Its built on top of Kubernetes, based on learnings I've had from previous experiences scaling infrastructure.
If you look at the markup PaaS (Heroku, Fly, Render) applies to IaaS (AWS, Hetzner), it's on the order of 5-10x. But not having that, and trying to stitch together random AWS services is a huge PITA for a medium sized engineering team (we've tried).
On top of all that, theres a whole host of benefits to being on kubernetes, namely, that you can install any helm package with one click, which Canine also manages.
A good example is Sentry -- even though it has an open source offering, almost everyone pays for the cloud version because its too scary to self host. With Canine, its a one click, and you get a sentry.your-domain.com to use for whatever you need.
Recently got a sponsorship from the Portainer team to allow me to dedicate way more time to this project, so hugely grateful to them for that.