But…
Every fair objection we hear, answered straight. Sceptics welcome.
“How is this different from Vercel?”
Vercel's great for frontends, and its Go support is function-style: one handler per file. Greyship runs your whole Go main as-is (any router, workers, crons, background goroutines) with one command.
“Why not Render or Railway?”
Both are solid, but they run your app like an always-on server, so you pay while it's idle (and free tiers that sleep are slow to wake). Greyship scales to zero and wakes fast, and it's built only for Go, so there's no Dockerfile.
“Why not just use Lambda?”
Lambda wants you to wrap your handlers and freezes your process right after the response, so background goroutines get cut off. On Greyship your normal main just works and goroutines get time to finish.
“Cloud Run already does this.”
Cloud Run is the closest, and it's good! The difference: no Dockerfile, no registry, no GCP setup, and Go-specific things like goroutine and GC insight built in. Think "Cloud Run, but made for Gophers."
“Fly.io can auto-stop machines too.”
True, and Fly is great. Greyship is narrower on purpose: no Dockerfile or config needed, every cmd/* folder becomes a service automatically, and the dashboard understands Go.
“Isn't this just Docker plus a reverse proxy?”
At its core, kind of, haha. The hard parts are waking apps fast, isolating untrusted code safely, scaling to zero and billing per second. That's the part I'm building in public.
See exactly how it works →“Why only Go?”
Because doing one language really well beats doing ten okay. Go's single binaries make fast, simple serverless possible, so I'm going all in on that.
“Why would I trust a solo dev with production?”
Fair question. Start with side projects. There's also zero lock-in: it's just your normal Go main, so you can move it anywhere, anytime. Trust gets earned, so I'm building in public.
How your code is isolated →“What about cold starts?”
Go starts fast, and an idle app is paused in memory rather than shut down, so most wake-ups are a quick resume, not a cold start. I'll publish real numbers as I go, not marketing numbers.
How sleeping and waking works →“How much will it cost?”
A generous free tier, then you pay only while your app is actually running. Idle apps cost nothing.
See pricing →