◈ DUCT

DUCT vs Heroku, Railway & Render

An honest look at where each one fits. No trash talk — just the tradeoffs.

	DUCT	Heroku	Railway	Render
Hosting model	Your own server	Fully managed	Fully managed	Fully managed
Pricing	Flat €119/yr	Per dyno/mo	Usage-based	Per service/mo
Cost at 10 apps	Same flat fee	Scales up fast	Scales with use	Scales per service
You own the box	Yes	No	No	No
Status pages built in	Yes	Add-on	No	No
Revenue / MRR tracking	Yes	No	No	No
Deploy via AI (MCP)	Native	No	No	No
Self-healing deploys	Yes	n/a	n/a	n/a
Vendor lock-in	None	High	Medium	Medium

The real difference: ownership + flat cost

Heroku, Railway, and Render are excellent managed platforms. You push, they run it, and you never touch a server. That convenience is the product — and you pay for it per dyno, per service, or per unit of usage. The more you run, the more it costs, forever.

DUCT flips the model. It deploys to your own DigitalOcean droplet, so you own the infrastructure and the data. One flat fee covers your whole fleet — the tenth app costs the same as the first. You get the push-to-live convenience and the ownership.

Built for fleets, not single apps

The PaaS options are optimized for deploying one service well. DUCT is optimized for an operator running many: a fleet console, per-SaaS revenue tracking, an investor data room, public status pages, and a scoring arena that prices your shipping performance. It's an ops platform, not just a deploy button.

Where the managed platforms win

Let's be fair: if you want zero infrastructure responsibility, a managed PaaS is the right call. They handle the underlying hardware, scaling, and security patching so you never think about it. DUCT gives you ownership and flat pricing, but you're deploying to a server you control — which means you (or DUCT's automation) handle the box. If never seeing a server is worth a variable bill to you, start with Heroku, Railway, or Render. If ownership and predictable cost at scale matter more, that's exactly the gap DUCT fills.

Own your stack. Pay once a year.

Full platform, your server, flat €119/yr for the first 100 founders.

See pricing →

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