Coolify is awesome! We use it for lots of things at Svelte Society. From self-hosting marketing and analytics to running our own Nextcloud instance as well as a bunch of other stuff.
What makes Coolify so useful?
It's never taken me more than 30 minutes to deploy self-hosted tools, from Nextcloud to Prosody, even without Docker. These "serverless" platforms certainly aren't any cheaper than bare metal and are at best marginally quicker to deploy, so what makes Coolify so useful to you?
Is it easier to maintain, manage dependencies, or load balance over time? What am I missing?
Outside that I deploy apps outside coolify as it doesn't scale automatically.
Solutions like Coolify help to save more than 30 minutes.
I have recorded a sample of my own herokulikeinspiredbycoolifysuccesssaas where I deploy a WordPress instance (with MySQL and ability to enable backups with 1 click) in less than 3 minutes, including introduction, explanations and afterword.
Having the right app template allows to easily spin any number of services you need in an ultra-short time.
Mine is based on the Docker Swarm, so you're getting the proven solution under the hood.
Mine is located here: https://ptah.sh
Idea is the same as with Coolify, but a little bit more opinionated and built solely on Docker Swarm.
30 minutes honestly sounds like a long time compared to the time it takes to do this with a PaaS.
Some other stuff that's nice: multiple environments (staging, production, you name it), Multiple deploy targets if you're running many servers (via Docker Swarm), support for Teams (in case you need multiple people to handle something, update environment variables, etc). There's lots.
Maybe you should give it a whirl? I don't know your exact use-cases