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Self-hosted vs the alternatives

Same capabilities.
Your boxes. Your bill.

Every product in the catalogue has a hosted equivalent — and each is excellent at what it does. They are also priced per request, per minute, or per connection; your data lives on their infrastructure. This page is the honest comparison.

Auto-CMS

Parachute

vs Admin panels and internal tools

An instant CMS for the database you've been handed

Compared against

  • Retool saas
  • Forest Admin saas
  • Directus oss

Deployment

Flightdeck

vs Container management dashboards

A dashboard for your containers without a managed-cloud lock-in

Compared against

  • Portainer oss
  • Rancher enterprise
  • AWS ECS Console cloud

Snapshot

vs Private static / prototype hosting

Private prototype hosting with magic links — not a Netlify password screen

Compared against

  • Netlify (password protection) saas
  • Vercel (preview auth) saas
  • InVision / Figma saas

Media

Crunch

vs Image processing APIs and CDNs

Image processing that scales on your cluster, not on your invoice

Compared against

  • Cloudinary saas
  • imgix saas
  • AWS Lambda + ImageMagick cloud

Gofer

vs Document conversion APIs

Office documents to PDF without per-page SaaS fees

Compared against

  • CloudConvert saas
  • Aspose.Slides Cloud saas
  • Gotenberg (OSS, self-run) oss

Greenlight

vs Screenplay format conversion

Screenplay format conversion without the manual script handoff

Compared against

  • Final Draft (desktop) desktop
  • Celtx saas
  • Custom screenjson-cli scripts oss

Mixtape

vs Cloud audio/media processing

Audio processing that scales with your cluster, not AWS MediaConvert

Compared against

  • AWS Elemental MediaConvert cloud
  • Azure Media Services cloud
  • Dolby.io saas

Monocle

vs Cloud document extraction and OCR

Text extraction and OCR without Azure Document Intelligence fees

Compared against

  • AWS Textract cloud
  • Azure Document Intelligence cloud
  • Google Cloud Document AI cloud

Photron

vs Cloud video transcoding

Video transcoding on your cluster, not AWS Elemental's meter

Compared against

  • AWS Elemental MediaConvert cloud
  • Mux Video saas
  • Cloudflare Stream saas

Shelf

vs Ebook production and validation

Ebook production pipeline without per-conversion SaaS fees

Compared against

  • Vellum (macOS) desktop
  • PressBooks oss
  • Draft2Digital saas

Messaging

Buzz

vs Managed MQTT brokers

MQTT, without the Mosquitto cliffs or the per-message invoice

Compared against

  • AWS IoT Core cloud
  • HiveMQ Cloud saas
  • Mosquitto (OSS) oss

Switchboard

vs Realtime messaging and pub/sub

Realtime messaging without Pusher or PubNub invoices

Compared against

  • Pusher saas
  • Ably saas
  • PubNub saas

Observability

Flytrap

vs Webhook inspection and testing

A private webhook inspector that doesn't send your payloads to a third party

Compared against

  • webhook.site saas
  • RequestBin (Pipedream) saas
  • Hookdeck saas

Registry

Dockyard

vs Software distribution and container marketplaces

Sell Docker images like SaaS, without handing over source

Compared against

  • Replicated enterprise
  • Docker Hub (paid plans) saas
  • AWS Marketplace cloud

Slipstream

vs Private package registries

A private package registry that sells packages, without JFrog enterprise prices

Compared against

  • JFrog Artifactory enterprise
  • GitHub Packages saas
  • Cloudsmith saas

Storage

Depot

vs S3 / object-store browsers

S3 and MinIO access without handing out master credentials

Compared against

  • AWS S3 Console cloud
  • Cyberduck / Transmit desktop
  • MinIO Console oss

Stash

vs Redis / Valkey browsers

Redis GUI without handing out master credentials

Compared against

  • RedisInsight oss
  • Another Redis Desktop Manager desktop
  • TablePlus / DBeaver desktop

Truffle

vs SQL database browsers

MySQL and Postgres GUI without handing out master credentials

Compared against

  • phpMyAdmin / pgAdmin oss
  • TablePlus desktop
  • DBeaver desktop

Testing

Reactor

vs CI / unit-test runners

A polyglot test runner that isolates branches and doesn't bill per minute

Compared against

  • GitHub Actions saas
  • CircleCI saas
  • BuildKite saas
The common thread

Why self-host any of this?

Every comparison on this page rests on the same few decisions. These are the principles the suite was designed around.

Flat-rate cost model

A self-hosted container costs the same whether it processes 100 jobs or 10 million. SaaS and cloud alternatives meter per request, minute, or connection — costs scale linearly with usage.

Your data stays in your VPC

No cross-border data transfer. No vendor data-processing agreements. Compliance, residency, and audit are simpler when data never leaves.

No vendor lock-in

Every service speaks open standards — MQTT 5, OpenAPI, OCI Distribution, Redis protocol, S3 API. Migrating away is a DNS change, not a rewrite.

One contract across your stack

One platform contract. Once your team learns one service, onboarding the next is an afternoon. Compare to mastering AWS IoT and Document Intelligence and MediaConvert separately.

Scale on the boxes you already have

Every service is stateless HTTP plus a worker pool. Helm charts ship with every image. If you have a Kubernetes cluster, you already have the platform.

Extend without asking permission

Need a custom task, a new notification driver, or a bespoke integration? The source is yours to modify. No vendor roadmap. No feature request backlog.

Ready when you are

Own the stack. Own the invoice.

Every service runs in your cluster, reads from your storage, and bills once — not per request.

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