1512 posts tagged with "PaaS"
Platform-as-a-Service tooling, economics, and self-hosted alternatives
Vercel's Active CPU Billing Saves 93% on a Real AI Agent — Here's the Exact Math
Vercel claims Active CPU pricing cuts costs up to 95% across 45 billion weekly requests. A worked example on a realistic AI-agent function gets 93% — and shows the exact invocation volume where the discounted bill catches back up to a flat-rate box you already own.
Vercel's Spending Cap Doesn't Cap Your Spending: The Bandwidth Math Behind $23K Bills
Vercel's Spend Management feature can pause a runaway bill, but it's opt-in, checks usage every few minutes instead of continuously, and shuts down all of production instead of capping the overage — here's the real per-GB, per-CPU-hour math and what a fixed-cost server costs instead.
The AI Agent Sandbox Wars: E2B vs Daytona vs Modal vs Fly Machines Compared
E2B, Daytona, Modal, and Fly Machines each bet on a different isolation architecture for running AI-generated code — a normalized cost comparison and what the isolation tradeoffs mean for a self-hosted platform.
Railpack Replaces Nixpacks: What Railway's BuildKit Rewrite Means for Git-Push Builds Everywhere
Railway replaced Nixpacks with Railpack, a BuildKit-based rewrite promising 38-77% smaller images — here's the real comparison against Cloud Native Buildpacks and what self-hosted tools like Coolify and Dokploy should do next.
Coolify vs Dokploy vs Kamal in 2026: Idle CPU, Multi-Server, and Why a Cluster-API PaaS Is a Different Bet
Coolify, Dokploy, and Kamal charge wildly different resource rent to run your self-hosted PaaS. Here's the real idle CPU/RAM cost of each architecture, and why a Cluster-API-based platform is a different bet entirely, not a fourth entry in the list.
Heroku Fir: The Kubernetes-Native Successor Nobody Outside Enterprise Can Use
Heroku's Kubernetes-native runtime, Fir, has been enterprise-only since its April 2025 GA, with a four-figure monthly price floor before you deploy anything. Here's what that architecture actually costs to run yourself, on Hetzner, with Cluster API.
Fly.io Quietly Metered Three More Things in 2026 — Here's What It Actually Costs Your Indie SaaS
In a single quarter, Fly.io started billing for volume snapshots, app-scoped egress IPs, and inter-region private networking. None of the three is large alone. Here's the line-by-line before/after for a real two-region indie stack, and what the same topology costs self-hosted.
Heroku Enters Sustaining-Engineering Mode: The Buildpack Survives, Here's What It Costs to Leave
Heroku's February 2026 shift to bug-fixes-only maintenance doesn't kill the buildpack workflow it invented — here's what actually stops, and a real dollar-for-dollar comparison of running the same dyno formation on self-hosted hardware instead.
Render Cut Included Egress 20x: The Real Bill to Self-Host the Same App on a Hetzner Box
Render's April 2026 repricing cut included egress to 25 GB on Pro and meters the rest at $0.15/GB. Here's the line-by-line bill for a web + worker + Postgres stack versus the same containers on a €8.49 Hetzner box, swept from 25 GB to 2 TB of traffic.