Andras Bacsai

Andras Bacsai is a Hungarian software developer best known as the creator of Coolify, the open-source, self-hostable alternative to Heroku, Netlify and Vercel. He runs it through coolLabs, a small company that keeps every feature free and open source and pays its bills with donations and a hosted cloud version.

Before going indie, Bacsai spent about ten years at IBM, starting as a system administrator and moving into software and infrastructure architecture. In the middle of the pandemic he left IBM to work on his own projects, and in January 2021 he created the Coolify repository. In early interviews he described funding the work through GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective and a few companies that offered to sponsor him.

Coolify lets developers deploy apps, databases and hundreds of one-click services to their own servers, which made it a favorite of people trying to escape rising platform bills. The GitHub repository has passed 65,000 stars, and coolLabs says there are hundreds of thousands of self-hosted instances. Everything ships under the Apache 2.0 license, with no paid enterprise edition.

Bacsai shares his numbers occasionally. In March 2025 he posted that Coolify had grossed about $15,700 in February (roughly $10,500 from Cloud and $5,200 from donations) against $2,800 in expenses, and that his family lived on donations alone. In 2026 the coolLabs philosophy page listed more than $23,000 in hosted-services MRR plus over $9,000 a month from GitHub Sponsors and $1,100 from Open Collective, and his GitHub bio cites $34k+ MRR.

In June 2025 he said he would focus on Coolify, but coolLabs has since added more open-source tools: Jean, a dev environment for running AI coding agents in parallel; Shoutrrr, a Buffer and Typefully alternative; Safetyper, a Grammarly alternative that runs on your own API key or a local model; and a privacy-friendly Google Fonts replacement. He builds much of it on live streams.

Bacsai matters because he showed that a fully open-source infrastructure tool with no paywalled features can support a family and a small team without venture capital.