Hi HN, this is Trevor and Justin from Porter (https://porter.run). We first launched on HN almost 3 years ago with our original product, which deploys your applications to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account with the simple experience of a PaaS. (original launch post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26993421).

We’re excited to show you something new - we’ve built Porter Cloud (https://porter.run/porter-cloud), a hosted Platform as a Service (PaaS) that you can eject from. It works just like conventional PaaS’s that deploys your apps with a few clicks, but it lets you eject to your own AWS, Azure, or GCP account as you scale.

Since launching Porter in 2021, we helped migrate a lot of companies from a PaaS to AWS, Azure, and GCP. Most of these companies had gotten started on these platforms in the early days to optimize for speed and ease of use, but ultimately had to go through a painful migration to one of the big three cloud providers as they scaled and outgrew the original platform.

Interestingly, we learned that many startups that deploy on a PaaS are fully aware that they’ll have to migrate to the big three clouds at some point. Yet they choose to deploy on a PaaS anyway because outgrowing a cloud platform is a champagne problem when they're focused on getting something off the ground. This, however, becomes a very real problem when you start running into technical constraints and it is difficult to migrate your production environment while serving users.

We’ve built Porter Cloud so you can deploy the earliest versions of the product as quickly as possible, with a peace of mind that you can eject to the tried and true hyperscalers later. When you need to eject, you can follow a few simple steps to migrate your workloads to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud with minimal downtime.

If you’re curious how it works, please drop your questions below. And if you’ve ever dealt with a migration from a PaaS to one of the big three cloud providers, we’d love to hear about your experience in the comments. Looking forward to it!