Since the beginning of Aptible, we've offered a model where Aptible hosts your infrastructure and gives you a control panel we call the Aptible platform. We fully provision and manage the AWS infrastructure, and your team never has to touch an AWS console to get started.

That's worked well for most teams, for a few reasons:

• Easiest way to get started. You never provision or manage an AWS account, Aptible handles all of it.

• Cheapest way to get started. A lot of Aptible customers start out as small startups, where cost matters most, and Aptible's startup program credits only apply to this model.

• No lock-in. Teams just getting started don't want to commit to infrastructure decisions before they know what they need, and staying on this model keeps that door open.

But Aptible has since introduced a second model: Self-Hosted Stacks. You host the infrastructure directly in your own AWS account but use the same Aptible platform to manage it.

Self-hosting makes sense for some customers, typically after they’ve scaled. That mainly means teams that have scaled on Aptible already (or that join Aptible already at scale) where full ownership over your own AWS account starts to matter more than ease of setup.

If that's where your team is, or where you're headed, read on.

What self-hosting gives you

The main benefit is control over AWS billing. If your organization already has AWS credits or wants to put AWS Savings Plans or Reserved Instances toward the infrastructure behind your Aptible apps and databases, self-hosting lets you apply that spend directly instead of paying for compute twice.

It could also be a fit for customers running extensive AWS infrastructure alongside their Aptible footprint, since everything lands in the same AWS account and the same AWS bill.

Beyond billing, the platform and functionality are the same.

The only shift is a slight change in the division of responsibility. Since you have direct access to the underlying AWS infrastructure, some things Aptible handles end-to-end on the hosted platform (like infrastructure-level penetration testing) become yours to manage instead. HIPAA, HITRUST, and SOC 2 remain available and achievable either way.

Self-hosting also unlocks a few AWS-specific integrations, most notably compliance evidence automation tools like Vanta and Drata.

How it works

You provide the AWS account. Then the Aptible platform deploys and manages your apps and databases inside it, the same way it does on our hosted infrastructure. You pay AWS directly for the underlying infrastructure and pay Aptible for the SaaS subscription that provisions and manages it.

Functionality is identical to the hosted platform.

Self-hosted alongside hosted

If you're already an Aptible customer, you don't have to choose one model and abandon the other. Self-hosted and hosted stacks can run side by side on your account. Moving a given app or database from hosted to self-hosted means migrating that resource to the new stack, it isn't a flip of a setting. But if you're coming from another platform entirely, there's no in-between step: you can migrate directly into a self-hosted stack from day one.

Getting started

Self-Hosted Stacks are only available on the Enterprise plan. Contact us to discuss whether it fits where your team is headed.

Keep in mind, there's a setup period involved: the Aptible team deploys the platform into your AWS account before you can start running apps and databases on it.

→ For more information, check out the Self-Hosted Stacks docs.