I feel like it's only possible to get excited about software anymore if it's open source and not in the control of some vendor. Not because I care a lot about the ideology of free software, it's just because the way corporations take over and ruin/sell out everything has been so demoralizing.
There's been quite some time that have the same feeling. You can always find exceptions of course, but in this case it is typically the sort that proves the rule.
I personally blame the "growth at all costs" that is pervasive to tech industry, where "simply" being an established, moderately profitable, healthy company is seen as negative. It brings along all sorts of perverse incentives.
I just don't see myself needing to do much differently than I did 10 years ago...heck 20 years ago. Sure some frameworks make things nicer but we had the ability to drag and drop labels on photos and create photo/video montages with audio in our startup back in 2005.
Maybe it could be done with better abstractions today but I just don't think it's worth all the complexity that it seems to come with nowadays.
Open-source is rarely sustainable, I use many open-source projects, and I support/sponsor them when possible, but many simply don't survive long and the builder loses interested.
With Coolify it's different, because many companies are willing to sponsor the project, so it's already sustainable.
What are you talking about? Corporations ruining open source is the norm in 2024, indie devs hiding their source code from corps takeover is the new free software.
>indie devs hiding their source code from corps takeover is the new free software.
High power level take.
The Stallman ethos of Free Software simply hasn't played out the way idealists thought it would. Instead, libraries are standardized by megacorps to farm employees inculcated into their design patterns and get GitHub clout chasers to fix bugs for free.
Open source really needs something like the CC-BY-NC-ND* license. Code is open but you can't profit from it. Unmodified redistribution requires credit. You can modify the code for personal use but you can't redistribute it without permission.
This model at least eliminates the potential maliciousness of a lot of closed-source software while leaving room for indie devs to profit from their work.
>However, Coolify’s explosive growth in 2024 suggests we’re witnessing a different level of adoption and impact on the wider software community.
This worries me about the state of Github more than anything else. For the past couple years now we've been seeing these "viral" repos that catch on for one reason or another, get tens of thousands of stars in a few months (in part due to posts like this), and then languish. Time was that a few thousand Github stars really meant something; that a project had steadily gained support over years and was at a place that was production ready for the masses. Not so anymore.
Most recent Github stars are came from big tech youtuber's videos.
That's kind of my point. It's becoming impossible now to tell the difference between long running stable repos vs something someone with social media followers just started pushing by stars alone anymore.
Has anyone tried out Tau [1]? It's similar to Coolify but supports multiple nodes which is appealing to me as I have spotty internet and distributing an app across several pi's in different locations sounds ideal.
I’m guessing they’re referring to Vercel’s business strategy and general influence on open source lately? I know it’s a thing on the twitter, but maybe I’m missing something more overt and obvious.
I was using https://caprover.com but I'm slowly migrating all services to Coolify.
CapRover still has a few things that it does better (better custom-domain support, more 1-click apps, integrated NetData monitoring, etc.), but overall Coolify is a lot more beginner-friendly and simpler to use.
I liked coolify when I was hosting my wordpress, bitwarden, and a couple of personal projects via github on a VPS, it made the annoying step of getting certs for all the https domains into a one click operation.
Once I forgot my password to the admin panel and it just wasn't that big of deal to blow away the VPS and set it all up from scratch. Feels good to not be anxious about that.
Shameless plug but I built https://flexstack.com for similar reasons. I wanted a Render/Vercel alternative on my own AWS account and all of the other options either didn't go far enough or were way too expensive for someone bootstrapping.
Marketing developer tools is commonly much harder than developing them.
The hard thing about adopting a product like yours is that as a potential customer you never know whether the thing you want to do is actually going to be easy or hard or impossible or time consuming.
The home page preaches all the right things, but it's very busy and information dense and yet nothing on the home page gives me enough detail for me to know if it will actually work for me for real.
Figuring out whether a product like this will actually work for me is the real cost I'm looking at, not the $10/month cost. At present, the figuring out if it will work for me cost looks arbitrarily high, because I have no information to go on on the home page without trying to work through an actual deployment on my own.
