PreviewDrop vs Coolify
Managed previews vs managing your own server
Coolify is open-source and free to self-host. You own the server and the ops. PreviewDrop is $19/mo managed — zero infrastructure to maintain.
TL;DR
Coolify is free in licensing. The real cost is provisioning the server, applying security patches, handling storage, and responding to incidents. PreviewDrop is managed infrastructure — we run the containers, scale the cluster, handle the DNS, and deal with infrastructure incidents. The cost is $19/month. The operations cost is zero.
Feature-by-feature
| Feature | PreviewDrop | Coolify |
|---|---|---|
| Software cost | $19/mo Starter | $0 (open-source) |
| Infrastructure cost | Included | VPS: ~$5–20/mo |
| Operations cost | $0 — we run it | Your time: updates, monitoring, incidents |
| No maintenance required | You own the ops | |
| Scales automatically | You provision more capacity | |
| PR preview environments | ||
| Auto-expiring TTL | 4–168 hours by plan | Configurable but manual |
| PR comment with preview URL | ||
| Password-protected previews | ||
| QR code per preview | ||
| Zero-config CLI setup | npx tsx https://previewdrop.dev/setup.ts | Requires server config |
| Open-source | ||
| Data on your servers | ||
| Automatic updates | Your responsibility | |
| Incident response | Our team | Your team |
Comparison last verified April 2026. Pricing and feature details change — for current numbers check Coolify's own pricing page.
What's actually different
The real cost of self-hosting
Coolify's licensing is free. The infrastructure and operational costs are real: a VPS costs $5–20/month, and someone on your team needs to apply patches, monitor uptime, and handle incidents. A 2am server outage is your incident, not a vendor's. If your time is worth $50/hr, the break-even for a 5-person team is just 0.18 hours of ops overhead per month. Most teams exceed that.
When Coolify legitimately wins
Coolify is the right choice when data residency is a hard requirement — "no data leaves our servers" — and you have the infrastructure knowledge to run it reliably. If you're already running a personal VPS and want preview environments as one of several hosted services, the marginal cost of adding Coolify is near zero.
Managed vs self-managed
PreviewDrop is for teams that want preview environments without owning a server. The $19/month buys you the absence of infrastructure operations, not just the feature. Connect your repo, push code — we handle the rest. No Kubernetes sprint, no YAML manifests, no capacity planning tickets.
Migrating from Coolify
PreviewDrop detects your stack and builds the container itself, so your Coolify build configuration isn't needed (a Dockerfile in the repo is not used). Export your environment variables from Coolify's dashboard, then run
npx tsx https://previewdrop.dev/setup.ts in your project root. Add PREVIEWDROP_TOKEN to your repo secrets, push a branch, and verify the preview URL works.See the numbers
Full plan limits and pricing on the Pricing page. Setup walkthrough in the Quickstart docs.Try PreviewDrop free
Connect a repo, push a branch, get a preview URL. No credit card, no trial clock.
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