HACKER Q&A
📣 theonlyvasudev

Is there real demand for a open source Railway-style PaaS that deploys?


Hey all, I am building an open-source platform with railway-grade UX.

Nothing to show yet, but just validating the pain before I spend more weeks on it.

So some quick questions (especially if you’re in the SF Bay, Seattle, DC, London/Berlin/Amsterdam scene):

Have you ever seriously considered leaving

1.Railway/Render/Vercel/Heroku because of cost, lockin, or compliance?

2. What’s the single biggest reason you wouldn’t try a BYOC option tomorrow?

3. Rough pricing you’d tolerate for the control plane (e.g. $29–99/mo flat for unlimited apps + your own infra bill)?

4. Any feature that would make you go “okay I’m in” on day one?

I’d love blunt answers - even “this is pointless because X” is extremely useful right now. If you’re interested (drop a comment) + quick demo video when the first prototype is up. Happy to jump on a 15-min call too and offer the first month of free usage on the product(when mvp is ready).

Thanks for reading - really appreciate the time.

  👤 mtmail Accepted Answer ✓
Not happy with Heroku's recent announcement and looked at https://hatchbox.io/ . If anything I'd prefer whatever is most similar to Heroku: automated deploys, some VMs to choose from, tight database integration (no worries about replication, backups etc). hatchbox's pricing seems too low (too good to be true?) There might be a market for those trying to leave Heroku by offering a great, comprehensive and straight forward migration guide. https://render.com/docs/migrate-from-heroku
👤 cristinaibunea
there's already an alternative for this and it's northflank.com
👤 apothegm
What would it mean for a PaaS to be open source? Does it mean you have to deploy it yourself on your own hardware/cloud? That seems like it would obviate the benefits of PaaS where someone else is taking care of running everything underneath it for you, and you just have to worry about your own application code.
👤 Albert-Lam
this exists over at https://ryvn.ai

completely handles configuring your infra in your AWS/GCP/Azure account; automated deploys; preview environments; docker and nixpacks; cron jobs; logs and metrics; cost optimized and autoscaled VMs

👤 2cpu1container
I've built my own and published it as open source.

It is called http://www.kubero.dev and runs on kubernetes.

👤 pmig
I think that Dokku [1] https://dokku.com/ is actually the closest to what you are building.

We are actually building in a similar space with Distr [2] and happy to jump on a quick call.

[1] https://dokku.com/

[2] https://distr.sh/docs/