The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool. It needs to focus instead on explaining things. Adding words, either spoken or on title cards, would help significantly. Yes, I understand there are words in the video - they are words that talk about goals of your company, not words that tell me what is going on in the video. I see lots of things that I recognize or that make sense, but I don't know where it's going or what I'm watching when it starts, so I have no schema in my mind to organize what I'm watching. Getting rid of the "music," or replacing it with much less distracting audio, would help as well - it makes it much harder to concentrate on trying to understand what I'm seeing. Remember, I am watching the video with the goal of understanding "will this do the specific things I need it to do" not "do we agree on the high level goals of what would be great to have."
Coolify is winning today, not because its tech is better than competitors, but because it's tech is more understandable than competitors.
Thanks for the feedback! I appreciate your honesty and your willingness to share.
> The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool
I have been working on a Loom version. Before putting a lot of time into the demo, I wanted to validate that people were watching it (and they are). I quickly put something together in iMovie that would introduce the product in <1 minute, was not trying to be cool. It stings to hear, but I accept that was the vibe.
> it's very busy and information dense ... nothing on the home page gives me enough detail
It has ~the same number of words as Render/Coolify/Vercel, so I will take your point that I'm not yet telling the story as well.
Not at the moment unfortunately. I understand it's more friction, but you can just clone any of those repos and deploy them to FlexStack in 1-click by linking your GitHub account.
At Coherence (withcoherence.com - I'm a cofounder) we are delivering the open-source benefits of Coolify (less vendor lock-in, cheap hosting costs) via our open-source CNC framework (cncframework.com) while still keeping a hosted SaaS control plane that eliminates the "few hours of fiddling with setup" that the blog author minimizes here. Maintenance and configuration complexity over time (as you customize and use click-ops to configure) are endless, especially as you get more usage or host more projects.
Coolify is awesome software, and alongside similar tools like Caprover, Dokku, and Cloud66, it has its role. But for business use-cases I believe that giving up managed cloud services is too big a leap to make sense, and that a middle-ground approach will win in the long term.
How is this different from the Coolify hosted cloud, apart from the fact that you are the co-founder of Coherence and not Coolify.
I've used neither solution, but just at a glance, right now I'd bet on Coolify -- it has more permissive license, it has active community of third party contributors and it amassed a large amount of private and corporate sponsors that likely make it sustainable.
On the other hand, you've raised $3.9m more that a year ago. What happens if the money runs out?
Maybe you can clarify what your solution offers that Coolify doesn't.
Appreciate the POV, and agree that Coolify has a much better community around it! A lot we can learn from. Not sure we agree on the license front since we do allow commercial use.
Coolify and cnc are very different technical solutions. Coolify is a server you deploy to a VM that then can schedule workloads onto that VM, managing features like ingress and updates. cnc is a client-side CLI that schedules workloads into managed cloud services like lambda, cloud run, ECS, or Kubernetes. It orchestrates public cloud provided services instead of providing them itself (e.g. RDS vs. MySQL in a docker container on a VM). The trade-offs here are too big for a comment and both are a great fit for different use cases. We dive in a bit deeper with our POV here: https://www.withcoherence.com/post/the-2024-web-hosting-repo...
Readit News
I personally blame the "growth at all costs" that is pervasive to tech industry, where "simply" being an established, moderately profitable, healthy company is seen as negative. It brings along all sorts of perverse incentives.
Maybe it could be done with better abstractions today but I just don't think it's worth all the complexity that it seems to come with nowadays.
Make Web Pages Reload Again.
With Coolify it's different, because many companies are willing to sponsor the project, so it's already sustainable.
High power level take.
The Stallman ethos of Free Software simply hasn't played out the way idealists thought it would. Instead, libraries are standardized by megacorps to farm employees inculcated into their design patterns and get GitHub clout chasers to fix bugs for free.
Open source really needs something like the CC-BY-NC-ND* license. Code is open but you can't profit from it. Unmodified redistribution requires credit. You can modify the code for personal use but you can't redistribute it without permission.
This model at least eliminates the potential maliciousness of a lot of closed-source software while leaving room for indie devs to profit from their work.
