About Ployz

Why I built it

I've paid the hosted platforms' bills. My first month on Laravel Cloud came to about $600. On Railway I was paying over $500 a month, and it went up every month. Most of that was the database, because it was busy and used a lot of gigabytes, and a busy database on Railway isn't cheap.

Today one dedicated server at €80 a month runs everything, which is far more than I ever ran on Railway.

I wanted my dream self-hosting platform: a really slick UI, no Kubernetes, no control plane to babysit and no three-server minimum. I also didn't want to be stuck on one server. Going from one server to two and retiring the old one should feel simple. Ployz adds and removes servers today, and moving a database to a new server is coming.

What Ployz does

You push to GitHub and Ployz builds and deploys your app on your own servers, from any provider. Each pull request gets its own preview environment. PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis and MongoDB are one click each. Your whole app sits on one canvas in the dashboard, with live status and logs.

The CLI has --json on every command, and ployz setup agent lets coding agents like Claude Code deploy for you.

Ployz is free on your own servers, with unlimited servers, projects, preview environments and custom domains, and the dashboard is hosted for you on Ployz Cloud.

It's open source. The CLI and server software are Apache-2.0, and the dashboard is AGPL-3.0. If Ployz Cloud goes down, your servers keep serving your apps.

What I think

• Renting a server is usually cheaper than a platform that resells compute, once you count the platform's markup.
• You shouldn't need Kubernetes or a control plane to run a few apps across a few servers.
• Coding agents make running your own servers practical. What they need are good primitives: add a server, deploy, remove.

Find me

The code is on GitHub at getployz/ployz, and I'm nick-potts there. I write about what hosting really costs on the blog.