A Vercel Alternative That Deploys to a VPS You Own

Vercel is for teams that want to push code and never think about a server: it builds from Git, runs the app on its own infrastructure and serves it through a global CDN. Shipown is for developers who would rather run the same app on a Linux server they rent at a flat monthly price, and who accept that the server is then theirs to look after. Shipown is a desktop app for Windows and Linux that deploys to that server over SSH.

The two are not the same kind of product. Vercel is hosting plus a deployment workflow; Shipown is only the deployment and operations side, pointed at hosting you buy elsewhere. This page sets out where that difference helps and where it costs you. If you are weighing several self-hosted options, the self-hosted Vercel alternatives guide compares six of them.

What is Vercel?

Vercel is a hosted platform. Your application is built from your Git repository and runs on Vercel's infrastructure, and you manage it through a web dashboard and the vercel CLI (Vercel pricing). Every change can produce a preview deployment, and production sits behind a global CDN with DDoS mitigation and a web application firewall.

When a release goes wrong, Instant Rollback returns traffic to an earlier deployment: on Hobby, the previous deployment only; on Pro, any eligible one (Instant Rollback). Pro adds role-based access control, and the platform offers rolling releases and Skew Protection. On the AI side, Vercel has v0, an AI agent that builds full-stack apps; an AI Gateway that accepts your own provider keys; and Vercel Agent, in beta on Pro.

None of that asks you to patch an operating system, rotate logs or watch a disk fill up. That is the point of Vercel, and it is a real advantage.

Why developers look for a Vercel alternative

The free plan is for personal, non-commercial use

Vercel's Hobby plan costs nothing, but Vercel describes it as "for personal, non-commercial use" (Hobby plan). A side project that starts taking payments, or a site built for a client, falls outside it. Commercial work starts on Pro.

Hobby has hard caps instead of overage

Each month, Hobby includes 100 GB of Fast Data Transfer, 10 GB of Fast Origin Transfer, 1 million CDN requests, 1 million function invocations, 4 CPU-hours of Active CPU, 360 GB-hours of memory and 5,000 image transformations. It also allows 100 deployments a day, one concurrent build, one hour of runtime logs and no team collaboration (Vercel limits). There is no paid overage on Hobby: going past a limit usually means waiting, for up to 30 days, until the allowance resets.

Pro is billed per seat and per use

Pro costs $20 per developer seat per month, with viewer seats free, as of October 2026. Each month includes a $20 usage credit, 1 TB of Fast Data Transfer and 10 million CDN requests; beyond that, usage is pay-as-you-go with no cap by default (Vercel pricing). For many teams that is a fair price for what Vercel runs on their behalf. For others the issue is predictability: the bill grows with the number of people who deploy and with the traffic that arrives, so a spike is a billing question as well as a capacity one.

The rest of the stack already lives on a server

If the database, a background worker or a Docker Compose service already runs on a VPS, putting the frontend on the same machine keeps it next to its data, on one bill, behind one set of credentials. That is not a flaw in Vercel. It is a differently shaped project.

How Shipown works differently

Shipown does not host anything. It is a desktop app, a Windows .exe and a Linux .deb, that connects to a server you already have and deploys to it.

Your server, over plain SSH, with no agent

You add a server with its host, port, user and key or password, and Shipown tests the connection before it saves anything (first connection). Nothing of Shipown is installed on the server. It inspects the machine and reports what is missing, then offers PM2 preparation, Docker installation, and Nginx with Certbot for domains and HTTPS (server operations). Ubuntu, Debian, the RHEL family and Alpine are handled.

Node under PM2, static sites from Nginx, containers from a Dockerfile

Next.js, Nuxt, Remix, SvelteKit, NestJS, Fastify and plain Express run under PM2, with the port, health check and restart policy set for you. Vite, Astro and plain HTML sites are built once and served straight from Nginx. Anything with a Dockerfile or a Compose file is built and run as containers behind Nginx (Docker deploys). For a Next.js app, the Next.js VPS guide shows what this replaces step by step.

A person presses deploy

Shipown has no automatic deploy on git push and no preview deployments. You connect GitHub and choose a repository and one of its real branches, or point at a folder on your computer. Shipown proposes a framework, install command, build command and output directory, every one of them editable, and what you approve is what runs (framework detection). It does tell you when a branch has moved ahead of what a server is running, and by how many commits (branch watching).

Build on the server or on your PC

You choose where the build runs. A server build installs and compiles remotely. A PC build uploads a checksum-verified artifact over SSH and is not rebuilt on the server; Node, Next.js and Docker builds on the PC use Linux Docker and target the server's architecture (deployments). Either way, what you watch is the real install and build output, not a progress animation (real logs).

Releases instead of a single live copy

Every deploy lands in its own release directory, and the live pointer moves only after the build and the health check pass. A failed deploy restores the previous release by itself, and rolling back later is picking a known-good release from the app (rollback).

Domains and HTTPS through Nginx and Certbot

Point a domain at an app and Shipown writes the Nginx virtual host, tests the configuration before reloading, and asks Certbot for a certificate. A configuration Nginx rejects is put back the way it was, and certificate expiry is surfaced in the app.

Vercel vs Shipown: feature comparison

Pricing compared

The two bills are built differently. Vercel's price covers the platform and the hosting together. With Shipown, the licence covers the app, and hosting is a separate bill from whoever rents you the server.

Vercel, as of October 2026

• Hobby: $0, for personal, non-commercial use, with hard monthly caps and no paid overage.
• Pro: $20 per developer seat per month, viewer seats free, including a $20 usage credit, 1 TB of Fast Data Transfer and 10 million CDN requests, then pay-as-you-go with no cap by default.
• Enterprise: on request.