*[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/]
This worries me about the state of Github more than anything else. For the past couple years now we've been seeing these "viral" repos that catch on for one reason or another, get tens of thousands of stars in a few months (in part due to posts like this), and then languish. Time was that a few thousand Github stars really meant something; that a project had steadily gained support over years and was at a place that was production ready for the masses. Not so anymore.
GH stars of Coolify built over 4 years.
That is not how I understood the chart in the article (vs Dokku), 2024 hockey stick!
That's kind of my point. It's becoming impossible now to tell the difference between long running stable repos vs something someone with social media followers just started pushing by stars alone anymore.
[1]: https://github.com/taubyte/tau
> What happened next with Next.js and Vercel is far less magical...
What happened - could someone elaborate or share a link?
Found this discussion - perhaps related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40682711 “Vercel ends open-source sponsorship program giving projects 24hr notice”
Deleted Comment
CapRover still has a few things that it does better (better custom-domain support, more 1-click apps, integrated NetData monitoring, etc.), but overall Coolify is a lot more beginner-friendly and simpler to use.
Once I forgot my password to the admin panel and it just wasn't that big of deal to blow away the VPS and set it all up from scratch. Feels good to not be anxious about that.
The hard thing about adopting a product like yours is that as a potential customer you never know whether the thing you want to do is actually going to be easy or hard or impossible or time consuming.
The home page preaches all the right things, but it's very busy and information dense and yet nothing on the home page gives me enough detail for me to know if it will actually work for me for real.
Figuring out whether a product like this will actually work for me is the real cost I'm looking at, not the $10/month cost. At present, the figuring out if it will work for me cost looks arbitrarily high, because I have no information to go on on the home page without trying to work through an actual deployment on my own.
The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool. It needs to focus instead on explaining things. Adding words, either spoken or on title cards, would help significantly. Yes, I understand there are words in the video - they are words that talk about goals of your company, not words that tell me what is going on in the video. I see lots of things that I recognize or that make sense, but I don't know where it's going or what I'm watching when it starts, so I have no schema in my mind to organize what I'm watching. Getting rid of the "music," or replacing it with much less distracting audio, would help as well - it makes it much harder to concentrate on trying to understand what I'm seeing. Remember, I am watching the video with the goal of understanding "will this do the specific things I need it to do" not "do we agree on the high level goals of what would be great to have."
Coolify is winning today, not because its tech is better than competitors, but because it's tech is more understandable than competitors.
> The "explainer" video is trying very hard to be cool
I have been working on a Loom version. Before putting a lot of time into the demo, I wanted to validate that people were watching it (and they are). I quickly put something together in iMovie that would introduce the product in <1 minute, was not trying to be cool. It stings to hear, but I accept that was the vibe.
> it's very busy and information dense ... nothing on the home page gives me enough detail
It has ~the same number of words as Render/Coolify/Vercel, so I will take your point that I'm not yet telling the story as well.
Not at the moment unfortunately. I understand it's more friction, but you can just clone any of those repos and deploy them to FlexStack in 1-click by linking your GitHub account.
Coolify is awesome software, and alongside similar tools like Caprover, Dokku, and Cloud66, it has its role. But for business use-cases I believe that giving up managed cloud services is too big a leap to make sense, and that a middle-ground approach will win in the long term.
I've used neither solution, but just at a glance, right now I'd bet on Coolify -- it has more permissive license, it has active community of third party contributors and it amassed a large amount of private and corporate sponsors that likely make it sustainable.
On the other hand, you've raised $3.9m more that a year ago. What happens if the money runs out?
Maybe you can clarify what your solution offers that Coolify doesn't.
Coolify and cnc are very different technical solutions. Coolify is a server you deploy to a VM that then can schedule workloads onto that VM, managing features like ingress and updates. cnc is a client-side CLI that schedules workloads into managed cloud services like lambda, cloud run, ECS, or Kubernetes. It orchestrates public cloud provided services instead of providing them itself (e.g. RDS vs. MySQL in a docker container on a VM). The trade-offs here are too big for a comment and both are a great fit for different use cases. We dive in a bit deeper with our POV here: https://www.withcoherence.com/post/the-2024-web-hosting-repo...