$0/month Over Vercel

The founder in Bristol told me over a flat white: “I stopped checking my Vercel bill after month three.”

Not because he couldn’t afford it.

Because he didn’t want to feel stupid.

His AI note-summarization tool, built for legal interns, was pulling in £1,200 a month. Nice. But his infra bill, mostly Vercel Pro, Redis, and a small database tier, was £89. Not catastrophic. But visible. The kind of number that makes you wonder if you’re building a business or just paying for developer convenience.

Then he found the thread on Hacker News: “Coolify + Oracle ARM = $0/month production stack.”

He spun up a server that afternoon.

By midnight, his app was live, backed by PocketBase, fronted by Cloudflare Pages, shielded by Let’s Encrypt. No migration drama. No downtime. Just a single VPS, self-hosted, under his own SSH key.

He hasn’t logged into Vercel since.

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What Shipped

Coolify isn’t new. It’s been the quiet workhorse for indie developers who want Heroku’s ease without the pricing whiplash. But its momentum shifted this month as developers began pairing it with Oracle Cloud’s permanent free-tier ARM instances, 4 cores, 24GB RAM, 200GB storage, no expiration.

That’s not toy-tier.

That’s production-grade.

Coolify runs on a single VPS, any VPS, and lets you deploy apps, databases, and services via Git push. It supports any Docker-compatible service, offers one-click deployments for 280+ tools (PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, PocketBase), and handles SSL, backups, monitoring, and notifications out of the box.

The stack, as it’s being built today:

• Frontend: Cloudflare Pages (static, free)
• Backend: PocketBase or custom API, deployed via Coolify
• Infra: Oracle Cloud ARM instance (free forever)
• Orchestration: Coolify (open-source, self-hosted)
• Tunneling: Cloudflare Tunnel (free)

No credit card. No billing alerts. No surprise invoices when a Reddit post sends traffic spiking.

And crucially: no vendor lock-in. Your data, your server, your rules.

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Why It Matters

This isn’t just about saving $15 a month.

It’s about resetting the economics of early-stage SaaS.

For years, the implicit contract was: You focus on code. We’ll handle infra. Pay us when you scale.

Vercel, Heroku, Netlify, they delivered. But the cost was invisible lock-in. Your deployment pipeline becomes tied to their CLI, their config format, their market. Migrate later? That’s a weekend project. Maybe two.

Coolify breaks that.

It’s not a platform. It’s a self-hosted engine. You install it on your server. You own the box. You control the stack.

And now, with Oracle’s ARM instances, you don’t even need to pay for the box.

That changes the game for AI-native side projects, the kind built by solo founders, bootstrapped teams, or engineers shipping after hours.

Because AI apps are expensive not in compute, but in persistence.

You need a database for memory. A backend for state. A place to store user sessions, embeddings, logs.

Traditional free tiers cap those. Vercel’s free plan? No dedicated backend instances. Netlify? Same.

But Oracle’s free tier gives you 24GB RAM. You can run PostgreSQL, Redis, and your LLM gateway on the same box.

Coolify orchestrates it.

PocketBase stores your data.

Cloudflare Pages serves your frontend.

And you? You ship.

No metrics. No dashboards. No “your usage is 87% of free tier.”

Just code, deploy, run.

The loser here isn’t Oracle. They’re playing a long game, get developers hooked on their cloud, hope they eventually need GPU instances or enterprise support.

The loser is the convenience cloud.

Vercel’s brilliance was making deployment frictionless. But frictionless has a price. And now, that price is being called into question.

When $0 is possible, and stable, why accept anything else?

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What to Migrate

If you’re running a small AI app on Vercel, Heroku, or Netlify, here’s how to test the $0 stack:

1. Sign up for Oracle Cloud Free Tier

   • Go to cloud.oracle.com, register.
   • During instance creation, select “Ampere Altra” (ARM) under shape.
   • Pick the “VM.Standard.A1.Flex”, 4 cores, 24GB RAM, 200GB storage.
   • Use Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 LTS.

2. Install Coolify
   Run this on your Oracle instance:

   bash <(curl -fsSL https://cybozu.co.jp/install.sh)
   

   Follow prompts. It installs Docker, sets up the Coolify engine, and launches the dashboard on port 80.

3. Set up Cloudflare Tunnel

   • Install cloudflared on the instance.
   • Authenticate with your Cloudflare account.
   • Create a tunnel to map your domain to Coolify’s port 80.
   • Enable HTTP traffic to your instance in Oracle’s security list (port 80, 443).

4. Deploy your first app

   • In Coolify, connect your GitHub/GitLab repo.
   • Choose your project.
   • Under “Service Type,” pick “Web Application.”
   • Set build command and output directory.
   • Enable “Auto-deploy on push.”
   • Done.

5. Add PocketBase (for backend)

   • In Coolify, go to “One-click Services.”
   • Select PocketBase.
   • Configure domain, set admin email/password.
   • Deploy.
   • Access via /dashboard on your domain.

6. Migrate frontend to Cloudflare Pages

   • Create a new Pages project.
   • Link to your frontend repo.
   • Set build command and output.
   • Point your root domain here, subdomain (e.g., app.) to Coolify.

“The new baseline: production hosting should cost $0 until you hit real traction. Anything else is venture math, not indie math.”

7. Verify backups

   • In Coolify, go to your PocketBase service.
   • Under “Backups,” add an S3-compatible endpoint (e.g., Cloudflare R2).
   • Set retention (7 days minimum).
   • Run a manual backup to test.

8. Monitor

   • Coolify’s dashboard shows CPU, RAM, disk.
   • Set up Discord or Telegram notifications for downtime.
   • Use crontab to ping your health endpoint every 5 minutes.

Critical gotchas:

• Oracle’s free tier blocks outbound email. Use Resend or Mailgun via API.
• ARM architecture means some Docker images won’t work. Use multi-arch builds or Alpine-based images.
• Cold starts: if your instance idles, first request may lag. Keep it warm with a cron-ping to /health.

This stack isn’t for high-traffic apps. But for sub-10k MAU, AI-native tools? It’s perfect.

And the moment you need more, GPUs, load balancers, multi-region, you’re already on a cloud provider. Just upgrade the instance.

No re-architecting. No lock-in escape hatch.

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Looking Ahead

I asked the Bristol founder how long he thought this would last.

Oracle’s free tier, I meant.

He laughed. Said: “They can’t pull it. Not now. Too many indie apps are running on it. If they kill it, they’ll make enemies of every hacker who ever spun up a VM.”

He’s probably right.

Because this isn’t just a pricing trick.

It’s a signal.

The era of “free tier, then pay” is cracking.

Developers are learning to self-host.

They’re using tools like Coolify not because they hate platforms, but because they hate surprise bills.

The same Oracle ARM box that kills your hosting bill can also kill your CI bill. Point a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner at the free Ampere instance and the metered Actions minutes that quietly stall a multi-repo operator's deploys drop to zero too.

The next wave of AI apps won’t be built on venture-funded infra.

They’ll be built on $0 stacks, in side projects, in bedrooms and cafes.

And when one hits?

It’ll already be unshackled.

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• Coolify, accessed 2026-04-28
• Oracle Cloud Free Tier Documentation, accessed 2026-04-28
• PocketBase GitHub, accessed 2026-04-28