Is Coolify Good for Production Deployments?

This article won't be about teaching or a how-to tutorial, but more about my experience and honest opinion on a self-hosted Coolify for production and why I got there.

I'll explain in a short form these topics:

• How I normally deploy my apps
• Why did I decide to change my way
• Is Coolify good and for what do I use it

What are my deployments?

I try to automate my work to great lengths. I try not to waste time on stuff that could be done without me. A part of my tooling for deployments is:

• k8s
• helm-charts
• GCP

Each extends my deployment and makes it easier to scale. I enjoy using this setup and I'm quite comfortable with it. The issue is that it gets expensive easily.

The moment you decide to make it stable and scalable, you need to use 2 zones of availability with replicas for each of your services and 2 pods for each service. This setup needs resources, but CPU and memory are expensive.

Having a low percentage of downtime is expensive!

I'll go into detail about my deployments in another article, but to summarise. It's good for large and scalable apps, but not for indie hackers with small apps.

Why did I decide to change my deployment strategy?

I have several projects, that don't need a lot of resources. A good example is KohiFIT which is inactive and is waiting for a turn to allow registrations. This was deployed on GCP and cost me more than 100$ a month.

Another example is this blog which was in the same cluster and increased the costs. It's built with StrapiCMS and has a Postgre + NextJS app. These are 3 services, so they need resources, so the logical choice was to go inside GCP to spend less time.

This kept increasing the bill for stuff that earned me 0$ per month and it was not even close to being smart. I've started researching an easy way to deploy my apps, but to still have the perks of automated deployments, logging, backups, and stuff that save me time.

The logical choice was to start searching for a solution. From being active on X I started seeing a lot of posts about self-hosted Coolify instances. It took me some time to decide it was time to dive into the VPS setup and reduce my costs. So I got a virtual machine from a friend who offered this and installed it for a test. (you can easily buy a Hetzner machine, I'll also try them in the future) 

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Is Coolify good?

I'm only going to speak from my own experience. I have more than 7+ services deployed on Coolify, and more are waiting to be deployed when my next project goes live! (it'll help all indie hackers searching for the best community, stay tuned!)

The development experience was 7/10 as the documentation was good, but it was unclear to me for some stuff about Cloudflare Tunnels. In general, even if you're not DevOps you'll still manage to install it on your VPS machine. It takes one curl command. The installation is explained thoroughly in their docs.

If you've used Vercel or anything similar you'll get a grasp of it right away. It's a process of adding a project and then a service which they have predefined templates for most. You could add your own files for Docker or docker-compose. One of the best things is they have GitHub automation and you could attach your repository and have auto-deployments out of the box.

You could backup your databases to AWS/R2 (which is generally the same). Automated process which by a cron-job uploads to a bucket your database or a selected database. I prefer to do it like this, as even if I have local copies, it's smart to have your DB backups outside the whole machine.

There are a lot more functionalities and you could extend it as much as you like. You could easily add metrics and monitoring of your whole machine.

Coolify for production

As we've gotten to the main part of what you're interested in. I've given you the positives of using it, now I'll list some cons. (as of the time of writing this article)

• Scalability issues and replications for large apps
• Using a language like JS that can use only 1 thread means that even deploying your app on a machine that has 16CPU, you'll still not be able to use them. For this, you'll need multiple replicas and a load balancer. 
• Single point of failure - your VPS machine dies or Coolify has a bug, and you're down without any idea what to do.
• Not validated in time. Even if's trending now, it's still used mainly by indie hackers, so it's not "battle-tested".

I won't go into much more detail, you get the picture, but the uncertainty is the biggest issue. You're in control, but not exactly.

To ease up some of the things I've said, they have an amazing Discord community that helped me with deployments. The answer time is relatively fast and even if they don't answer you, the founder is active on X and streaming regularly, so you could try there.

• Will I deploy my next app with Coolify? Yes.
• Will I be skeptical, as it might fail and have an easy deployment at another place? Yes.
• Do I recommend Coolify to newbies? No. Choose a service and pay a little bit more that will handle everything for you and start learning how to move from it, step by step.

It's a game of compromises. You either decide to pay more or to spend time learning about Linux and deployment while saving money.

Most apps won't need scalability, 99.9% uptime, rolling updates, or shiny automation. Don't over-engineer what could be improved in the future without much effort.

In summary, I am using Coolify for production and will continue to use it. If any big issues occur, I would update this article, write another, or just spam the creator on Twitter. You'll know.

If you have any questions, reach out to me on Twitter/X or LinkedIn. I've recently created an Instagram account, which is empty, but I'll try to start posting there! A follow is highly appreciated at all places!

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