Question

Is moving from Vercel to a Hetzner VPS + Coolify worth it at my size?

Open · 1404 viewsasked by noah_s

Next.js app, ~1,500 monthly active users, Vercel Pro bill has been $38-55/month lately (function duration mostly). Everyone on X says a €8 Hetzner box with Coolify runs 10 apps. Tempted, but I'm a vibe coder and scared of servers. Is the saving real?

What I’ve tried

Watched a Coolify setup video. Tried it on a test VPS, got it running, but SSL took me an evening.

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What's eating function duration? Might be cheaper to fix that than to move. gus_fullstack

3 answers

deploydan

Saving is real in euros, but count what you take on: OS updates, backups, monitoring, zero-downtime deploys, DDoS/bot handling, and being the one who gets paged. For a vibe coder that's the hidden cost.

At $40-55/month I'd first look at why function duration is high. Common cheap fixes: streaming AI calls holding functions open (enable Fluid compute), slow DB queries from a far-away region (put functions in the same region as Supabase), uncached pages.

If after that it's still $50+, Coolify on a VPS is reasonable. Keep the DB managed (Supabase) so the VPS holds nothing you can't redeploy.

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functions were in iad1 and supabase in Frankfurt. moved the region... we'll see next invoice noah_s
That alone can halve function duration. Let us know. deploydan
gus_fullstack

Different take: I moved 4 projects to Coolify last year and don't regret it. It's more boring than people make it sound. Automatic SSL, git push deploys, backups to S3. Maybe 1 hour a month of maintenance.

But I'm a developer, and noah says they're scared of servers. That fear is valid, the first incident at 2am is not fun.

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1 hour a month sounds ok. the 2am part less so noah_s
henrik_l

Middle ground: Railway or Render. Container hosting, still managed, often cheaper than Vercel for apps with long-running requests. Less magic, less ops.

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