This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Pavel
Over the last few months, I’ve been talking to a lot of developers about how they deploy their side projects, SaaS MVPs, and personal tools.
A few patterns stood out. Some were obvious in hindsight, others caught me completely off guard.
1. Keep Talking to Users – Always
Interviews aren’t just a pre-launch thing. They work for any kind of app.
Something that feels crystal clear to you as the builder can be completely unintuitive to someone else. Watching real people click around your UI will surface more “aha” moments than weeks of theorizing.
2. Interfaces Should Feel Alive
Users want to feel in control and know what’s happening.
If something is in progress, show it – a spinner, a loading bar, anything. If you can’t give immediate results, fill the gap with meaningful feedback. Never leave people wondering, “Is this thing stuck?”
3. Pretty vs. Functional: Where Devs Lean
Maybe it’s selection bias, but most developers I talked to care far more about a UI being clear and functional than it being flashy.
When AWS’s interface is slow and clunky, anything even marginally better feels like a big improvement.
4. Your Landing Page Might Matter Less Than You Think
Only a small fraction of devs I spoke to read landing pages in full. Many go straight to Getting Started or Try Now.
A common journey seems to be:
Top of page → Pricing → Try Now.
Selection bias? Possibly. But it makes me think the “shiny” part of the landing page matters less than making the first click effortless.
5. Many Devs Don’t Even Know the “Big” PaaS Players
About half of the devs I spoke to didn’t know the names of popular PaaS competitors.
In hindsight, it makes sense:
- At work, devs often don’t handle deployments at all.
- If they do, it’s usually Kubernetes – and where it’s hosted is someone else’s problem.
- For hobby projects, most people just rent a VPS, install Docker, and run
docker compose up.
The upside? There’s still a lot of awareness to be built.
6. Listening Pays Off – Literally in Features
When I first started sketching out my platform idea, it was going to be “bare” PaaS – you’d have to create apps, databases, and volumes yourself, wire them up, copy env vars around, etc.
Two questions kept coming up over and over:
- “Do you support Docker Compose?”
- “Do you have templates?”
At first, both answers were no. But after hearing it enough times, I built them.
- Templates now include five common stacks – Spring Boot, Rails, FastAPI, Django, and Node – plus a bunch of open-source apps like Umami, Ghost, Actual Budget, and Memos.
- Docker Compose support takes your YAML and turns it into a template. If your Compose file builds from source, the platform will just ask for the Git repo and build it for you.
What about you?
How do you usually host your side projects? VPS + Docker? A PaaS? Something else?
I’d love to hear what’s working for you in the comments.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Pavel