Show HN: I built a Mac App that brings Vercel UX to my $5 VPS
by vankhoa1505 | 2025-11-08 12:13:19+00:00
I got tired of $100+/month PaaS bills, so I built Server Compass

You know that feeling when you deploy to Vercel or Railway and everything just works? The slick dashboard, one-click rollbacks, live logs, it's beautiful.

Then you get the bill and realize you're paying $200+ across Vercel, Render, Railway, Supabase, NeonDB, and whatever else you're using for what's essentially a few $10 VPSs with nice UIs.

I was running projects on all of them. Vercel for the frontend, Railway for some backend services, Render for others, Supabase and NeonDB for databases.

Each one felt so polished individually, but the bills kept stacking. A hobby project would somehow cost $50/month just because it crossed some arbitrary usage threshold.

And don't even get me started on the random limits: - Vercel caps you at 20 cron jobs - Supabase charges you $10 for every additional database.

So I started moving everything to cheap VPSs on Hetzner. Saved a ton of money (went from $100+ to about $50/month total). I can deploy unlimited apps & database now.

But man, the workflow sucked. Suddenly I'm SSHing into servers, managing PM2 processes in tmux, grep-ing through logs, and trying to remember which port my blog is running on at 2am.

I wanted the Vercel/Railway/Render experience without the PaaS pricing. Server Compass is what came out of that frustration.

What it actually does

It's a desktop app that lives on your laptop and connects to your servers over SSH. No agents/cPanel to install, no control panels eating your server resources 24/7.

I tried Coolify before, it installed a bunch of stuff like Docker and made my server lag like crazy.

Server Compass doesn't touch your server beyond standard SSH. Just you, your VPS, and a clean interface that makes deployment feel like pushing to Vercel:

See everything at a glance: CPU, memory, which apps are running, which port, which domain is pointing to which app.

Deploy with one click (or auto-deploy on new commits)

Manage all the boring stuff: env vars, domains, SSL certs, cron jobs without touching any command lines.

Live logs and instant rollbacks when things go sideways

Database management coming soon (because honestly, that's the next obvious piece of the puzzle)

The whole thing still uses plain SSH under the hood. You're not locked into anything.

Why this exists

I'm a big fan of Pieter Levels - he runs most of his apps on a single server and prints money. That's the dream, right? But most developers I know are scared to try VPS hosting because the command line feels intimidating.

They'll pay $20/month per app across multiple PaaS platforms just to avoid learning what PM2 does.

I have friends who want to switch but can't figure out how to point a domain to the right port. That seemed like such a solvable problem.

The pricing part

- Free forever for 1 server, 1 app, and 1 domain: enough to actually test if this works for you.

- If you like it, it's $19 one-time per device for unlimited everything. No subscriptions. The app keeps working forever; you just get updates for the 1 year. (Buy 3+ licenses and you get a discount)

Who this is for

- Indie hackers who are tired of PaaS pricing adding up across Vercel, Railway, Render, Supabase, NeonDB, and friends. DevOps folks managing multiple servers who want a GUI without sacrificing control. Anyone who's ever thought "I wish I could use Railway's UX with my own server."

- Right now it's Mac-only (Windows and Linux builds coming). If this sounds useful, I'm around to answer questions or show you what it looks like in action!

You can try the app for free at: servercompass[dot]app