Compare 15+ cloud hosting and PaaS services: Railway, Vercel, Render, Netlify, Fly.io, Cloudflare Workers/Pages, Deno Deploy, Koyeb, Val Town, Google Cloud Run and more. Free tiers, bandwidth limits, build minutes, and pricing gotchas. Compiled 2026-04-13, not re-checked since.
Published 2026-04-13 · Not yet reviewed · 15 platforms compared · Figures compiled 2026-04-13, not re-checked since · 38 of 38 figures in the “Recent Pricing Changes” table come from our records for 1,493 developer tools · 17 pricing changes tracked
Cloud hosting in April 2026: 15 platforms across four categories — traditional PaaS, edge/serverless, full-featured platforms, and static/specialized hosts. $5/month has become the entry price for always-on compute (Railway Hobby, Heroku Eco). Cloudflare dominates the free tier with unlimited bandwidth and 100K requests/day. The big shift: credit-based pricing is replacing flat-rate plans (Vercel Jan 2026, Netlify Sep 2025).
Key trends: Heroku's free tier removal (2022) drove a migration wave to Railway, Render, and Fly.io. Netlify's move to credit-based pricing (Sep 2025) replaced flat bandwidth and build-minute limits with a single 300-credit monthly allowance. Google is flooding the market with generous always-free tiers (Cloud Run: 2M requests/month). Edge computing is making traditional PaaS less necessary for many workloads.
This guide covers: pricing tables, category breakdowns, free tier analysis, cost comparison for solo devs and teams, hidden costs, pricing gotchas, and best-for-use-case recommendations — compiled by hand from vendor pricing pages.
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Compiled 2026-04-13, not re-checked since. Hover rows to highlight. Click platform names for full vendor profiles with free tier details.
| Platform | Free Tier | Paid From | Free Bandwidth | Free Compute |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Railway | Free plan: $0/mo, $1 of free credit a month after trial | $5/mo (Hobby) | None included ($0.05/GB) | Up to 1 vCPU, 0.5 GB RAM per service |
| Render | Free web services | $7/mo (Starter instance) | 5 GB (then $0.15/GB) | Less than 1 CPU, 512 MB RAM (spins down) |
| Fly.io | None (pay-as-you-go) | $0 (usage-based) | 100 GB (legacy) | None (legacy: 3 shared VMs) |
| Koyeb | None for new users | $29/mo (Pro) | — | None |
| Northflank | 2 services | $2.70/mo (0.1 vCPU, 256 MB) | Included | 2 services (0.2 vCPU, 512 MB each) |
| Cloudflare Workers | 100K requests/day | $5/mo (Workers Paid) | Unlimited | 100K requests/day, 10ms CPU/req |
| Cloudflare Pages | Unlimited sites | $5/mo (via Workers Paid) | Unlimited | Unlimited requests, 100K functions/day |
| Netlify | 300 credits/mo (~15 GB) | $20/mo (Pro) | ~15 GB (300 credits at 20/GB) | 10 credits/GB-hour |
| Deno Deploy | 1M requests/mo | $20/mo (Pro) | 20 GiB | 1M requests/mo, 10 hrs active CPU |
| Val Town | Free tier | $10/mo (Pro) | Included | Free requests with limits |
| Vercel | Hobby plan (free) | $20/mo (Pro) | 100 GB | 100 GB bandwidth, serverless functions |
| Google Cloud Run | Always free tier | Usage-based | 1 GB North America | 2M requests/mo, 180K vCPU-sec, 360K GiB-sec |
| GitHub Pages | Free (static sites) | N/A (free only) | 100 GB/mo | N/A (static hosting) |
| PythonAnywhere | 1 web app | $10/mo (Developer) | Included | 1 web app, 512 MB storage |
| Heroku | Removed (2022) | $5/mo (Eco dynos) | Included | None free |
Cloud hosting platforms fall into four categories, each optimized for different workloads and developer preferences.
A date in a heading below cites a record we hold, not a property of the vendor it names. These figures were compiled on 2026-04-13; a dated badge marks a card whose vendor we have recorded a change for since, and the date moves to the newer record on the day that record takes effect. Every record we hold for any vendor named below is in the full change log.
