Dokploy Cloud vs Self-Hosted Dokploy: What Each Really Costs per Month in 2026

Dokploy is free to self-host, and the Dokploy team also sells Dokploy Cloud, a hosted control plane from $4.50 per server per month. The two are often described as "free vs paid", which hides the real question: in both cases you rent the servers your applications run on, so the comparison is between one bill (servers) and two bills (servers plus a per-server fee), with a different place for the dashboard to live. This post puts numbers on both for a solo developer, a small team and an agency, using the prices on dokploy.com and the MassiveGRID configurator on 31 October 2026.

What Dokploy Cloud is, and what it is not

Dokploy Cloud runs the control plane for you: the dashboard, user accounts, deployment orchestration, the monitoring dashboard and notifications, together with the PostgreSQL and Redis instances behind them. The Dokploy team handles its updates, backups and uptime. What it does not do is run your applications. You connect your own servers from any provider over SSH (IP, port and key), Dokploy installs Docker, Traefik and a monitoring agent on each, and your containers, databases, Compose stacks and the Traefik proxy run there. The docs put it in one line: "Your code and data never leave your servers."

Self-hosted Dokploy puts the same control plane on the first of those servers. The dashboard, its PostgreSQL database and Traefik share the machine with your applications (Redis is no longer needed in self-hosted installs since v0.29.9). The Dokploy docs are honest about the trade: the management layer "competes with your workloads" on that one machine, you choose when to update, and it suits "a single server or a tight budget". Everything else, templates, Compose, databases, backups, remote servers, Swarm clusters, preview deployments, is in both editions: the docs state that every feature in Self-Hosted is available in Cloud and the reverse.

Two differences do matter in practice. The built-in monitoring dashboard is a Cloud feature; self-hosted installs ship container metrics and logs but the project's hardening guide tells self-hosters to ship logs to an external system. And concurrent builds, the per-server build queue setting, is self-hosted only. Neither is a reason to pick one edition on its own.

The price lists on 31 October 2026

Dokploy Cloud, from docs.dokploy.com:

All plans include unlimited deployments, databases and applications per server, annual billing is 20 percent cheaper, and dokploy.com advertises a 7-day free trial with no card. The servers themselves are not in that price.

Self-hosted Dokploy costs the server it runs on. On the MassiveGRID Dokploy hosting page the configurator is preset to the sizes Dokploy actually needs:

Prices are per month in New York, London or Frankfurt with 1 TB of traffic and one IPv4 address, before the discounts for longer billing cycles. Dokploy itself adds nothing.

Three bills, side by side

The honest comparison uses the same servers on both sides, because Dokploy Cloud customers still need somewhere to run their apps. The MassiveGRID Starter preset on shared cores is the server in every row.

Two things the table does not show. First, the self-hosted dashboard takes roughly 350 to 450 MB of RAM and a little CPU from the first server; on a 4 GB server that is about a tenth of the memory, which is why the Starter preset has 4 GB rather than the 2 GB the installer accepts. If that bothers you, the equivalent of Dokploy Cloud's separation is a second small server for the control plane, which costs more than $4.50 a month. Second, the Cloud fee buys automatic updates and someone else's uptime for the dashboard; your applications are exactly as available as the servers you rented in either case.

When Dokploy Cloud is the right buy

• Your servers are scattered across providers. The Cloud dashboard sits outside all of them and treats each as a remote server from day one. Self-hosting does the same through Remote Servers, but then one of the providers hosts the control plane.
• Nobody on the team wants to update the dashboard. Self-hosted updates are one command (curl -sSL https://dokploy.com/install.sh | sh -s update), but someone has to run it, read the release notes and keep a backup of the instance. Cloud removes that chore.
• You want the hosted monitoring dashboard without running your own metrics stack.
• You are evaluating. A 7-day trial against a $9.58 VPS is a cheap way to decide whether Dokploy's workflow fits before you commit to operating anything.

When self-hosting wins

• One or two servers. The Dokploy docs themselves say self-hosting suits a single server or a tight budget. At one server the fee is a third of the bill; the dashboard on the same machine is no real burden.
• Data residency or security policy. With self-hosting the control plane, its database and the SSH keys to your servers stay inside your infrastructure. With Cloud, the dashboard that holds those keys runs on Dokploy's servers. For a team that chose self-hosting to get away from third-party control planes, that is the deciding point.
• You want to decide when updates happen. Pinning a version, testing on staging and rolling production later is a self-hosted-only option.
• Build queue control. Per-server concurrent builds, useful on a dedicated build server, is a self-hosted feature at the time of writing.

There is also a middle path that most comparisons miss: a MassiveGRID VPS works as a connected server under Dokploy Cloud, so you can start on Cloud during the trial and switch the control plane onto the server later by installing self-hosted Dokploy and restoring an instance backup, or the other way round. The Dokploy hosting page lays the three options out in a single table, including MassiveGRID PaaS for teams that would rather not run a platform at all.

What the MassiveGRID server adds that the price does not show

The self-hosted column above assumes the cheapest reasonable server, but the thing that usually goes wrong with self-hosted Dokploy is not the software, it is the box underneath: a full disk puts the Dokploy database into recovery mode, a hardware failure takes dashboard and apps down together, and noisy neighbours stretch builds from thirty seconds to five minutes. The MassiveGRID servers behind the presets run on a Proxmox cluster that migrates the VM to a healthy node when hardware fails, store everything on Ceph with three replicas, sit behind 12 Tbps of DDoS protection, and come with 24/7 support and a 15-day money-back guarantee. Installation is also covered: order the server, open a ticket, and the engineers install Dokploy for you at no charge. Those are the operational worries Dokploy Cloud answers for the dashboard, answered for the whole server instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Dokploy free?

The self-hosted edition is free and open source; you pay only for the server it runs on. Dokploy Cloud, the hosted control plane sold by the Dokploy team, is $4.50 per server per month (Startup $15 for three servers) at the time of writing, on top of the servers you connect.

Does Dokploy Cloud include a server?

No. Dokploy Cloud hosts the dashboard and orchestration; your applications run on servers you rent from any provider and connect over SSH. A MassiveGRID VPS works as one of those servers, or as the single server of a self-hosted install.

Can I move from Dokploy Cloud to self-hosted later?

Yes. Install self-hosted Dokploy on a server, recreate your projects or restore an instance backup under Web Server, Backups, and point the domains at the new Traefik. Your applications keep running on the servers they were on; only the control plane moves. The reverse move works the same way during the 7-day Cloud trial.