Mist
a lightweight, self-hosted PaaS
Details
- External ID
- 46669045
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Mist
- Website domain
- trymist.cloud
- Launched
- Jan. 18, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 14
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5961791831357048
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hi HN,We’re building Mist, a lightweight, self-hosted PaaS for running and managing applications on your own servers.We started Mist because we wanted a middle ground between raw VPS management and heavy, all-in-one platforms. Existing PaaS solutions often felt too complex or resource-intensive for small servers, homelabs, and side projects. We wanted something that keeps the PaaS experience but stays simple and predictable.Our goals with Mist are: - A simple PaaS to deploy and manage apps on your own infrastructure - HTTPS, routing, and app access handled automatically - Low resource usage so it runs well on small VPSes - Self-hosted and transparent, with minimal magicMist focuses on being an opinionated but lightweight layer on top of your server. It doesn’t try to hide everything behind abstractions, but it does aim to remove the repetitive operational work that comes with managing apps by hand.Mist is still early, and this is where we really need help. We’re actively looking for:- Users who want a simple self-hosted PaaS and can share real-world feedback- Contributors who want to help shape the core features, architecture, and UXWebsite: https://trymist.cloudRepo: https://github.com/corecollectives/mist
Enrichment
- Theme
- self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Model & infra
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- lightweight self-hosted paas
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes Mist is a single-node Go application interacting directly with the Docker Engine SDK and an embedded reverse proxy to deploy containers and stream logs via WebSockets.
Discussion
9 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Coolify, Dokku, Heroku, Canine
Concerns raised: Single node only, unclear multi-node migration path for existing databases, Steep learning curve with CLI compared to web UI, Build process memory-intensive on small VPS, Binaries checked into repo instead of distributed
Feature requests: Web-based UI instead of CLI for beginners, Multi-node deployment support, Improved UX for client-side built containers, Single distributed binaries instead of server-side builds
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 93 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #37 of 94 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 44 days after the earliest competitor.
- Cygnus · hn · 2026-07-25 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- mistatic · github · 2026-09-11 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- selfhosted · github · 2026-09-10 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Tinykit · hn · 2025-12-25 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Self-hosted lightweight file sharing app. (folderhost) · hn · 2026-02-23 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- I've built a nice home server OS · hn · 2026-04-24 · 194 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- PhpEZ · hn · 2026-08-29 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- webkvm · github · 2026-09-26 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.39
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a model & infra tool for Fintech yet.