Deploy containers or code with familiar push-to-deploy workflows. Best for traditional web apps, APIs, and background workers that need persistent compute.
Free plan: $0/month, opening with a 30-day trial carrying $5 of credits, then $1 of free credit a month. Up to 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB RAM per service, 0.5 GB volume storage, 1 project, 3 services. Hobby plan ($5/mo minimum usage) includes $5 of monthly usage credits, not a free allowance. Supports Docker, Node, Python, Go, Rust, and more. Built-in Postgres, Redis, MySQL.
Free web services with less than 1 CPU, 512 MB RAM, auto-sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity. 750 free instance hours/month, 500 build minutes/month, 5 GB bandwidth/month included then $0.15/GB. Free PostgreSQL (30-day expiry, 256 MB). Free Redis (25 MB, 50 connections). Supports Docker, Node, Python, Go, Ruby, Rust.
No free tier for new accounts since October 2024. New accounts get a trial of 2 machine hours or 7 days, whichever comes first, before adding a payment method; apps stop at the end of the trial unless one is added. Legacy accounts (Hobby/Launch/Scale plans) retain: 3 shared-cpu-1x VMs (256 MB RAM), 3 GB volume storage, 100 GB transfer/month. Volume snapshots: first 10 GB free, then $0.08/GB/month.
None for new users. Since February 2026, new users must subscribe to Pro ($29 a month plus compute, with $10 of compute included) or a higher plan. Organizations already on the Starter plan keep it.
Developer plan: 2 free services with 0.2 vCPU and 512 MB RAM each. Supports containers, buildpacks, and databases. Auto-deploy from Git. Built-in secrets management, job scheduling, and observability.
Run code at the edge with zero cold starts and automatic global distribution. Best for APIs, static sites with functions, and latency-sensitive applications.
100,000 requests/day, 10ms CPU time per invocation, 1 MB script size. Runs on Cloudflare's 300+ edge locations. V8 isolates — no cold starts. KV storage: 100K reads/day, 1K writes/day. R2 storage: 10 GB free. Workers AI: 10K neurons/day.
Unlimited sites, unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/month. Pages Functions (serverless): 100K requests/day free. Deploy from Git or direct upload. Custom domains, SSL included. Preview deployments for every commit. 25 MB max file size.
300 credits/month, spent across deploys (15 credits each), bandwidth (20 credits/GB), compute (10 credits/GB-hour) and web requests (2 credits/10K) — about 15 GB of bandwidth if you spend the whole allowance on it. Legacy accounts opened before September 2025 keep 100 GB bandwidth and 300 build minutes. Deploy from Git. Instant rollbacks, preview deploys, custom domains, SSL. Edge Functions (Deno-based) included.
1 million requests/month, 20 GiB outbound bandwidth, 10 hours of active CPU per month, 1 GiB KV storage, 1M KV read units/month. Runs in 2 regions. Cold starts complete within 100 ms for a hello-world app. Built-in KV storage (Deno KV). Instant deployments from Git.
Code snippets ("vals") that run as HTTP endpoints, cron jobs, or email handlers. Free tier includes public vals, SQLite storage, email sending. Community-driven code sharing. TypeScript/JavaScript runtime. Instant deployment.
Enterprise-grade platforms with rich ecosystems. Best for production applications that need the full toolchain — CI/CD, monitoring, databases, and team management.
Hobby plan: 100 GB Fast Data Transfer, 1M Function Invocations and 4 hours Fluid Active CPU a month; builds included, up to 45 minutes each; non-commercial personal use only. Deploy from Git with preview deployments. Optimized for Next.js, supports all frameworks. Edge Functions, Image Optimization, Analytics (limited).
Always Free tier: 2 million requests/month, 180,000 vCPU-seconds, 360,000 GiB-seconds of memory, 1 GB outbound (North America). Runs containers, auto-scales to zero. Supports any language/framework via Docker. Integrated with Google Cloud ecosystem.
