I run 11 apps across my own servers - a mix of internal tools, side projects, and things I've adopted while testing DeployOS against real infrastructure instead of a demo box. People ask what that actually costs, expecting a big number. Here's the honest breakdown, and the comparison that actually matters.
What's on the server
A representative single box in that fleet: a handful of small Node/Next apps, a couple of background workers, one Postgres database, an Uptime Kuma instance monitoring the rest, and a couple of the smaller apps sharing headroom with each other since they're low-traffic. Nothing exotic - the kind of mix most indie builders or small teams actually run once they've shipped more than one or two things.
The server itself
A VPS with enough RAM and CPU to comfortably run that mix - the kind of box Hetzner, DigitalOcean, or Contabo sell in the $10-20/month range depending on specs - handles it without strain. Scale that up or down depending on how heavy your actual apps are; the point isn't a specific number, it's that the price doesn't change no matter how many apps you add to that same box, right up until you actually run out of RAM or CPU. Going from 3 apps to 11 didn't cost anything extra. Going from 11 to 20 wouldn't either, until the hardware itself is the constraint.
That's the entire monthly infrastructure bill for all 11 apps: one server payment.
What the same 11 apps would cost on managed platforms
This is the number that actually matters, because "$15/month for a VPS" only sounds cheap in isolation. Compared to what:
- A managed PaaS (Heroku, Render, Railway) typically bills per app, sometimes per resource attached to each app (a database add-on, a worker dyno). Eleven apps on a Render-style pricing model, even at modest per-app tiers, lands well into the $150-300+/month range once you're not on free tiers anymore - and several of those platforms cap what free tiers can actually run.
- Shared hosting (cPanel-style plans) typically caps you at one site per plan, PHP-only in a lot of cases, with hard resource limits. Eleven apps would mean eleven separate hosting plans, or hitting a wall almost immediately.
The gap isn't close, and it only gets wider as you add apps - one-time-purchase, unlimited-apps pricing doesn't care whether you're running 3 things or 30. Per-app monthly billing very much does.
What this doesn't include
To be fully honest about the math: this doesn't include my time, and self-managing a VPS is not zero effort even with a tool handling the deploy pipeline, HTTPS, and backups for you. It also doesn't include the occasional cost of scaling the box itself up when a workload actually outgrows it - that's a real cost, it's just infrequent and proportional to actual growth rather than proportional to app count.
And it assumes you're comfortable owning a VPS at all. If you'd rather pay a premium specifically to never think about a server, a managed PaaS is a completely legitimate trade to make - you're paying for that, and it's worth something.
The actual takeaway
The real bill for running 11 apps on one server is whatever that one server costs - full stop, not per app, not per database, not per background worker. If you're only running one thing, the gap versus a managed platform's free tier might not be worth the switch. If you're running several, the math stops being close very quickly.