Self-Hosting Rails (and Python) Apps with Cloudflare Tunnels: Why I Swapped $17/Month Cloud Hosting for Self-hosting

Be adventurous and free - start hosting this stuff yourself with no barriers to your exploration! The $17/Month Death by a Thousand Cuts I love building side projects. I tend to use them to explore technologies in a fun way - Fantasy golf leagues, personal dashboards - the kind of apps that scratch a specific itch but don’t need to scale to millions of users. But every time I’d spin up a new Rails app, I’d hit the same wall: hosting costs that kill exploration. ...

August 10, 2025 · 11 min · 2241 words · Mark Holton