---
title: "PaaS with no usage-based billing in 2026: flat prices, spending caps and overage compared | Pethost"
description: "Of six PaaS that bill by use or per service, only Railway documents a hard spending cap. Pethost has no usage-based billing: €9.99 a month for a whole machine."
---

[Blog](https://pethost.dev/blog/) · Flat-price hosting

# PaaS with no usage-based billing in 2026: flat prices, spending caps and overage compared

By the Pethost team · 17 September 2026 · Updated 5 October 2026 · 10 min read

You are afraid of a surprise bill and want a PaaS with a predictable monthly price: flat-rate pricing, no usage-based billing, no overage charges. In October 2026 most platforms still meter something: CPU and memory by the second, or traffic by the gigabyte. Of six we read that bill by use or per service, only Railway documents a hard limit that stops the bill. On Pethost nothing is metered: €9.99 a month rents a whole machine, and when it is full an app slows down and the bill stays €9.99.

**In short**

- **A hard cap on the whole bill:** Railway alone, from $10, and at the limit every workload goes offline. Fly.io and Google Cloud Run say they have none; on Render, Heroku and DigitalOcean App Platform none was found.
- **A fixed price per instance, traffic billed on top:** Render ($0.15 a GB after 5 GB), DigitalOcean App Platform ($0.02 a GiB after 50 GiB a container). Heroku bills no traffic.
- **Nothing metered:** Pethost (€9.99 a month for 2 vCPU, 3 GB and 30 GB), Sliplane (€9 for 1 vCPU and 1 GB), Hostim.dev (€2.50 for each app of 1 GB).
- **Three web services, a worker and a Postgres:** €9.99 on Pethost, $23.15 on Railway, $27.00 on DigitalOcean App Platform, $33.00 on Heroku, $34.75 on Render. Starter's 3 GB of memory alone are $30 a month at Railway's rates.

## Where a surprise bill comes from

A surprise bill is a meter multiplied by something nobody planned.

### A traffic spike

A post reaches a front page: a million views of a 500 KB page are 500 GB of outgoing traffic. For one small service, at each vendor's listed rate and allowance, by our sums:

**What 500 GB of outgoing traffic in one month adds to the bill**

| Host | Added that month |
| --- | --- |
| Pethost | €0 |
| Sliplane | €0 |
| Hostim.dev | €0 |
| Heroku | $0 |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | $9.00 |
| Fly.io | $10.00 |
| Railway | $25.00 |
| Google Cloud Run | $59.88 |
| Render, Hobby | $74.25 |

The amounts are small, and on most of these platforms nothing stops them at ten times the traffic.

### A loop

A worker retries a failing job without a pause and keeps a CPU core busy. Where compute is billed by use, that is on the invoice: on Railway one busy vCPU is $20 a month, and a leak that grows a service from 0.5 GB to 4 GB turns $5 of memory into $40. Where an instance has a fixed price, a loop adds nothing. On Pethost it takes CPU from your other projects, and the bill does not move.

### A crawler

A crawler is traffic you did not ask for, billed like a spike, and on Google Cloud Run by request too: $0.40 a million. On Pethost it is a line in the request log.

### An agent that deploys ten things

Where every service has its own price, each deploy is a new line: $7 for 512 MB on Render and on Heroku, $5 on DigitalOcean App Platform. Ten are $70, $70 and $50 a month. On Pethost a new project takes memory from the same machine and adds nothing to the bill, and [your AI coding agent](https://pethost.dev/blog/hosting-for-ai-coding-agents/) cannot pay for anything or change your account.

Claude Code

**You say:** Deploy this bot too. Will my bill go up?

- GetMachine Starter: 1.4 of 3 GB memory in use, 5 projects
- CreateTransfer bot.tgz uploaded
- CreateProject bot: building
- GetOperation succeeded

**The agent answers:** The bot is running, and your bill stays the same: the plan is a flat price. About 1.5 GB of memory is still free.

## Spending caps in 2026: Railway's hard usage limit, Fly.io with no spending cap

When a month goes wrong on a metered platform, the service stops or the bill grows. A hard cap chooses the first.

