Deceptive UX, zero support, and no way to delete apps — AVOID LIKE PLAGUE!.
I’m a developer who paid for NodeChef expecting basic reliability. What I got was:
A deployment system that silently fails unless you build your app around its quirks.
Support that doesn’t reply — not to pre-sales questions, not to active issues. I waited over 13 hours before giving up and rewriting my app for another host.
No delete button. Seriously. You can create apps, pay for them, and stop them — but not delete them. The UI just doesn’t include that feature. Their support articles link to 404s.
Broken billing transparency. You have to cancel billing manually or they keep charging, even for stopped containers.
To delete/close your account you have to delete the apps, which you can't do - my advice is to change billing to an account that's permanently overdrawn like I have!
If their support was as fast as the time it took to take my money they'd be a great choice, but they're not.
And a final insult: “Deployment completed” messages for apps that never started and were never listed.
NodeChef might work if you're deploying a vanilla Node app and never touch it again. But for anything else? Use Render, Railway, or even a cheap VPS. They’ll actually respond to support requests, and they won’t gaslight you into thinking your container “deployed successfully” while it’s dead in the logs.
