The Product

Your PaaS is dying.
Your next one shouldn't.

Heroku froze new feature development in February 2026. Salesforce put it in "sustaining mode." Render's cold starts punish your users. Railway's egress bills punish your wallet.

Ancla started because we got tired of the same ritual: write app, then spend three days wiring up Docker, CI pipelines, secrets management, TLS certs, and rollback scripts. We wanted one command. So we built it.

Start Deploying No credit card required

The Idea

Deploy should be
a verb, not a project.

Most platforms make you think about infrastructure before you've even finished your feature. You're choosing instance types, writing Dockerfiles, configuring load balancers. By the time you push to production, you've done more ops than engineering.

Ancla flips that. Point it at your code, run ancla deploy, and the platform handles detection, building, TLS, zero-downtime rollout, and health checks. Your app is live. You didn't write a single line of YAML.

And when something breaks at 2am? Roll back in under a second. Every release is immutable, versioned, and auditable. No detective work required.

Capabilities

What you get out of the box

5 stages — one pipeline

One-command deploys

Ancla auto-detects your language, package manager, and framework. Python with uv? Go modules? A bare Dockerfile? It handles all of them. The build runs in an isolated environment, produces an OCI image, and ships it to your cluster with zero-downtime rolling updates.

PythonGoRustNode.jsPHPRubyDockerfile
deploy
ancla deploy
Detected Python 3.14 + uv
Building ancla-prod:v42 done 3.2s
Migrating 2 pending → applied
Rolling out healthy 3/3
app.ancla.dev 37s total

Instant rollbacks

Every deploy creates an immutable release — your image, your config, your environment variables, frozen together. Rolling back doesn't rebuild anything. It repoints traffic to a known-good snapshot. Sub-second. No drama.

Full audit trail included. See who deployed what, when, and which config changed between versions. Your SOC 2 auditor will thank you.

v42 live
deployed 4 min ago · 3 instances
v41 rollback
deployed 2h ago · config: +2 env vars
v40 rollback
deployed yesterday · migration: add users_idx
v39

Secrets that stay secret

Environment variables are encrypted at rest and injected at runtime. They never touch disk on your containers. No .env files floating around servers. No plaintext in your CI logs.

Set them from the CLI or the dashboard. Scope them per environment. Diff them between releases.

secrets
ancla env set DATABASE_URL
Value: ••••••••••••••••
Encrypted and stored
ancla env list
DATABASE_URL = ••••rds.amazonaws.com:5432/prod
REDIS_URL    = ••••elasticache:6379
SECRET_KEY   = ••••••••

Logs, shell, scaling

Tail logs across all instances in real time. Drop into a running container when you need to poke around. Scale your web, worker, and cron processes independently with a single command.

ancla logs -f Stream logs across all pods
ancla shell Interactive container access
ancla scale web=5 Horizontal scaling per process
ancla status Health at a glance
my-app healthy
3 instances
42 releases
12ms p99 latency

TLS from minute one

Certificates are provisioned and renewed automatically through Let's Encrypt. HTTPS everywhere, no configuration, no expiration surprises. Custom domains work the same way — add a CNAME, and Ancla handles the rest.

https://your-app.ancla.dev
Let's Encrypt · auto-renewing · A+ rating

That's the whole pipeline.

Push your code. Ancla handles the build, the rollout, the certs, and the monitoring. You ship features, not infrastructure.

The Migration

Why teams are switching

Every platform makes trade-offs. These are the ones that push teams to look for something better.

Heroku
Feature development frozen (Feb 2026). Salesforce put Heroku in "sustaining mode" — no new capabilities, just maintenance. Standard-2X dynos cost $50/mo for only 1 GB RAM. Performance dynos start at $250/mo.
Active development, predictable pricing, no artificial RAM constraints.
Heroku
Eco dynos sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity. Cold starts take 10-30 seconds. Your users stare at a spinner while your app wakes up from a nap.
No cold starts on paid plans. Even hobby tier is always-on with auto-sleep only after extended inactivity.
Render
Free tier spins down after 15 minutes. Cold starts take roughly 1 minute. No static outbound IPs — need a third-party proxy for IP allowlisting. Preview environments cost real money at standard rates.
Always-on even on hobby tier. No surprise bandwidth charges.
Railway
Effectively no usable free tier — the $5 trial credit expires in 30 days, leaving only $1/mo (barely enough for a sleeping service). Databases are unmanaged containers. Egress surprise bills are well-documented: cases of $466 to $4,000 in unexpected charges.
Predictable pricing, no egress charges, managed infrastructure.
Railway
WAF protection only added in February 2026 — after a major DDoS incident forced their hand. Egress charges ($0.10/GB) still apply with no spending caps to protect you.
No egress charges, ever. Traffic protection designed in from day one.
Fly.io
No billing alerts. No spending caps. Volume snapshots now charged silently. Unmanaged Postgres had reliability issues — Consul dependency caused cascading failures across the fleet.
Transparent pricing, stable Postgres, no hidden snapshot fees.
Fly.io
GPU offering deprecated after launch. "We Were Wrong About GPUs" — their own blog post title. Platform direction shifts leave teams scrambling to re-architect.
Focused on what works. No chasing hype cycles at your expense.
Northflank
Credit card required even for the free tier. Dashboard complexity has a steep learning curve. Build caching is slower than local Docker builds. Advanced documentation is thin.
No credit card for hobby tier. Simple UX, comprehensive docs.

What 1 vCPU + 2 GB RAM costs per month

Ancla Pro
$ 19
/app/month · no egress fees
1 vCPU 2 GB RAM Always on
same specs, elsewhere
Heroku Standard-2X
$50 /mo 1 GB only
+$31/mo more
Railway incl. plan fee
~$40 /mo usage-based
+$21/mo more
Fly.io usage-based
~$32 /mo + egress
+$13/mo more
Render
$25 /mo Standard
+$6/mo more
Northflank
$25 /mo + egress
+$6/mo more

Under the Hood

Kubernetes, without the PhD

Ancla runs on Kubernetes so you get real orchestration, real scaling, real reliability. But you never have to write a manifest or think about pods.

OCI Images

Every build produces a standard OCI container image. Portable, cacheable, reproducible. No proprietary buildpack magic.

Rolling Updates

New instances spin up, pass health checks, then old instances drain. Zero dropped requests during deploys.

Process Types

Define web, worker, cron, and one-off processes. Each scales independently with dedicated resource limits.

Health Checks

HTTP, TCP, or exec-based probes. Ancla won't route traffic to an instance until it confirms it's ready.

Resource Limits

CPU and memory limits per process. No noisy neighbors, no runaway containers eating your cluster.

Custom Domains

Add a CNAME, tell Ancla, done. TLS provisioned automatically. Wildcard support for SaaS platforms.

Try it. It's fast.

From sign-up to your first deploy in under sixty seconds.