It was exciting until I saw the pricing for self hosting...

"Pricing is based on the specification of the VM you are connecting:

$5 per vCPU + $2.5 per GB of Ram + $0.25 per 10GB of disk.

Example: if you are connecting a VM with 2 vCPU + 4GB Ram + 40GB Disk, the cost per month will be:

(52) + (2.54) + (0.25*4) = ~$21/mo

Price per hour is then calculated like this: $21/730h = $0.02876/h

You can create one BYOVM service for free. To be eligible the VM you connect must have no more than 2 vCPU, max 4 GB of ram and max 80 GB of storage." https://docs.elest.io/books/cloud-providers/page/byovm-bring...

I understand your point, but we have to maintain a huge amount of OSS and also provide human support when needed. That's why it's not free. FYI we do publish most of our stuff open source on GitHub (https://github.com/elestio-examples/) and also on docker hub (https://hub.docker.com/u/elestio). Although some companies prefer to pay us to get peace of mind and a strong DevOps team to help them when critical stuffs going wrong

I understand your need to maintain profitability. However this pricing is structured for corporate. BYOVM home enthusiasts expect a flat fee that's easy to understand. Pricing based on hardware scaling isn't really acceptable for that market.

This looks great! I see on your website that you have corporate users. Do you see a lot of interest from companies for this kind of product?

Yes we do, especially for exotic software when we are the only managed option available on the market

Wow this looks really good. Well done! Good work!

Could you share how you think you compare to cloudron? Are you kind of a IaaS host coordinator?

Thanks for your kind words :) Main difference is the human support, catalog size, CICD from Git and we help users in case of anything going wrong or with advanced customizations. Also we include Hosting + management fees + human support in a price per hour, we also have BringYourOwnVM and BringYourOwnAWS account options.

I have a few hand-written node apps with a small express API. Can I deploy those on elest.io without having to worry about the underlying OS and its security and network setup? That would be very interesting for me. Kind of like a simple and cheap webhoster with php: Upload your files, forget about the rest. Is it that what you offer?

hi, fellow Elest.io user here. Yes, that is a perfect use case, aside from a regular OSS deployment. The CI/CD feature is exactly what you’re describing - it’s basically a private netlify/vercel, but can run express on a server (vs. serverless only/no express)

I myself run a Next.js app on it, it’s amazing how much faster it is than Vercel… even on the cheapest VM (1 CPU / 2 Gb RAM) I now get instant page loads vs. long long seconds of waiting with Vercel.