You can certainly roll your own setup and get the minimal functionality _you_ need. Thats the general "build vs buy" question.

Dokku itself comes with a ton of functionality and is actively developed separate from your app. It's been built for thoughtful extensibility (one person in this story mentioned adding TCP/UDP support in a day, as an example) so if it doesn't do what you want, you can add it. We also provide a "curated" experience that handles things based on years of working on other deployment tools (and not just simply cloning the Heroku CLI and experience, though it has had a very deep influence). If our workflow and experience are what you want, its there today.

With something you build/maintain, the system is often simpler. Maybe one or two tools with a couple hundred lines of code, all fairly grokable. If you need to extend it, you know exactly where and can do so. In fact, thats how a lot of Dokku alternatives come out - someone didn't like our codebase or setup and decided to write something else[1]. Building your own deployment stack is often how most companies start - roll your own against tooling that is close-by or familiar.

The unfortunate thing is you now own that experience, so if you need functionality, you need to build it, which can be distracting from your actual business goals (unless you're a deployment tooling company, in which case this totally makes sense!). Would you rather spend 10 hours working on a feature for your customers or hacking together a version of review apps? If this is for your own home cluster, maybe that makes sense, but even then, I'd assume most people _should_ just want to deploy their app and move on vs work on that tooling.

All that said, if Minikube + Ingress and a few yaml templates work for you, go to town. Feel free to try us out if you want a more curated experience :)

   - [1] Piku is an example where they wanted ARM support and we didn't have it yet, while the Caprover developer wanted something that works with Swarm.