Small teams want the convenience of a platform as a service without giving up control of their infrastructure. Managed deployment platforms reduce setup time, but the tradeoff is recurring platform spend, provider limits, and less flexibility over where workloads run.
Pure self-hosting has the opposite problem. You keep control of the server, but SSL, backups, database setup, service templates, and repeatable deployments become manual work. Coolify exists to close that gap by giving self-hosters a dashboard and workflow layer on top of their own servers.