Vercel UX, VPS pricing. That's what I built.

Hey IH 👋

I want to share what I've been working on for the past few months. It started from frustration with my own hosting bills and turned into a product that now has paying customers.

The problem that annoyed me into building something

Like a lot of you, I was running projects across multiple PaaS platforms. Vercel for frontends, Railway for some backend services, Render for others, Supabase for auth, NeonDB for postgres.

Each one felt great individually. Beautiful dashboards, one-click deploys, live logs. The developer experience was chef's kiss.

Then I actually added up what I was paying: ~$200/month across everything. For side projects and small apps.

And the limits kept hitting me:

• Vercel caps you at 20 cron jobs
• Supabase charges $10 per additional database
• Railway's "hobby" tier isn't really a hobby tier once you need anything real

I knew the math didn't make sense. A $6 Hetzner VPS could run all of this. But every time I thought about migrating, I remembered what VPS management actually felt like: SSH-ing around, managing PM2 in tmux, grep-ing through logs at 2am, trying to remember which port my blog was running on.

I'd pay the PaaS tax just to avoid that.

The "aha" moment

I'm a big Pieter Levels fan. The guy runs most of his empire on like one server. That's the dream, right?

But I realized the gap wasn't about capability - it was about experience. I could manage a VPS. I just didn't want to because the workflow sucked compared to hitting "Deploy" on Vercel.

I started looking for a Vercel alternative that would let me keep the nice UX but use my own servers. Coolify, CapRover, Dokku - I tried them all. None of them felt right. Too heavy, too complicated, or required installing a bunch of stuff on the server.

So I thought: what if I could get the Vercel/Railway experience on my own $6 VPS?

What I built

Server Compass is a desktop app (Electron) that connects to your servers over SSH and gives you a clean UI for everything:

• See all your apps at a glance: what's running, which ports, which domains
• Deploy with one click or auto-deploy on git push
• Manage env vars, SSL certs, domains, cron jobs - no terminal needed
• Live logs and rollbacks when things break
• Real-time resource monitoring

Think of it as a Vercel alternative that runs on your own infrastructure. Same deployment experience, but you own the server and pay VPS prices instead of PaaS prices.

The key decision: it's a desktop app, not a web service. Your SSH keys never leave your machine. You're not giving credentials to some third-party server. It's basically SSH with a nice GUI.

I tried Coolify before building this - it installed Docker and a bunch of stuff that made my $6 VPS lag. Server Compass doesn't install anything heavy on your server beyond what you'd set up manually (PM2, nginx, etc).

Current state

• 5 device sales so far (one-time purchase, $19)
• Paying customers actually using it in production
• Mac only right now (Windows/Linux coming)
• Currently adding Docker support based on customer feedback

The sales are small but the validation is real - people are using it for real deployments and asking for features.

What I've learned so far

Distribution is the hard part. The product works. People who try it like it. But getting in front of the right people is where I keep hitting walls. I've caught myself wanting to pivot multiple times, but I keep reminding myself it's a distribution problem, not a product problem.

Desktop app was the right call. Users consistently mention they like that SSH keys stay on their machine. The "it's just SSH with a GUI" pitch resonates.

Customer feedback shapes everything. Docker support wasn't on my original roadmap. Multiple users asked for it because they have apps in Rust, Python, Ruby - not just Node. Now it's my top priority.

The pain point is real. When I talk to devs about PaaS bills, they literally wince. Acknowledging the frustration connects way more than generic technical pitches.

The pricing

• Free tier: 1 server, 1 app, 1 domain (enough to actually try it)
• $19 one-time per device for unlimited everything

No subscriptions. I wanted it to feel like buying a tool, not renting one.

What's next

• Docker/Docker Compose support (done, but only support Build on VPS mode)
• GitHub OAuth integration (no more PAT tokens)
• Database deployment support
• Windows/Linux builds

Ask

If you're looking for a Vercel alternative that doesn't cost a fortune, or you're running stuff on Railway/Render and the bills are adding up, I'd love for you to try it. The free tier is enough to test if this workflow clicks for you.

And if you've done the PaaS → VPS migration yourself, I'd love to hear how you handled the workflow. What tools did you end up using?

Site: https://servercompass.app/

Happy to answer any questions about the build, the tech, or the business side.