A few months ago, Jeroen started working on a new open source project: Intercity Next. "Next" is the next generation version of our current Ruby on Rails hosting dashboard Intercity.

Last Friday, Jeroen and I sat down to make Intercity Next into a great product the following months. We are going to blog frequently about our next steps. We'll describe both on the product end as commercial goals we have with the product.

Intercity Next lets developers host apps on their cloud or on-premise infrastructure. We want a developer that doesn't have much server managing experience to host and deploy apps within a few clicks and have all sane defaults set up and in place. The defaults include things like automatic periodic backups, SSL certificates and security updates of your server software.

There are a two main reasons why we think own cloud or on-premise is important.

First of all, it's transparent where your app and your (customers) data is stored. It gives you the ease of use one or more cloud hosting services like AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure or others. The ability to use more than one infrastructure reduces vendor lock-in, and you can use Intercity's hosting methods to move your app over to any other service you like.

Second, using Platform as a Service or other app hosting services get expensive as your app grows. Especially if you're hosting multiple apps that don't need to do much in the beginning. The extra money you pay is usually because you pay an extra fee per "worker" or for every external service you add (like Postgres, Redis, Memcached, etc.). Intercity Next runs all of these popular services on your infrastructure, so you don't pay anything extra.

Now a little bit on product development and future steps.

The product itself will stay open source, and product development will happen in the GitHub repository. When certain specific requests or enterprise features come up, we will fork that into an Intercity Enterprise edition and will sell that via premium license.

What we are going to introduce shortly, is a Pro support package for a small fee. With the Pro package, you get priority support from us on getting your apps deployed via Intercity Next. If you want, we can even install Intercity Next on your server, so you don't have to bother with that. We'll do our best to answer any other questions or problems you run into. The only thing we do not do is give guarantees on uptime or instantly fix problems when your app is down. We'll, of course, help you figure out the problem as best as we can.

So if you're interested in using Intercity Next or just follow us develop and grow the product, stay tuned via this blog!

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