2026-05-01announcementphilosophy

Why we built a self-hosted deployment platform

by Pulsar Team

The problem with cloud deploy platforms

Every major deployment platform — Vercel, Netlify, Railway, Render — follows the same model: you pay monthly, often per seat, and costs scale with usage. A small team with moderate traffic can easily hit $50-200/month.

That's fine if you want managed infrastructure. But many teams already have servers. They just need a deploy pipeline.

What Pulsar Deploy does differently

Pulsar Deploy runs on **your server**. You push to GitHub, and your code is live in under 60 seconds — with SSL, custom domains, and rollbacks. No surprise bills, no vendor lock-in.

Your first project is free. Additional projects are a one-time $12 purchase. Re-deploys, rollbacks, and branch deploys are always free.

What you get

•Push to deploy — GitHub integration with Nixpacks auto-detection

•Encrypted env vars — AES-256-GCM at rest, scoped per environment

•Instant rollback — every deploy is immutable

•Custom domains + SSL — auto-provisioned via Certbot

•Managed databases — Postgres, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, PocketBase

•File storage — S3-compatible buckets via MinIO

•PR previews — unique URLs per PR, auto-deleted on close

•Team management — invites, audit trails

The bet

We're betting that developers want to own their infrastructure again. Not everyone needs a global edge network. Most apps serve a region, and a $10/month VPS handles it fine.

Pulsar Deploy is the deployment layer those VPS instances have been missing.

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