps takeover is the new free software. High power level take. The Stallman ethos of Free Software simply hasn't played out the way idealists thought it would. Instead, libraries are standardized by megacorps to farm employees inculcated into their design patterns and get GitHub clout chasers to fix bugs for free. Open source really needs something like the CC-BY-NC-ND* lice…

There is a Fair Source model, driven by Sentry: https://fair.io

Re: Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

#27
At Coherence (withcoherence.com - I'm a cofounder) we are delivering the open-source benefits of Coolify (less vendor lock-in, cheap hosting costs) via our open-source CNC framework (cncframework.com) while still keeping a hosted SaaS control plane that eliminates the "few hours of fiddling with setup" that the blog author minimizes here. Maintenance and configuration complexity over time (as you customize and use click-ops to configure) are endless, especially as you get more usage or host more projects.

Coolify is awesome software, and alongside similar tools like Caprover, Dokku, and Cloud66, it has its role. But for business use-cases I believe that giving up managed cloud services is too big a leap to make sense, and that a middle-ground approach will win in the long term.

Re: Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

#28
post #24

Shameless plug but I built https://flexstack.com for similar reasons. I wanted a Render/Vercel alternative on my own AWS account and all of the other options either didn't go far enough or were way too expensive for someone bootstrapping.

Marketing developer tools is commonly much harder than developing them. The hard thing about adopting a product like yours is that as a potential customer you never know whether the thing you want to do is actually going to be easy or hard or impossible or time consuming. The home page preaches all the right things, but it's very busy and information dense and yet nothing on the home page gives me enough detail for m…

Thanks for the feedback! I appreciate your honesty and your willingness to share.

> The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool

I have been working on a Loom version. Before putting a lot of time into the demo, I wanted to validate that people were watching it (and they are). I quickly put something together in iMovie that would introduce the product in > it's very busy and information dense ... nothing on the home page gives me enough detail

It has ~the same number of words as Render/Coolify/Vercel, so I will take your point that I'm not yet telling the story as well.

Re: Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

#29

We've been using Coolify to power all our products. It's a great tool for quickly starting new projects. We're very happy with it. We got our servers from Hetzner and we're not looking back.

Sounds great! Any resources on where to start? This thread is the first time I heard from that

Re: Coolify’s rise to fame, and why it could be a big deal

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've missed the Vercel/Coolify hype train, the last "seamless" deployment platform I touched was Heroku. What makes Coolify so useful? It's never taken me more than 30 minutes to deploy self-hosted tools, from Nextcloud to Prosody, even without Docker. These "serverless" platforms certainly aren't any cheaper than bare metal and are at best marginally quicker to deploy, so what makes Coolify so useful to you? Is it e…

(not coolify) Solutions like Coolify help to save more than 30 minutes. I have recorded a sample of my own herokulikeinspiredbycoolifysuccesssaas where I deploy a WordPress instance (with MySQL and ability to enable backups with 1 click) in less than 3 minutes, including introduction, explanations and afterword. https://youtu.be/k34Zdwcsm6I Having the right app template allows to easily spin any number of services yo…

Okay, I see that everyone bumps their project into the thread, so I'll follow the mob. :D

Mine is located here: https://ptah.sh

Idea is the same as with Coolify, but a little bit more opinionated and built solely on Docker Swarm.

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