Nicheloom

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I built self-hosted deployment automation tool for Windows and IIS

Details

External ID
49430259
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
I built self-hosted deployment automation tool for Windows and IIS
Website domain
fdeploy.com
Launched
Aug. 25, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
35
Upvotes percentile
0.8198924731182796
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Updated at
Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.

Description

Seven years in the making (I admit that I did get a kid at some point which slowed down progress and brought it to a halt quite a few times), I decided to finaly release it, with a rather drastic change to the now (I believe) generous licensing model.Unlike current major players in this field, I decided to go with uncrippled, free version for commercial use for corps with up to 1M USD ARR. I poured my heart and soul into this, not because I was looking for financial success, but because I felt it just had to be done, given the price hikes wherever you look today. While my wife and kid were enjoying the beach during a vacation, I was using the time to figure out how to best tackle the problem with variable substitution and snapshots, a rather important part of the software. Pulling your hair kind of thing, many of you have likely been there, but darn does it feel good once you solve it! I know, not the best use of my time, but on the other hand, I hate the beach, so I guess this was an escape mechanism for me at that time :)I had received quite a few encouraging emails from people eager to try fDeploy back when I only had a tiny landing page out, but life has its own course and it took a while to even gather the courage to publish the first beta!As everything that sounds too good to be true in this day and age, fDeploy is no different. It does not support multi tenancy (a rather big feature which I'd love to work down the road) and a few other things may be missing which some companies may find crucial. Either way, I see this covering the needs of a large chunk of small to medium sized companies, so some "assembly" may be required. If only HN had the crowd which likes to get their hands dirty and find ways to make things work ;)I'd love to hear your thoughts and if you could take it for a spin. No signups, should be a smooth ride to get up and running and experimenting in minutes.Thanks!

Enrichment

Theme
indie hacker passion projects
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Workflow automation
Audience
B2B
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
deployment automation for windows and iis
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial While basic release orchestration can be scaffolded, managing deep Windows internals, IIS metabase/config transforms, native services, and enterprise Windows Server deployments requires deep OS-specific systems expertise.

What it would actually take: A self-hosted Windows deployment system needs a Windows Service backend (typically C#/.NET) communicating with agents over gRPC/WinRM, hosting an internal NuGet server, and executing PowerShell runspaces in isolated environments. The hard parts involve atomic IIS app-pool manipulation, thread-safe configuration transforms (web.config), and reliable rollback mechanics across distributed enterprise Windows Server environments. It requires seasoned Windows systems engineering and enterprise infrastructure expertise.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Octopus Deploy, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes GitOps, Nginx

Concerns raised: $3K per server pricing is too steep, Per-instance pricing model is non-starter for procurement, Not GitOps-based in era when GitOps is becoming standard, Configuration in dashboard rather than source control, URL Rewrite module not included in Windows Server installation

Feature requests: Include URL Rewrite module in default Windows Server installation, Support GitOps workflow/source control-based configuration, Improve Linux performance parity with Windows

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 249 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #48 of 250 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 300 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a workflow automation tool for Real estate yet.