Free tier: none. Our own pricing change record, on 2022-11-28, says: Heroku stopped offering free dynos, hobby-dev Heroku Postgres and hobby-dev Heroku Data for Redis on 2022-11-28, as announced on 2022-08-25. Source ↗ Read what we recorded →
Focused hosting for specific use cases. Static sites, Python apps, or developer documentation. Simple and free for what they do well.
Free static site hosting from GitHub repos. 100 GB bandwidth/month, 1 GB storage, 10 builds per hour via GitHub Actions. Custom domains, SSL. Perfect for docs, portfolios, blogs. Jekyll built-in, supports any static site generator.
1 free web app on yourusername.pythonanywhere.com. 512 MB storage, daily CPU seconds limit. Python 2.7/3.x. Built-in Bash console, MySQL database. No custom domain on free tier. Good for learning and small projects.
Free tiers range from genuinely production-ready (Cloudflare, Vercel) to barely-functional trials (Fly.io). Here's the honest breakdown.
| Platform | Free Tier Type | Bandwidth | Build Minutes | When You Hit the Wall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Railway | Free credits | None included ($0.05/GB) | Included | When credits run out |
| Render | Limited free tier | 5 GB (then $0.15/GB) | 500 min/mo | Weeks of moderate use |
| Fly.io | No free tier | 100 GB (legacy) | N/A (Docker) | Immediately (pay-as-you-go after a trial of 2 machine hours or 7 days) |
| Koyeb | No free tier | — | — | Immediately ($29/mo Pro minimum) |
| Northflank | Limited free tier | Included | Included | Weeks of moderate use |
| Cloudflare Workers | Generous free tier | Unlimited | N/A | Months of real traffic |
| Cloudflare Pages | Generous free tier | Unlimited | 500/mo | Months of real traffic |
| Netlify | Limited free tier | ~15 GB (300 credits at 20/GB) | ~20 deploys (15 credits each) | Weeks of moderate use |
| Deno Deploy | Generous free tier | 20 GiB | N/A (instant) | Months of real traffic |
| Val Town | Generous free tier | Included | N/A | Months of real traffic |
| Vercel | Generous free tier | 100 GB | No monthly quota (45 min per build, 100 deployments/day) | Months of real traffic |
| Google Cloud Run | Generous free tier | 1 GB North America | 2,500/mo (Cloud Build) | Months of real traffic |
| GitHub Pages | Generous free tier | 100 GB/mo | 10/hr (Actions) | Months of real traffic |
| PythonAnywhere | Limited free tier | Included | N/A | Weeks of moderate use |
| Heroku | No free tier | Included | Included | Immediately ($5/mo minimum) |
What does each platform actually cost for a solo developer running a side project versus a team of 5 with production traffic?
| Platform | Solo Dev /mo | Team of 5 /mo | Key Cost Factor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Railway | $0–5 | $20/mo minimum (Pro, unlimited seats) | The $5 trial credit is one-time — once the 30 days end the Free plan provides $1... |
| Render | $0–7 | $25/mo flat (Pro) + usage | Free web services spin down after 15 minutes without traffic and take about one ... |
| Fly.io | Usage-based | $29/mo (Scale) + usage | No free plan for new accounts: a trial of 2 machine hours or 7 days, whichever c... |
| Koyeb | $29+ | Usage-based | No free plan for new users since February 2026; Pro is $29 a month plus compute. |
| Northflank | $0–10 | Usage-based | Limited to 2 services on free tier. Database add-ons are separate. Scaling beyon... |
| Cloudflare Workers | $0–5 | $5+ | 10ms CPU time limit is restrictive for compute-heavy tasks. 1 MB script size lim... |
| Cloudflare Pages | $0 | $0–5 | 500 builds/month can be limiting for active repos with many commits. Functions s... |
| Netlify | $0–19 | $20/mo flat (Pro, no seat fees) | Every action draws on one credit pool, so builds and traffic compete — and sites... |
| Deno Deploy | $0 | $20+ | Deno runtime only — no Node.js compatibility layer for all packages. 50ms CPU li... |
| Val Town | $0–10 | $10+ | Free tier vals are public. Private vals require Pro ($10/mo). Limited compute pe... |
| Vercel | $0 | $20/seat | WATCH: New Pro projects default to Turbo build machines ($0.126/min vs $0.014/mi... |
| Google Cloud Run | $0 | Usage-based | Google Cloud account required with billing enabled. Egress to other regions is e... |
| GitHub Pages | $0 | $0 | Static sites only — no server-side code. Public repos only on free GitHub (priva... |
| PythonAnywhere | $0–10 | Per-account | $5 Hacker tier was eliminated (Jan 2026). Jump from free to $10/month for custom... |
| Heroku | $5–7 | $7/dyno + add-ons | No free tier at all. Add-on costs stack up fast (Postgres Mini $5/mo, Redis Mini... |
The sticker price is rarely the full story. These are the costs that surprise developers after they commit to a platform.
