Websites and hosting decision
Netlify
A competent developer can reproduce core hosting, CI, previews, and simple functions in about a week using existing cloud building blocks, but Netlify’s scale, integrated AI agents, managed database primitives, and platform polish are expensive to match—so building a narrow replacement is realistic, but replacing the full paid product is not.
Visit website↗$9/mo
$108/yr
Per seat. Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off30 h to build
$0/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Netlify alternatives, with the arithmetic →
Code Netlify publishes itself
Not a way out of the subscription - these are the vendor’s own repositories. Worth a look for how they build, and for anything you would have to integrate with.
What a replacement has to do
- Push code to Git → run build CI → publish assets to CDN → serve previews and production; optionally run serverless functions and image transforms.
What it still won’t have
- Agent Runners (AI agents integrated into dashboard)
- AI Gateway (managed model routing / unified model billing)
- Managed Netlify Database and Blob store primitives
- Built-in Image CDN with on-demand transforms integrated into platform
- Usage credit billing model and integrated analytics/observability UI (30-day retention on Pro shown in docs)
What remains hard
- Infrastructure at scale
Global edge network with 99.99% uptime
- Brand trust
10M+ developers
- Brand trust
60M+ apps deployed
- Infrastructure at scale
99.99% uptime Go to Netlify homepage GitHub
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted alternative to Netlify focused on Git-driven static-site hosting and basic serverless functions using: GitHub Actions for CI, an S3-compatible object store (DigitalOcean Spaces or AWS S3) + CloudFront or Cloudflare for CDN, Lambda/Cloudflare Workers for serverless functions, and a simple image-transforming proxy (Sharp on a small function). In scope: 1) GitHub Action that builds a static site and uploads artifacts; 2) CDN-backed hosting with cache invalidation API; 3) per-branch preview URLs served from separate deploy prefixes; 4) HTTP serverless function runtime (deploy and route functions); 5) on-demand image resize proxy and Let’s Encrypt HTTPS for custom domains; 6) basic dashboard (single-page app) showing latest deploys and logs. Out of scope: multi-tenant billing, enterprise SLA, built-in managed Postgres, AI agent integrations, advanced analytics. Include error handling, idempotent deploys, automated tests for CI pipeline, and scripts to bootstrap DNS/SSL and deploy the stack.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score64
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productNetlify homepage
- official pricingNetlify Pricing
- official docsNetlify Docs
- open sourcecoollabsio/coolify
- open sourceglitternetwork/pinme
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
