Historically, managed platforms like Fly.io, Render, and DigitalOcean App Platform existed to solve three pain points: 1. Fear of misconfiguring Linux 2. Fear of Docker / Compose complexity 3. Fear of “what if it breaks at 2am?”
CLI agents (Claude Code, etc.) dramatically reduce (1) and (2), and partially reduce (3).
So the tradeoff has changed from:
“Pay $50–150/month to avoid yak-shaving” → “Pay $5–12/month and let an agent do the yak-shaving”