I built an open source Heroku that costs 1/10th as much to use

I've been working on https://canine.sh for the past year. Tldr: its your run of the mill Heroku, Flyio, Render, etc, except that its fully open source, and free to use (including just using the cloud hosted option)

Built it based on some learnings I've had in the past building startups where we quickly outgrew the single VPS type deployments, moved onto managed platforms like Heroku and Render, and watched our costs explode, with an annoying amount of vendor lockin. Our peak year, we hit over $400k in hosting costs.

Made with shots.so

Goal for this project was to build something that indie hackers can start with and get up and running fast, but has no problem being flexible enough to scale to future needs.

Managed Kubernetes is now widely available and dirt cheap ($10 / month), so you don't have to worry about, and supported by pretty much every single cloud vendor.

This lets you take advantage of a ton of things that Kubernetes does really well, like automatic healthchecks, zero downtime deployments, auto scaling, etc, while also making it easy to use for solo developers or small teams.

The additional benefit of Kubernetes is that it's also possible to host a bunch of other stuff in your cluster via Helm charts, that you’d normally have to pay for like:

• Sentry
• Wordpress
• Metabase
• Dagster
• Airflow
• MongoDB
• Redis
• PostgreSQL
• … And basically every single open source tool under the sun

I've been hacking around on random projects like Reframe and Whiteboarder for myself, and deploying it with Canine and been really happy with it so I figured it was worth a shot sharing it.

Would love feedback, roasts, suggestions!

Source code: https://github.com/czhu12/canine