Very close to the worst alternative for people who actually need Heroku, but it won't stop people from plugging it to death and back.

Eh, no, depends on why you used Heroku in the first place. Way back when, I used it because the UI was dead simple and it Just Worked™. If I can replicate that with a VPS and have a good UI around it that takes care of everything, it's functionally the same to me.

"Depends on what you used it for" applies to just about any platform.

Realistically, self-hosting the PaaS defeats the purpose of a PaaS for the crowd Heroku was attracting.

Heroku was one of the first to have that seamless UX, only after which others like Fly or Render or Railway came to copy it. I wager people were primarily attracted to that user experience and only minimally cared that it was fully hosted versus not, because there was also AWS at that time.

How do you think self-hosting affects that seamless UX they value.

As I said, the correct software on top handles it all for you. I don't think you've actually tried Dokploy.

Dokku is better. And neither is what Heroku's bread and butter customer needs.

But alas, my interest in painstaking explaining why self-hosting is fundamentally incompatible with a product who's value prop was "nothing to install" is waning.

Have a good one.

You and I simply have different opinions on what Heroku's value proposition was, because, again, AWS was also right there and also was "nothing to install." Therefore Heroku was used primarily for its dead simple UX, something which is replicated even in a self-hosted environment, because, again, the value prop was never about PaaS or self-hosting, it was always about the user experience.

Have a good weekend.

Having used Heroku at multiple startups during the 2012–2015 years, this is not correct.

With heroku you could `git push heroku master` and it would do everything else from there. The UX was nice, but that was not the reason people chose it. It was so easy compared to running on EC2 instances with salt or whatever. For simple projects, it was incredible.

That's literally the UX I'm talking about and that's what other companies copied too. To be clear, I'm not (just) talking about how heroku.com looks and works, I'm talking about the entire user experience including git push to deploy, so I believe you are agreeing with me here. That is why I said VPS with Dokploy or Coolify and so on have the same UX, both in the command line with git push deploys supported as well as (now, at least) a vastly superior website user experience, akin to Vercel.

Ok so I am researching what to use in this space - a Vercel-ish clone on cheap VPS - and, is Dokploy really the best option?

What do you think about Caprover? https://github.com/caprover/caprover

Or uh.. Dokku https://github.com/dokku/dokku

Right now I am using Coolify but so far it has not been exactly reliable

I don't like their UIs, Dokploy's is far more modern. And yes Coolify is not known to be very reliable, especially because it's built on PHP.

Check out these videos:

https://youtu.be/ELkPcuO5ebo

https://youtu.be/RoANBROvUeE