Leanly vs Roll Your Own Terraform
Terraform is powerful — it gives you full control over your cloud infrastructure. But hand-rolled IaC is not a deployment platform. It's an ongoing maintenance commitment. Leanly handles the deployment layer so your team doesn't have to.
This comparison is different
Unlike Vercel or Railway, Terraform deploys to your own cloud account — just like Leanly does. Cloud ownership is not the question here. The question is how much time your team spends maintaining the infrastructure layer versus shipping product.
Leanly is not a replacement for Terraform when you need to manage cloud resources — VPCs, IAM policies, databases, DNS. It's a replacement for the bespoke deployment scripts, Terraform modules, and tribal knowledge your team accumulates to get application code from a git branch into production.
| Terraform | Leanly | |
|---|---|---|
| Your cloud account | Yes | Yes |
| Cloud expertise required | Yes | No |
| Developer self-service | No | Yes |
| Maintenance burden | Ongoing — yours | None |
| Time to first deploy | Hours to days | Minutes |
| State drift & upgrades | Your problem | Handled |
The real cost of hand-rolled infrastructure
Tribal knowledge is a liability
Hand-rolled Terraform works until the person who wrote it isn't available. When a deployment breaks and the infra lead is on holiday, or a new team member needs to ship something and can't get a pipeline to run — that's when the cost of complexity becomes visible. Leanly makes deployment something any developer on the team can do, without needing to understand the underlying cloud setup.
Terraform configs rot
Provider version upgrades, state drift, deprecated resources, module refactors — Terraform configurations require constant attention to stay working. What started as a clean set of modules becomes a patchwork of workarounds over time. With Leanly, the deployment layer is maintained for you. Your team focuses on the application, not the infrastructure plumbing.
Developers shouldn't need cloud expertise to ship
The gap between writing code and getting it into production should not require knowing how to write Terraform, understand IAM policies, or debug a failed plan. That overhead slows every developer on the team, not just the ones responsible for infra. Leanly gives developers a deployment experience that just works — without exposing the complexity underneath.
Your cloud. No ops required.
Leanly deploys to your own AWS or GCP account — your VPC, your IAM, your bill — without the Terraform maintenance overhead. Keep your existing cloud setup. Stop maintaining the deployment layer by hand.