Caddy
Fast, multi-platform web server with automatic HTTPS
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Jun 2026
Point it at your domain, it gets the certificate and renews it. Done.
Apache 2.0, written in Go. You download a single binary, write a Caddyfile that's maybe 5 lines long, and your site is live with HTTPS. Compare that to nginx where HTTPS setup is a whole afternoon project if you're new to it.
Everything is free. No paid tier, no enterprise edition, no cloud offering from the Caddy team. The company behind it (ZeroSSL/Apilayer) makes money from other products, not from gating Caddy features. You self-host it. There's no managed version to pay for.
The catch: Caddy uses more memory than nginx and handles fewer concurrent connections at the extreme high end. If you're serving 50K+ requests per second, nginx or HAProxy is still the move. For 99% of projects, Caddy's performance is more than enough and the automatic HTTPS alone is worth the switch. Also, the ecosystem of third-party modules is smaller than nginx's. Some niche configurations might not have a plugin yet.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeCaddy is fully open source under Apache 2.0. No paid features, no enterprise edition, no hosted service from the Caddy project.
Self-hosted cost: A single binary you run on any server. A $5/mo VPS handles most sites. No additional dependencies, no separate TLS certificate service, no package manager overhead.
Commercial support: The team behind Caddy (Apilayer) offers commercial support contracts, but the software itself has zero paywalls. Every feature is available in the open source version.
Compared to alternatives: nginx is also free. The cost difference is your time. Caddy's automatic HTTPS and simple config save hours on initial setup and ongoing maintenance.
Free. Everything included. You only pay for the server you run it on.
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