Vercel Pro, 5 seats → Dokploy, self-hosted
Switch. At $50 an hour, Dokploy saves you $570 over 3 years.
Worth doing only if your hour is worth less than
$62.39/hrBelow that rate, moving to Dokploy 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 × 5 seats, billed monthly | $100.00 |
| Every month | $100.00 |
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 | $29.72 |
| After one year | −$143 |
| After 3 years | $570 |
What you give up, and what you get
You lose
- Vercel's edge network, which one VPS does not replicate at any price
- Automatic image optimisation and instant cache invalidation
- Zero-config Next.js behaviour that exists because Vercel builds both halves
- Preview deployments that cost nothing when idle
You gain
- A fixed bill instead of usage billing that can spike without warning
- Free seats, including for people who only need to read logs
- Any runtime, not only the supported ones
Read this before you decide
- Latency-sensitive global traffic is the case where this loses regardless of price. Put a CDN in front of it or stay on Vercel.
- The $20 per seat excludes usage overages. If bandwidth is why you are here, your Vercel bill is higher than this page assumes and Dokploy wins sooner.
- Dokploy is younger than Coolify with a smaller community. That is a real operational risk on the box that runs your production apps.
Is the project alive?
Dokploy/dokploy has 37,861 stars, was last pushed 3 days ago, and last cut a release (v0.30.8) 20 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 We do not publish comparisons against software that has gone dormant, however good the arithmetic looks.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 |
| Dokploy/dokploy 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.