Self-Hosting vs. Managed Platforms: The Real Cost Breakdown

"Just use Vercel" is good advice — until your bill arrives. We ran the same Next.js app across three setups and tracked every cost for 30 days.

The test app

A production Next.js 15 app with:

• ~50 routes, ISR enabled
• Postgres database
• Redis for caching
• ~100K monthly visitors
• ~500GB bandwidth/month

The results

	Vercel Pro	AWS (ECS + RDS)	Openship (self-hosted)
Compute	$150/mo	$85/mo	$24/mo
Database	$50/mo (Neon)	$45/mo	Included
Bandwidth	$120/mo	$45/mo	Included
SSL/Domains	Included	$1/mo	Included
Total	$320/mo	$176/mo	$24/mo

The self-hosted Openship setup runs on a single Hetzner VPS (CPX31: 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, 160GB SSD).

The trade-offs

Managed platforms give you zero-ops. You push code, it deploys. That's real value.

But Openship closes the gap significantly:

• AI handles config — Build detection, Dockerfile generation, and SSL are automatic.
• One-command deploys — openship deploy is just as fast.
• Built-in monitoring — Logs, metrics, and alerts out of the box.

The remaining trade-off is server maintenance — OS updates, disk space, uptime monitoring. For most teams, that's a few hours per month.

When to self-host

Self-hosting makes sense when:

• Your monthly bill exceeds ~$100 on managed platforms
• You need data sovereignty or compliance
• You want predictable, flat-rate pricing
• You're deploying multiple apps (cost stays the same)

Try it

curl -fsSL https://get.openship.io | sh

Your server, your data, your bill.