Vercel Pro, 3 seats → Coolify, self-hosted
Stay. At $50 an hour, Coolify costs you $870 more over 3 years.
This one only pays off if your hour is worth less than
$31.09/hrThat is a low bar. Unless your time is genuinely cheap, or you would enjoy running Coolify enough not to count the hours, Vercel Pro is the better deal.
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 × 3 seats, billed monthly | $60.00 |
| Every month | $60.00 |
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 1 h/month keeping it patched and backed up | $50.00 |
| Every month | $70.28 |
| Migration, once 10 hours of your time, our estimate | $500.00 |
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 | −$10.28 |
| After one year | −$623 |
| After 3 years | −$870 |
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Vercel's edge network — this is the big one, and it is not something a single VPS replicates
- Instant global cache invalidation and automatic image optimisation
- Zero-config Next.js features that only exist because Vercel builds both sides
- Preview deployments that scale to zero for free
You gain
- A fixed monthly bill instead of a usage bill that can spike without warning
- Free seats, and no per-seat charge for a viewer who just wants to see logs
- Any runtime you like, not only the ones the platform supports
Read this before you decide
- If your traffic is global and latency-sensitive, one VPS is a genuine downgrade and no amount of savings fixes that. Put Cloudflare in front of it or stay on Vercel.
- The $20/seat Vercel figure excludes usage overages. If your bandwidth bill is the reason you are reading this, your real Vercel cost is higher and Coolify wins sooner.
- Coolify itself needs headroom on top of the applications you deploy. The 4 GB here is for Coolify plus a couple of small apps, not a full production estate.
Is the project alive?
coollabsio/coolify has 63,187 stars, was last pushed 0 days ago, and last cut a release (v4.4.6) 10 days ago. Licence: Apache-2.0. 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 |
| coollabsio/coolify 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.