New Pro projects on Vercel default to Turbo build machines at $0.126/min — 9 times the cost of Standard builds ($0.014/min). A 5-minute build costs $0.63 on Turbo vs $0.07 on Standard. Switch to Standard builds in project settings unless you genuinely need faster builds.
Free web services on Render spin down after 15 minutes without traffic and take about one minute to spin back up. Not viable for APIs that need to respond quickly. The workaround costs $7/month (Starter instance, always-on).
Railway's Trial plan gives a one-time $5 credit. Once it's gone, services stop. Hobby plan ($5/mo) resets monthly but usage can exceed the credit — a busy API can cost $10–20/month. Monitor your usage dashboard closely.
Cloudflare Workers free tier uses daily quotas (100K requests/day), not monthly. A traffic spike on one day gets throttled even if your monthly average is well under limits. The 10ms CPU time limit per request also restricts compute-heavy operations.
Cloud hosting pricing has been volatile. Here are the changes we've tracked. See full change timeline for all tracked changes.
| Date | Vendor | Change | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| effective Oct 9, 2026 | Deno Deploy | Deno Deploy keeps running for now. Deno announced on 2026-10-09 that it is joining Cloudflare and that Deno Deploy will keep running for six months and then shut down; Deno gave no exact date. Deno will help paying customers move to Cloudflare Workers. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective Oct 1, 2026 | Fly.io | Fly.io raised the price of memory on Machines to $6.00 per GB a month, from about $5, and left CPU prices unchanged. Every preset includes memory, so every preset costs more: shared-cpu-2x with 512 MB went from $3.89 to $4.39 a month in Ashburn and Secaucus, and performance-1x with 2 GB from $31.00 to $33.00. The smallest, shared-cpu-1x with 256 MB, is now $2.19. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| discovered Aug 28, 2026 · effective date unknown | Deno Deploy | Deno Deploy cut its Free plan's CPU time from 15 to 10 hours a month, memory time from 350 GB-hours to 150 GiB-hours, custom domains from 50 to 5, apps from 20 to 10 and team members from 5 to 3; 60 deployments an hour became 15 builds an hour, one at a time. KV read units went up from 450,000 to 1,000,000 a month and write units from 300,000 to 500,000. The pricing page changed between a Common Crawl capture of 2026-08-07 and our read on 2026-08-28. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective Apr 23, 2026 | Render | Render replaced its workspace plans. Bandwidth for the Hobby tier went from 100 GB to 5 GB included per month, then $0.15 per GB, and Hobby workspaces are now capped at 25 services. New workspaces got the new plans on 2026-04-23 and existing workspaces moved on 2026-08-01. Free web services, Postgres and Key Value kept their specs, and free web services draw on the workspace's included bandwidth. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective Apr 14, 2026 | Netlify | Netlify changed its credit rates: bandwidth went from 10 to 20 credits per GB and compute from 5 to 10 credits per GB-hour, while web requests went from 3 to 2 credits per 10,000. The Free plan keeps 300 credits a month, so each credit buys half as much bandwidth and compute. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Apr 14, 2026 | Netlify | Form submissions are now free across all Credit plans (including the Credit Free tier) — previously each form submission cost 1 credit. Credit Pro also gained unlimited team seats (was $20/seat per Git contributor), which effectively removes the prior CMS/Identity 'every committer becomes a $19 Pro seat' gotcha for free-tier users who ever upgrade. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Apr 12, 2026 | Deno Deploy | Egress on the Free plan fell from 100 GB to 20 GB a month. Deno Deploy's pricing page changed between Common Crawl captures of 2026-03-15 and 2026-04-12. