Canine Reviews and Details

Is Canine good?

Social recommendations and mentions

• Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (May 2026)

  Been working on an open source, free, Heroku alternative at https://canine.sh for about two years. I feel like even after all these years we’re still missing the devex that Heroku provided. It’s been super fun to experiment & integrate MCP into it. We just passed 2000 developers last month actively deploying with canine. - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago

• Show HN: I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer

  Agreed, at the moment, I have it set up on https://canine.sh which is fully open source. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

• Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

  I’ve been working on an open source tool that turns your Kubernetes into a Heroku like PaaS — https://canine.sh A problem that we had at my last startup was that we got stuck between not wanting to spend too much time on devops, and getting price gouged by Heroku. We were too big for the deploy to a VPS type options like coolify, but too small to justify hiring a full time Devops. Eventually a few of us had to... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

• I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project

  I've been developing and maintaining https://canine.sh and https://hellocsv.github.io/HelloCSV/ for some time now, and its really odd what pops up when you google these. Neither of these projects anything requiring payment anywhere, but tons of sites pop up trying to "sell" these projects. I wouldn't even know what that means and I'm kind of tempted to drop in a credit card to see what happens. Would they auto... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

• Railway Global Outage

  Been building an open source version of railway at https://canine.sh. Offers all the same features without the potential of a vendor lock-in / price gouging. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

• Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)

  I’ve been slowing building https://canine.sh for about two years now. It’s a basically a full Heroku replacement, with a UI, CLI, etc, except running with a Kubernetes backend. It’s fully open source. It was super annoying how delightful Heroku was, but how annoyingly locked-in and expensive it is. I’ve been lucky to get a sponsorship from the Portainer folks so I can work on this full time! - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

• An Update on Heroku

  I’ve been developing an open source Heroku alternative so we may never again be gouged for nice deployment pipelines. https://canine.sh It supports all the quality of life features like opening a shell via a cli, which I found was one of my favorite parts of Heroku (canine run —myproject /bin/bash) Been fortunate enough to get a sponsorship from the Portainer folks, which allows me to maintain and develop full time! - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

• Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

  Just a heads-up: The footer of https://canine.sh/ says the project is MIT licensed, but the GitHub site at https://github.com/CanineHQ/canine says the project is Apache 2.0 licensed. I'm not sure how to reconcile that, but the project seems really interesting, either way. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago

• Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell

  Https://canine.sh - makes it dead simple to turn your Kubernetes environment into a Heroku like PaaS. It’s fully open source so we’re covered by sponsors, the largest being Portainer $5k+ / m from sponsorships. Makes it possible to keep the cloud offering totally free. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago

• Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

  Working on https://canine.sh, an open source, self hosted PaaS for Kubernetes. A big part of this was inspired by the last startup I worked at. In an effort to not deal with complexities of Kubernetes, we ended up on Heroku and was charged exorbitant amounts of money. One year spending close to 400k on Heroku alone, for what should’ve been 10-15k in cloud costs. I think a big part of this is just making Kubernetes... - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago

• Heroku Support for .NET 10

  This is exactly why we built https://canine.sh, to try to rebuild Heroku in the open source We begged heroku for years to lower their prices but they just kept increasing it. I even showed a rep a side by side comparison of heroku vs raw AWS costs and it was 8x. Absolutely couldn’t justify. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago

• Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025

  I’ve been working on https://canine.sh which is a free, open source Heroku alternative for 2 years now. It’s exactly the product I wish I had when I started my previous company. Running on PaaS is incredible for devex but the pricing is bonkers, and the vendor lock in makes it really hard to deal with annual price increases. We spent close to 400k / year for just 128GB combined fleet in our last startup on Heroku.... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago

• Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

  > It's a shame they don't just license all their software stack at a reasonable price with a similar model like Sidekiq and let you sort out actually decent hardware We built and open sourced https://canine.sh for exactly that reason. There’s no reason PaaS providers should be charging such a giant markup over already marked up cloud providers. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago

• 3x performance for 1/4 of the price by migrating from AWS to Hetzner

  We discovered a similar thing and ended up building an open source PaaS that works well on hetzner. Otherwise, it’s a little annoying to wrangle shell scripts and GitHub actions to drive all the automations https://canine.sh. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago

• AWS Service Availability Updates

  Super cool project! If you ever get this working for Kubernetes, I'd love to add it to https://canine.sh for a one click deploy, been looking for something like this. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago

• Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2025)

  Currently working on an open source Heroku / Fly.io / Render alternative: https://canine.sh Its built on top of Kubernetes, based on learnings I've had from previous experiences scaling infrastructure. If you look at the markup PaaS (Heroku, Fly, Render) applies to IaaS (AWS, Hetzner), it's on the order of 5-10x. But not having that, and trying to stitch together random AWS services is a huge PITA for a medium... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago

• Why Self-Host?

  This is why I built https://canine.sh -- to make installing all that stuff a single step. I was the cofounder of a small SaaS that was blowing >500k / year on our cloud stack Within the first few weeks, you'll realize you also need sentry, otherwise, errors in production just become digging through logs. Thats a +40/m cloud service. Then you'll want something like datadog because someone is reporting somewhere... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago

• Dokploy is the sweet spot between PaaS and EC2

  We developed https://canine.sh for work which was heavily inspired by dokploy. The idea was to have a dokploy like container scheduler against a Kubernetes backup for ease of scalability / recovery and multi-node setup. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago

• Over engineering my homelab so I don't pay cloud providers

  This was exactly a use case I had in mind when building https://canine.sh -- also uses k3s as a provider, and provides a Heroku-like devex. How to actually reliably expose a homelab to the broader internet is a little tricky, cloudflare tunnels mostly does the trick but can only expose one port at a time, so the set up is somewhat annoying. - Source: Hacker News / 12 months ago

• Few things to know

  Canine the open source hosting platform at cheaper cost then heroku, netlify, it runs on docker container and compatible with. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago

• Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2025)

  I'm working on a Heroku / Render / Flyio alternative thats free, open source, built on top of Kubernetes. Supports deployments of your own apps as well as 15k+ other packages (postgres, airbyte, dagster, etc) via helm charts. https://github.com/czhu12/canine Reason? Got sick of paying for the massive markups on PaaS but missed the simplicity and convenience. - Source: Hacker News / 12 months ago