Source: vercel.com/pricing.

Shipown

A free trial, then a paid licence for a fixed period that does not renew by itself — current prices are on the pricing page. A licence key carries an expiry and a device limit. Shipown is not in the path of your traffic, so the licence does not depend on your requests or bandwidth.

What a VPS actually costs

With Shipown, the hosting line is a VPS. You pay the provider a flat monthly price for a server of a given size: a number of CPU cores, an amount of memory and a disk. Prices vary by provider, region and size, so compare current price lists rather than trusting a figure in an article, this one included.

What the flat price gives you, and what it does not:

• It is predictable. The same server costs the same in a quiet month and a busy one.
• It is a capacity ceiling, not a meter. A traffic spike does not raise the bill; it slows the server down or pushes it past what it can serve. Growing means resizing the server or adding another one.
• Check the transfer allowance. Many providers include a monthly amount of outbound traffic and charge for, or slow down, anything beyond it. Read the plan's terms before you compare it with a CDN.
• Provider backups and snapshots are often a separate line on the bill.
• One server can run several apps. Each Node app, static site or container gets its own Nginx virtual host on the same machine, so the price is shared across them.

The third cost is time, which the next section is about.

What you take on when you self-host

Part of what Vercel charges for is people keeping the platform running. On your own VPS, that work is yours. Shipown helps with parts of it; it does not take the responsibility away.

Patching

The operating system needs security updates, and so do Node.js, Nginx and your app's dependencies. On Ubuntu and Debian, the unattended-upgrades package applies security updates automatically; sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades switches it on. Some updates, such as a new kernel, still need a reboot that you schedule. When something breaks after an update, Shipown's AI terminal can help find out why: with your own key, it proposes one shell command at a time with its reason, and you approve each one.

Backups

Shipown finds the MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and MongoDB engines installed on the server, backs up their databases on demand or nightly, and restores a backup after taking a safety copy first (database backups). Those backups are written to the server's own backup directory, so they do not survive the loss of the server: copy them somewhere else, or use your provider's snapshots as well. Files your app writes to disk need their own plan. Shipown does not create new databases; it works with the ones already installed.

Uptime

A single VPS is a single point of failure. If it goes down, every app on it goes down, and nothing fails over unless you build that yourself. Shipown's monitoring is live gauges, an SSH heartbeat that reports an outage once and its recovery once, and a live feed of PM2 and Docker changes (live updates). All of it runs from the desktop app: the app must be running and the PC awake, and no checks run while it is closed or asleep (servers and monitoring). If somebody needs to be woken when the site is down at night, add an external uptime monitor as well.

Security

The firewall, SSH access and protection against password guessing are yours to configure. Shipown manages ufw or firewalld with the live SSH port allowed first, creates non-root deploy users with scoped sudo rules, and installs and runs fail2ban (fail2ban, security hardening). There is no WAF or DDoS mitigation in front of your server the way there is on Vercel.

When Vercel is the better choice

• You do not want to operate a server at all: no patching, no machine backups, no capacity planning.
• Your team reviews work through preview deployments for every change. Shipown does not have them.
• You want deploys to start from Git on their own. In Shipown, a person presses deploy.
• Your audience is spread around the world and you want a global CDN, DDoS mitigation and a WAF without configuring any of them.
• Your team needs role-based access control, rolling releases or Skew Protection.
• The project is personal and non-commercial and fits inside Hobby's limits, so it costs nothing.
• You work on a Mac. Shipown has no macOS app yet, while Vercel is used from a web dashboard.
• You want a web dashboard or an API for deployments. Shipown is a desktop app with neither, and it is closed source.

When Shipown is the better choice

• The project is commercial and you would rather have a flat hosting bill than per-seat pricing plus usage.
• You already rent a VPS, or your database and other services already run on one.
• You want the app, its data and its logs on a machine you control.
• You run Docker or Compose services next to your Node apps and want one tool to deploy both.
• You want releases with health checks, automatic restore and rollback, without installing a panel or an agent on the server.
• You are prepared to own patching, backups and uptime, and want cron, firewall, swap, log rotation and database backups in the same app as your deploys (server management).

Moving from Vercel to Shipown

1. Write down what the project uses on Vercel: every environment variable, every domain and subdomain, the install and build commands, the Node.js version, and anything that runs on a schedule.
2. List what the app gets from the platform rather than from its own code, such as functions, image transformations and CDN caching. On a VPS, a Next.js app runs as one long-lived Node process under PM2; its built-in image optimization works under next start (Next.js self-hosting), and there is no CDN in front of it unless you add one.
3. Rent a VPS sized for the app, install Shipown, and add the server with an SSH key (quick start).
4. Let Shipown prepare the server: PM2 for Node apps, and Nginx with Certbot for domains and HTTPS.
5. Create the deployment from the GitHub repository and branch, review the detected build plan, enter the environment variables, and deploy. Read the real build log as it runs.
6. Point a temporary subdomain at the server and test the app there before touching the main domain. Take a first database backup, and try a rollback while nothing depends on it.
7. A day ahead, lower the TTL on the domain's DNS records. Then point the A record, and the AAAA record if you use IPv6, at the server. Once the domain resolves to the server, issue the certificate: Certbot's HTTP challenge needs the domain to reach the server first.
8. Leave the Vercel project in place until the new server has carried real traffic for a while. Remove the domain from Vercel only after you have verified the move.