What is bex?

bex is an open-source Platform-as-a-Service for deploying web applications, background workers, scheduled tasks, static websites, and managed databases from Git repositories or container images onto infrastructure you control. It implements a Render-compatible API and command-line interface, so existing render.yaml blueprints work without changes. The control plane runs as a Kubernetes operator backed by a PostgreSQL database, with a separate API service exposing REST, GraphQL, and MCP endpoints. A web dashboard provides a human-friendly interface for managing services, environments, secrets, domains, and deployments. The platform is designed to be operated by both humans and AI coding agents — agents can deploy and manage resources via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Self-hosting is achieved by running the operator and API on a Kubernetes cluster provisioned with Cluster API (using Docker containers locally or Hetzner servers in production). The project is in public alpha and not yet recommended for production workloads.

Should you self-host bex?

bex scores 47/100 on selfhost.directory (how scoring works) and ranks #12 of 14 in Platform as a Service. It has 577 GitHub stars.

It shipped 8 stable releases in the past year. The latest, bex-cli/v0.3.3, came out on 16 October 2026. New versions land roughly every 4 days.

Setup is advanced: plan for several services and some ongoing maintenance. It is Apache-2.0-licensed and written mostly in Go.

Its closest alternative on selfhost.directory is rack (56/100, 1 889 stars). It scores higher overall, so compare the two before you pick. See bex vs rack side by side.