What a typical app really costs
The same 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 40 GB server with 500 GB of traffic a month, priced three ways. Every number is the whole monthly bill you pay, not just the DollarDeploy fee. List prices in USD, checked September 2026.
| Cost | DollarDeploy + Hetznerdollardeploy.com/pricing | Vercel Provercel.com/pricing | AWS EC2aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing |
| Monthly total, all-in | $12.09 | $20.00 | $66.65 |
| Included traffic | 20 TB | 1 TB | 100 GB |
| Extra traffic | ~$1/TB | ~$150/TB | ~$90/TB |
| Cost of a traffic spike | No compute charge within capacity | Metered above allowances | Metered above allowances |
Prices checked September 2026 at 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 40 GB with 500 GB of traffic. Traffic only: Vercel function and build usage, or an AWS load balancer, would add to those bills.
Architecture, side by side.
Price is only half of it. This is who runs the control plane, who owns the server, and what the deployment platform costs you in resources.
| Architecture | DollarDeploy | Vercel | AWS | Coolify (self-hosted) | Dokploy (self-hosted) |
| Control plane location | Hosted by DollarDeploy | Hosted by Vercel | AWS console and APIs | On your server | On your server |
| Application infrastructure ownership | Yours | Vercel | Yours (your AWS account) | Yours | Yours |
| Control plane on application server? | |||||
| Docker required for app runtime? | Managed | Optional | |||
| Native systemd support | You configure it | ||||
| Where builds run | DollarDeploy build infra | Vercel | You configure it | Your server by default | Your server by default |
| Build CPU/RAM consumes app server? | Depends | ||||
| Open-source control plane | |||||
| Who maintains the control plane | DollarDeploy | Vercel | You | You | You |
| Persistent server processes | |||||
| Apps/services can share server capacity | |||||
| Minimum / recommended host | 1 GB RAM / 10 GB disk | No server to size | You size the EC2 instance | 2 CPU / 2 GB / 10 GB | 2 GB RAM / 30 GB disk |
Self-hosted minimums are the officially recommended figures for each platform, not measured usage. Coolify and Dokploy both support remote application servers and dedicated build servers, and both also offer hosted cloud options.
Detailed comparisons