Zach Kazanski went from CTO of a dedicated server hosting company to bootstrapping Sherpa.sh—an ambitious platform-as-a-service that challenges the VC-backed giants of application hosting.
Zach Kazanski's journey to founding Sherpa is anything but conventional. He started as an unpaid software intern at Hivelocity, a dedicated server hosting company operating two data centers in Tampa and 40 more around the world.
Over the years, he worked his way up through development, management, and product leadership, eventually participating in the company's sale to private equity.
That decade of experience in the hosting industry revealed a massive opportunity: the enormous price gap between raw compute costs and what developers actually pay for cloud services.
The Problem with Modern Hosting
At his previous job, Zach watched major companies like the NFL, Tencent, and iHeartMedia move from AWS to dedicated servers—and saw their bills drop to a tenth of what they were paying. The economics were stark: physical compute is dramatically cheaper than what cloud providers charge.
The situation gets worse when you add platform-as-a-service providers like Vercel, Netlify, and Heroku into the mix. These platforms are essentially wrappers on AWS, charging their own margin on top of already expensive cloud compute.
For bootstrapped founders watching every dollar, this markup can be devastating.
Enter Sherpa - a Bootstrapped Alternative to Vercel
Sherpa cuts out the AWS middleman entirely. The platform connects directly to your GitHub account, auto-detects your framework (Next.js, Nuxt, Docker, and more), builds Docker containers, and deploys them to Kubernetes with horizontal scaling and a CDN in front—all built on bare metal infrastructure rather than cloud providers.
The result? Users can reduce their hosting bills by up to 80% compared to Vercel. For a company spending $10,000 monthly on Vercel, that's $96,000 per year that could go toward growth instead of operations.
Bootstrapping an Ambitious Platform
Building a platform-as-a-service without venture funding sounds nearly impossible. Yet Zach and his small team are making it work through a combination of strategic choices and modern tooling.
The team leverages AI extensively for operations that would typically require many more people. MCP servers, AI agents, and tools like Makerkit's AI rules help them stay efficient. As Zach puts it, legacy hosting platforms won't be able to adopt AI as quickly, and that efficiency gap could drive Sherpa's costs down even further over time.
Makerkit itself played a crucial role in getting started. By eliminating the overhead of building authentication, billing, teams, and other SaaS fundamentals from scratch, the kit allowed Zach to focus on what makes Sherpa unique—the hosting infrastructure itself.
Counter-Positioning Against the Giants
So how does a bootstrapped startup compete with well-funded competitors? Sherpa takes the opposite approach on almost everything.
- Support: At Vercel or Netlify, getting support can be difficult even on enterprise plans. Sherpa's team engages directly with customers in Discord and provides hands-on help.
- Values alignment: The company is moving its entity to the EU, aligning with European values around privacy, data security, and carbon neutrality—things that matter to many developers but aren't prioritized by Silicon Valley incumbents.
- Untapped markets: Perhaps most importantly, Sherpa is targeting markets that VC-backed companies can't profitably serve. SaaS companies in anywhere in the world where the unit economics don't work with expensive US-based hosting — suddenly become viable when infrastructure costs drop dramatically. The same applies to NGOs, research software, and nonprofits that need affordable hosting.
Finding the First Customers
Early traction came from two main channels: partnerships with starter kits like Makerkit, where bootstrapped founders share the same values of speed, efficiency, and keeping costs low, and paid advertising on Reddit.
Reddit worked particularly well — but with an important caveat. Zach emphasizes that you have to genuinely engage and help people, not just promote your product. Combine authentic community participation with useful content (like their detailed blog post on self-hosting Next.js at scale) and targeted ads, and the conversions follow.
YouTube ads drove signups but didn't convert to paying customers — a useful distinction for teams focused on immediate revenue rather than top-of-funnel growth.
Advice for Founders
When asked what advice he'd give other founders, Zach offered a few key principles:
- Validate before you build: ideally by getting someone to pay you or commit to paying. That said, Zach acknowledges this isn't how he started Sherpa. His decade of industry experience gave him enough confidence in the market to start building.
- Ship fast and imperfect: Your first iteration won't have everything. Sherpa doesn't offer managed databases yet - they're focused on making app deployment excellent first. Be okay with gaps.
- Spend as much time marketing as coding: Too many technical founders hide behind their code. Getting customers requires equal effort.
- Use the right tools: Starter kits like Makerkit eliminate months of foundational work. AI tools are making small teams dramatically more productive. Leverage everything available.
The Road Ahead
Sherpa represents something bigger than just another hosting platform. It's a bet that the future of software isn't controlled by a handful of VC-backed companies in San Francisco — that developers everywhere deserve affordable, high-quality infrastructure.
With AI making small teams increasingly capable, transparent pricing, strong values, and a focus on the massive global market that current platforms underserve, Sherpa is positioned to carve out a meaningful alternative in application hosting.
Check out Sherpa.sh to learn more about their platform. Zach and team are active in the Makerkit Discord if you have questions about hosting your Next.js applications.
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