We stopped sharing one staging server — here's what we built instead

How it works

What it supports

What it costs

Who it's for

What we're not

Try it Every team I've been on has had the same problem. You have 4 engineers. You have one staging server. Every morning there's a Slack message: "who's on staging right now?" Someone has to wait. Someone always merges before QA finishes. Someone's PR sits in review for 3 days because the environment is occupied. The frontend teams solved this years ago. Vercel gives you a preview URL for every branch automatically. It's genuinely great — if your stack is Next.js. But if you're running Django, Rails, Laravel, FastAPI, Spring Boot, or anything else that needs a real backend process? You're stuck with the shared staging server. Or you spend two weeks wiring up Kubernetes preview environments. We got tired of it and built PreviewDrop. PreviewDrop spins up an isolated Docker environment for every GitHub branch or pull request. Each environment gets its own URL. When the PR closes, the environment is automatically cleaned up. Setup is one command: That writes a GitHub Actions workflow file to your repo. After that, every PR gets a preview URL automatically — no manual steps, no shared state, no "who's on staging" Slack messages. If it runs in Docker, PreviewDrop can preview it. That includes: $19/mo flat for the Starter plan — 5 concurrent previews, 3 team members. No per-second billing, no per-seat fees, no surprises at month end. Compare that to Railway's pay-per-second model, which gets unpredictable fast when you're spinning up preview environments 20 times a day. Three use cases where it genuinely solves a real problem: 1. Agency developers sending clients preview links

You're building a Django or Rails site for a client. They need to review the new feature. Right now you either keep a staging server running 24/7 (costs money, needs maintenance) or you send a Loom video. With PreviewDrop, you send a URL. 2. Small product teams with a QA bottleneckOne staging environment + multiple engineers = a queue. PreviewDrop gives every PR its own environment. QA can test 5 PRs in parallel. 3. Teams that evaluated Kubernetes-based solutions and gave up

Bunnyshell is powerful but the onboarding assumes you have a platform engineer with Kubernetes experience. PreviewDrop is Docker — if you can write a Dockerfile, you're done in under 10 minutes. To be clear: PreviewDrop is not production hosting. The environments are ephemeral. If you need Vercel-style CDN and ISR for a Next.js frontend, use Vercel — it's genuinely better for that use case. PreviewDrop is for the backends that Vercel can't run. We're in public beta. Free tier available, no credit card required. The GitHub App install takes about 90 seconds. If you have a Dockerfile, you'll have your first preview URL before your next coffee. Feedback welcome — what's missing? What would make you actually switch? Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse