I run a dozen apps off one $20 VPS and finally automated the part I hated most

I've been running client work and side projects off a single Ubuntu box for years. Cheap, fast, mine but every deploy was the same ritual: SSH in, git pull, rebuild the container, hope the Traefik config didn't need touching, check the cert didn't expire, tail the logs to see if it actually came up. None of it was hard. All of it was boring, and boring-but-necessary is exactly the kind of task that eats a Saturday.

The "real" alternatives never felt right for a solo dev:

• Heroku/Render/Railway solve it, but you're renting the platform forever $20 here, $30 there, per app, and it adds up fast on top of the VPS you're already paying for.

• Self-hosted panels like Coolify are great, but now you've got another service running on your box that needs patching and babysitting, plus a browser tab pointed at your own server's IP as your new attack surface.

So I spent the last few months turning my own deploy scripts into an actual product: a native desktop app (Mac + Windows) that talks to your VPS over plain SSH, on demand nothing installed there but the apps you actually deploy. Push to GitHub, it builds, health-checks, and swaps traffic over with zero downtime. HTTPS, databases, backups, monitoring, one-click rollback the stuff a PaaS gives you, minus the subscription and the extra always-on service.

It's called DeployOS. Free tier is a real license, not a trial one server, no card, no time limit.

Genuinely curious what the rest of you are running: still on Heroku/Render, self-hosting a panel, or just raw-dogging SSH like I was for years? What finally made you switch (or not)?