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Mar 1, 2026 | Netlify | No longer in force (2026-04-14). Every repo committer is now charged as a full Pro seat ($19/mo) when using Netlify CMS or Identity with a private repo. Previously only users who logged into the Netlify dashboard counted as seats Reversed 2026-04-14: Netlify's pricing page now states that as of April 14th, credit-based Pro plans no longer charge for any seat. The per-committer charge described here is no longer in force. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective Feb 26, 2026 | Koyeb | Koyeb withdrew its free Starter plan from new users after announcing on 2026-02-17 that it is joining Mistral AI: new users "must subscribe to one of our paid plans to get started", from Pro at $29 a month plus compute. Starter was on koyeb.com/pricing in the Internet Archive's capture of 2026-02-19 and gone by 2026-02-26. Organizations already on Starter keep it. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective Feb 1, 2026 | Vercel | New Pro projects now default to Turbo build machines (30 vCPUs, 60GB memory) at $0.126/minute — 9x more expensive than Standard machines ($0.014/min). Pro plan still $20/seat/month with $20 usage credit, but real-world build costs for moderate teams can hit $400+/month. Standard machines still available but must be manually selected. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Jan 15, 2026 | PythonAnywhere | PythonAnywhere dropped its $5-a-month Hacker plan, so the base paid plan is $10 a month. New free accounts lost MySQL and scheduled tasks; unused free web apps now expire after 1 month instead of 3. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Jan 1, 2026 | Fly.io | Volume snapshots now billed — previously free automatic snapshots now cost $0.08/GB-month Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Jan 1, 2026 | Vercel | Pro plan moved to credit-based model ($20/mo credit pool), Hobby plan metrics renamed and restructured — bandwidth→Fast Data Transfer, serverless split into Active CPU + Provisioned Memory, Blob Storage and Image Transformations added Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Sep 4, 2025 | Netlify | Restructured to credit-based pricing; sites pause on credit exhaustion Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Sep 3, 2025 | Railway | Railway added a Free plan: after the 30-day trial, $1 of free credit a month. It first appears in the Internet Archive's 2025-09-03 capture; the 2025-08-24 capture has no Free plan. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Jun 30, 2025 | Railway | Railway's trial credit now expires. The one-time $5 grant, which previously did not expire, lasts 30 days. The Internet Archive's 2025-06-26 capture still says the credits do not expire; the 2025-06-30 capture says they expire in 30 days. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Nov 28, 2022 | Heroku | Heroku stopped offering free dynos, hobby-dev Heroku Postgres and hobby-dev Heroku Data for Redis on 2022-11-28, as announced on 2022-08-25. Source ↗ | HIGH |
Cloudflare Pages for static/JAMstack (unlimited free bandwidth). Railway for full-stack apps ($5 trial credit for 30 days, no credit card). Vercel Hobby for Next.js (100 GB of Fast Data Transfer, builds included; non-commercial use only).
Vercel Pro ($20/seat) for frontend/Next.js. Railway Pro ($20 monthly minimum, unlimited seats) for general-purpose backends. Google Cloud Run for container workloads with auto-scale-to-zero and generous always-free tier.
Cloudflare Workers (100K req/day free, zero cold starts, 300+ edge locations).
Cloudflare Pages (unlimited bandwidth, 500 builds/month). GitHub Pages (100 GB/month, free with any GitHub account). Vercel Hobby (100 GB bandwidth, best for Next.js).
Railway Pro ($20 monthly minimum) and Render Pro ($25 a month flat) include unlimited team members. Google Cloud Run has no per-seat pricing — purely usage-based.
Railway — closest developer experience to Heroku with better pricing ($5/mo vs Heroku's $5–7/mo minimum). Similar push-to-deploy workflow, built-in databases, and add-on ecosystem.