Serverless Sucks – Go Back to Self-Hosting

One of the largest industries in the development world is serverless. Platforms like Vercel, Netlify, etc., are all SaaS solutions built atop AWS. The idea is smart—it simplifies basically everything in the developer lifecycle, from CI/CD to redundant hosting of all required microservices for an app. It sounds awesome, but here’s the catch:

It’s expensive.

Honestly, expensive is putting it lightly. Websites like Serverless Horrors show that serverless cloud platforms can, will, have, and continue to run developers thousands upon thousands of dollars in expenses. No one wants to wake up to a $3,000 Vercel bill.

"But look at all the services they have! It really simplifies the DX!"

Remember when Microsoft MySQL Server was a thing? Or when you could just install a LAMP stack onto a machine and call it a day? Not anymore. Now you get to deploy 20+ Lambda functions to launch your small-time blog app that maybe 50 people will read per day if you're lucky. Need a simple cron job? Enjoy employing GCP’s Cloud Functions, Cloud Scheduler, and Pub/Sub, when a $5 Altivox Virtual Machine handles it for you—and can even handle much more.

Want a database? Install MySQL/MariaDB like a normal, sane person. If you want key-value, use Redis. Or if you want NoSQL, self-host MongoDB. Why pay for Firestore when self-hosting Supabase is 2,000× easier (and cheaper!)? Don’t even get me started on the troubleshooting when your Firestore query breaks for no reason…

Containerizing your app? Just use Docker—it’s the OG of container software. Make a Dockerfile, choose your Docker image, install your app, and deploy. Cloud Run is just marked-up, overengineered Docker that burns a hole in your wallet.

"But you don’t understand! I need a private cloud and inter-communication!"

Go ahead—Cloud Run is great! Just remember the bills you’ll pay and the hours you’ll spend setting up networking and IAM. Fun fact: you’ll spend less money renting a dedicated server, installing Proxmox VE, and making a few containers to act as an internal router setup.

"But it makes my life so much easier! It just integrates so well!"

Coolify is a self-hostable Vercel. It has all the integrations you need, want, and would use. With a simple copy-paste install script—it just works.

If you think about it, serverless isn’t server-less—it’s just less server. Everything is run on a machine; where else would it run? The cloud isn’t real—it’s a concept. AWS, GCP, Azure, etc., are just overengineered, overpriced hosting companies. Return to the old days, when hobby developers were spending $10/mo to host all their development apps and services, when you needed a small understanding of how to use the command line. When companies could pay third parties a significantly smaller chunk for managed support after going to production to handle issues for them. It worked. Look back to before AWS’s takeover—that’s how everything was run, and no one had problems.