DEPFLOY VS VERCEL

The same workflow, on hardware you own.

Vercel is a hosting platform — it runs your app and bills you for what that costs. Depfloy is not a host. It connects to a server you rent from anyone, provisions it, and automates it from there. Everything below follows from that one difference.

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DEPFLOY CAPABILITIES

What you get on the servers you already own.

The whole stack on the same machines

The app, the database, the cache and the search index all sit on machines you rent. PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Valkey, ClickHouse and Meilisearch are provisioned on servers you own, on a private network, with the database port open to your app subnet and closed to everything else. There is no separate data vendor to add.

Flat Depfloy subscription

Depfloy does not charge per build, deployment or request. Your provider bills separately for server capacity and any metered bandwidth or storage, so traffic can still affect your total cost.

You keep root

SSH and root access stay yours for the whole time. You can edit the nginx config, install a PHP extension. Depfloy automates on top of your access rather than replacing it.

Backups with restore, across the stack

Six data engines plus project files, scheduled to S3, Cloudflare R2, any S3-compatible endpoint, SFTP, FTP or local disk, with retention and exclusion rules. Restore targets a database you choose, which is what makes a staging refresh from a production dump routine.

Leaving does not break anything

If you stop paying, your servers keep running exactly as they were configured — nginx, certificates, cron, workers and all. There is no platform to be evicted from, because the platform was never holding your app.

SIDE BY SIDE

Checked against their own pages.

Only the points we could cite. Every row links to where the Vercel side came from, with the date it was read — pricing and features move, and an undated claim about someone else's product ages badly.

DIMENSION DEPFLOY VERCEL
Where the app runs A server you rent from any provider, with root access retained by you. Vercel's own platform. Checked Jul 26, 2026 →
Data transfer Depfloy does not meter data transfer. Provider allowances and bandwidth charges depend on the server plan you choose. 1 TB of fast data transfer included on Pro, then billed per GB. Checked Jul 26, 2026 →
Builds Run on your own server and are not counted. Billed per build minute. Checked Jul 26, 2026 →

Vercel is very good at what it does, and this page is not an argument that it is not. It is an argument about where your application, your database and your search index live — and about whether the thing that runs them is yours.

FAQ

Common questions

What do I give up by leaving a platform? +
The edge network and the zero-operations promise. You become responsible for picking a server size, and one machine is one machine. Depfloy automates the operations, but it does not pretend the box is infinite — that is a real trade, not a detail.
Can I move a Next.js app across without rewriting it? +
Usually, if it runs with next start. Anything depending on platform-specific primitives — edge middleware, image optimisation as a service — needs a plan before it moves.
Is this only worth it at scale? +
Not only, but scale is where the difference gets obvious. At low traffic a free tier is hard to beat. The case for owning the machine strengthens as the metered lines on the invoice start moving on their own.

Other comparisons

Depfloy vs Coolify Depfloy vs Laravel Forge Depfloy vs Ploi Depfloy vs RunCloud

Try it on one server.

7 days free, no credit card. Connect a clean server and deploy one test project.

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