SimpleDeploy is opinionated and small on purpose. Here is when it fits and when it does not.
Great for
- Single-VPS or single-box deployments. One server runs many apps.
- Side projects and indie SaaS. Five containers, a Postgres, a cron job, done.
- Small teams. Per-app RBAC, audit log, API keys for CI.
- Internal tools. Wikis, dashboards, scripts behind IP allowlists.
- Dev and staging. Spin up a VPS, deploy a branch, share a URL.
- Homelab. Run your *arr stack, Vaultwarden, Uptime Kuma with TLS and backups.
- Replacing a hand-rolled stack. nginx + certbot + cron + Slack scripts collapse into one binary.
Pick something else if
- You need multi-node orchestration. SimpleDeploy targets one host. Use Kubernetes, Nomad, or Docker Swarm.
- You already run Kubernetes well. Stick with it. Helm + ArgoCD covers this ground.
- You need horizontal autoscaling across machines. No cluster scheduler here.
- You need GPU scheduling, taints, tolerations, or PodSecurityPolicies. Out of scope.
- You want a managed PaaS. Try Render, Railway, Fly.io, or Coolify Cloud.
- You need built-in service mesh, mTLS between services, or canary routing. Not the model.
- Your app is already serverless or fully on AWS Fargate / Cloud Run. No reason to add a VPS.
- One host means one blast radius. If the box dies, every app dies with it. Plan backups and DNS failover accordingly.
- No HA control plane. Restarting
simpledeploy briefly drops the management UI. Apps keep running, the proxy keeps proxying because Caddy is in the same process and restarts fast.
- Compose only. No support for Kubernetes manifests, no Helm.
- Vertical scaling only. Bigger VPS, not more VPSes.
If those tradeoffs sound fine, you are in the target audience.
