Carrd vs DigitalOcean App Platform
Pricing
Carrd: Free, Pro from $19/year
DigitalOcean App Platform: Free for static sites, from $5/mo for apps
Description
Carrd: Simple one-page websites for anything
DigitalOcean App Platform: Simple cloud hosting with managed infrastructure: deploy from GitHub without touching servers
Pros
- Dead simple to use
- Incredibly affordable
- No coding required
- Predictable pricing with no surprise bandwidth bills: $5/month gets you a real server
- Free static site hosting with 3 static sites included
- Backed by a public company (since 2021): low risk of shutting down
Cons
- Limited to one-page sites
- Less customization than full builders
- App Platform is less polished than Vercel or Railway for developer experience
- Fewer framework auto-detections: you often need to configure build commands manually
- Scaling is manual unless you set up additional configuration
Details
Carrd lets you build simple, responsive one-page sites in minutes. Perfect for landing pages, portfolios, and link-in-bio pages.
Built by solo founder AJ, bootstrapped to $1.5M ARR with over 3.3M sites created. The definition of doing one thing well.
DigitalOcean has been around since 2011 and went public in 2021. The App Platform is their answer to Heroku and Render: connect a GitHub repo, pick your runtime, deploy. It is not the slickest developer experience, but it is reliable and the pricing is transparent. A $5/month Basic instance runs a small app without the billing surprises that come with usage-based platforms.
The sweet spot for solo founders is pairing App Platform with DigitalOcean’s managed databases ($15/month for Postgres). You get a production-grade setup for $20/month total with clear, fixed pricing. The downside is less magic: where Vercel auto-detects your Next.js settings and Railway auto-provisions databases, DigitalOcean expects you to configure things yourself. If you value predictability over convenience, that is a reasonable trade.
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