Vercel Pro, 4 seats → CapRover, self-hosted
Marginal. At $50 an hour, CapRover saves you $400 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$61.43/hrBelow that rate, moving to CapRover pays for itself inside 3 years. Above it, your time is worth more than the saving, and you should stay on Vercel Pro.
Every figure on this page updates as you move these. Most comparisons of this kind quietly assume your time is free and your team never changes size.
What you pay now
| Vercel Pro $20.00/month × 4 seats, billed monthly | $80.00 |
| Every month | $80.00 |
What the escape costs
| Vultr vc2-2c-4gb 2 vCPU · 4 GB RAM · 80 GB disk · 3 TB transfer · $300 of credit for your first 30 days via our referral link | $20.00 |
| Backblaze B2 backup 40 GB at $0.00695/GB/month | $0.28 |
| Your time 0.75 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $37.50 |
| Every month | $57.78 |
| Migration, once 8 hours of your time, our estimate | $400.00 |
The same box elsewhere, if you already have an account. The arithmetic above uses the cheapest.
- Vultr $20.00 vc2-2c-4gb · used above · $300 of credit for your first 30 days
- Linode $24.00 Linode 4GB
- DigitalOcean $24.00 2 vCPU · 4 GB
The difference
| Saved each month | $22.22 |
| After one year | −$133 |
| After 3 years | $400 |
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Vercel's edge network, which a single box does not replicate
- Automatic image optimisation and instant cache invalidation
- Next.js features that exist because Vercel builds both halves
- Free idle preview deployments
You gain
- A fixed bill instead of usage billing that can spike overnight
- Free seats, including for people who only read logs
- A mature, boring codebase — CapRover has been doing this since 2017
Read this before you decide
- Global latency-sensitive traffic is the case this loses regardless of price. Put Cloudflare in front or stay on Vercel.
- CapRover is built on Docker Swarm, which is stable but effectively frozen. That is fine for a single box and a poor foundation for a cluster.
- The $20 per seat excludes usage overages. If bandwidth is why you are reading this, your real bill is higher and this page understates the saving.
Is the project alive?
caprover/caprover has 15,189 stars, was last pushed 0 days ago, and last cut a release (v1.15.4) 50 days ago. Its licence is not one GitHub recognises automatically, so check the repository before you rely on it. We rate it active. We do not publish comparisons against software that has gone dormant, however good the arithmetic looks.
Every number above comes from one of these, on the date shown. The Vercel figure is the site's own wording: “Pro Popular $20 /mo. ... Team Seats Developer seat 1 $20 / month”.
| Vercel pricing page | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Vultr plan catalogue affiliate link | 19 Oct 2026 |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | 3 Sept 2026 |
| caprover/caprover activity | 19 Oct 2026 |
Hosting requirements (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 50 GB disk), migration hours and maintenance hours are our estimates, not measurements. They are the numbers most worth arguing with, so we put them where you can see them. The cheapest plan meeting those requirements is selected automatically from Vultr, Vultr and Linode's live catalogues.