TL;DR
Coolify is an open-source, self-hostable PaaS — 52,600+ GitHub stars, Apache-2.0 licensed, with exactly two tiers. Self-hosted is free forever with the full feature set; Cloud is $5/month base for a managed Coolify dashboard that deploys to your own servers.
- Apache-2.0 across the board — no enterprise edition, no feature gating, no AGPL/BSL trap
- Self-hosted free forever: unlimited servers, deployments, and team members
- Cloud at $5/month (or $4/month annual) includes 2 connected servers; +$3/month per extra server
- "Bring your own servers" model — you pay for the control plane, your apps run on Hetzner/DO/AWS/Pi
- Built by a solo founder (Andras Bacsai) with 3,400+ cloud customers; roughly $17k–30k MRR
Hey, it's Vlad, founder of Beton.
Coolify is the open source project I wish existed when I was setting up my first VPS five years ago. It's a self-hosted PaaS that replaces Heroku, Vercel, and Netlify — and the pricing model is unlike anything else in the space.
How Coolify pricing scales
Coolify barely scales by price: self-hosting is free forever, and Cloud is a flat $5/month convenience fee (+$3/month per extra server beyond two).
Coolify pricing by tier. The feature set is identical; Cloud is a flat convenience fee.
This post is a part of series on commercial open source software pricing.
What is Coolify
Coolify is an open-source, self-hostable platform-as-a-service. You install it on any server with SSH access and it gives you a dashboard to deploy applications, databases, and 280+ one-click services. Think of it as your own private Heroku.
It supports any language, any framework, any server. VPS, Raspberry Pi, EC2, bare metal — doesn't matter. All you need is SSH.
- 52,600+ GitHub stars
- Apache-2.0 license
- Built with PHP (Laravel) + Svelte
- 3,400+ cloud customers
- Solo founder project (Andras Bacsai), built largely in public via live streams
The tagline is "self-hosting with superpowers" and it's accurate. This isn't a toy — it handles SSL, reverse proxying, Docker orchestration, git-based deployments, database provisioning, and monitoring.
The licensing play
Apache-2.0. That's it.
No AGPL trap, no BSL time-bomb, no "sustainable use" restriction. You can fork Coolify, modify it, embed it in a commercial product, and sell it. The most permissive license in serious open source.
This is a deliberate philosophical choice. From their own philosophy page: "We've seen too many promising open-source projects slowly close their doors, adding 'enterprise' features and artificial limitations. We chose a different path."
And they mean it. There is no enterprise edition. There are no features behind a paywall. The self-hosted version is the full product. Cloud and self-hosted share the exact same open-source codebase.
This is rare. Most COSS companies use licensing as a monetization lever — AGPL to prevent competitors from forking (Firecrawl), BSL to block hosted competition (Sentry), or custom licenses to restrict commercial use (n8n). Coolify does none of that.
The bet is pure: make the product good enough that people will pay for convenience even when the free version is identical.
Pricing structure
Coolify has exactly two tiers. That's it. No confusing grid of plans.
Self-hosted — Free forever
- Full access to every feature
- Unlimited servers, unlimited deployments, unlimited team members
- Community support (19k+ Discord members)
- Automated or self-managed updates
- All future features included
Cloud — $5/month base (monthly) or $4/month (annual)
- Base price includes 2 connected servers
- +$3/month per additional server (monthly) or +$2.70/month (annual)
- Connect unlimited servers total
- Unlimited deployments per server
- Free email alerts for Coolify events
- Community + limited email support
- Founder-tested updates before they reach you
Annual billing saves 20%.
That's the entire pricing page. No per-seat fees. No execution limits. No credit system. No hidden add-ons.
The "bring your own servers" model
Here's what makes Coolify weird compared to every other PaaS.
Render, Railway, Fly.io — they sell you compute. You pay them, they run your containers on their infrastructure. Coolify Cloud flips this completely: you pay $5/month for managed Coolify, but your applications run on YOUR servers. Hetzner, DigitalOcean, AWS, your Raspberry Pi — whatever you want.
You're not buying hosting. You're buying "someone else runs the Coolify dashboard for me."
This is less "cloud PaaS" and more "Coolify-as-a-service." Your servers, their control plane.
It's a smart model for the target user: someone technical enough to have a Hetzner box (starting at ~$4/month for a decent VPS) but who doesn't want to babysit a self-hosted dashboard. You get the economics of cheap European VPS + the convenience of not managing the orchestration layer.
The FAQ confirms it: "You need to bring your own servers from any cloud provider. Your apps will be deployed on the server you connect to the cloud, while Coolify runs on our managed server."
Does it make sense to pay?
Let's do the math.
Solo developer, 2 servers: $5/month cloud. That's less than a single Render hobby service. You get a managed dashboard, email alerts, and tested updates. The alternative is self-hosting Coolify on one of your servers, which takes about 60 seconds to install but means you're responsible for keeping it updated and backed up.
Small startup, 8 servers: $5 + (6 x $3) = $23/month. No per-seat fees — your whole team deploys through the same instance. Compare that to Railway or Render where 8 services could easily cost $100-200+/month just in platform fees, before compute.
Larger team, 20 servers: $5 + (18 x $3) = $59/month. Still under $60. With unlimited team members. This is where the model gets absurd — you could have 50 engineers deploying through Coolify and it costs the same.
The catch: there are no per-seat fees, but each additional team (workspace) in the cloud requires a separate subscription. If you need isolated environments with separate billing, that adds up. For most companies, one team is enough.
The honest answer: if you're comfortable managing a VPS, self-host Coolify for free. It takes one curl command to install and the feature set is identical. Cloud at $5/month is a convenience fee, not a feature upgrade. The only reason to pay is that you genuinely don't want to maintain the Coolify instance itself — the updates, the backups, the occasional troubleshooting.
I'd pay it. Not because I need to, but because $5/month is below my "think about it" threshold and I'd rather spend that 15 minutes per month on something else.
The bigger picture
Coolify's monetization strategy is the anti-pattern to modern COSS. No feature gating, no license restrictions, no enterprise upsell. Just Apache-2.0 everything and charge a nominal convenience fee for hosted management.
Can this sustain a business? With 3,400+ cloud customers at $5+/month, that's roughly $17k-30k MRR depending on server counts. Add sponsorships (they have a long list of sponsors including Hetzner and Hostinger) and it's a viable solo founder operation.
But it's not a venture-scale business — and I think that's the point. Coolify isn't trying to be the next $100M ARR company. It's trying to be the best self-hosting platform in the world and let the economics follow.
For users, this is the dream scenario. A genuinely free, genuinely full-featured product with an optional convenience tier that costs less than a coffee. No rug-pull risk because Apache-2.0 means the community can fork it if the project ever changes direction.
I build Beton — open source revenue intelligence for B2B SaaS.
FAQ
Is Coolify open source?
Yes — Apache-2.0 for the entire product. There is no enterprise edition and no features behind a paywall; the self-hosted version is identical to what Cloud runs.
What's the cheapest paid Coolify plan?
$5/month on monthly billing, or $4/month effective on annual (20% savings). The base price includes 2 connected servers and unlimited deployments.
Do my apps run on Coolify's servers if I use Cloud?
No. Coolify Cloud runs the managed dashboard on their infrastructure, but your applications deploy to servers you bring — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, AWS, bare metal, even a Raspberry Pi.
When does it make sense to pay for Coolify Cloud?
When you don't want to maintain the Coolify instance itself. The feature set is identical to self-hosted, so $5/month is a convenience fee for updates, backups, and not babysitting the dashboard.