### Railway: a hard usage limit from $10

Railway has a hard limit on the whole bill, on every plan. You set an amount of $10 or more, and when usage reaches it Railway takes all your workloads offline: its documentation calls setting one a possibly destructive action.

### Fly.io: no spending cap, no billing alerts

Fly.io's cost page is plain: “there's no soft ceiling. If you go over, we'll bill you.” It has no billing alerts yet. A Machine does have a fixed price for its size while it runs, $3.69 a month for 512 MB in Ashburn, whatever its CPU does. What moves is traffic, volumes, and Machines somebody forgot.

### Every platform's meter, overage rate and cap

**Usage-based billing, overage and spending caps, October 2026**

| Platform | Compute | Outgoing traffic | A hard cap, and what happens there |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Pethost | One price for the machine: €9.99 for 3 GB | Not metered | The price is the cap: a full machine slows down |
| Railway | Metered by the second: $10 a GB, $20 a vCPU a month | $0.05 a GB | Yes, from $10: every workload goes offline |
| Render | Fixed per instance: $7 for 512 MB | 5 GB, then $0.15 a GB | None found: the bill grows |
| Fly.io | Fixed per Machine: $3.69 for 512 MB | $0.02 a GB | No, and no alerts: the bill grows |
| Heroku | Fixed per dyno: $7 for 0.5 GB | Not billed | None found; nothing is billed by use |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | Fixed per container: $5 for 512 MiB | 50 GiB a container, then $0.02 a GiB | None found: an email alert |
| Google Cloud Run | Metered per 100 ms | 1 GiB, then $0.12 a GiB | No: a budget only alerts |
| Sliplane | One price per server: €9 for 1 GB | Included, under fair use | The server's price |
| Hostim.dev | Fixed per app: €2.50 for 1 GB | Included | The plans you chose |

Billing by use is built for two cases: one thing that mostly idles, which then costs close to nothing, and one that must scale through a spike. Google Cloud Run scales a quiet service to zero, at the price of [a cold start](https://pethost.dev/blog/always-on-hosting-no-cold-starts/), and Railway's Pro plan runs a service on up to 42 replicas. Five always-on projects are neither: they hold their memory all month, and the meter counts all of it.

## Render, DigitalOcean App Platform and Heroku: a fixed instance price, and bandwidth overage per GB

On these three an instance costs the same whatever it uses. What moves the bill is traffic, and the count of services.

- **Render** includes 5 GB of outgoing traffic a month on Hobby and 25 GB on Pro, and bills $0.15 for each gigabyte after it.
- **DigitalOcean App Platform** pools 50 GiB a container across the team and bills $0.02 a GiB past the pool. Its documentation says usage cannot be viewed.
- **Heroku** bills no traffic: a Basic dyno is a flat $7 a month, and a second app is a second dyno. See [Heroku alternatives](https://pethost.dev/blog/heroku-alternatives/).

## Flat-rate pricing with no overage charges: the machine is the limit

A flat price moves the limit from the invoice to the machine. On Pethost €9.99 a month rents a virtual machine of 2 vCPU, 3 GB of memory and 30 GB of SSD, with as many projects, containers and databases as fit. Nothing is metered, nothing is billed on top. At the limit, this happens in place of a charge:

- **The CPU is busy:** requests wait longer, for as long as the spike lasts.
- **A service takes more memory than there is:** it is killed, and the panel and your agent report it as out of memory.
- **A deploy does not fit:** it fails and says why: the disk is full, or how much memory the build lacks.

The bill is €9.99 in each case. Grow, a machine twice the size, is €17.99; moving up from one plan to another follows soon.

**The limit, on the screen.** The capacity page shows each project's memory, CPU and disk, before the month ends.

![The Pethost panel's capacity page: each project with its memory, its CPU and its disk.](https://pethost.dev/shots/capacity.webp)

Two other hosts we read meter nothing. Sliplane is flat per server, as we are: €9 a month is 1 vCPU and 1 GB there, and the 4 GB server that holds the workload below is €28.80 ([Sliplane alternatives](https://pethost.dev/blog/sliplane-alternatives/)). Hostim.dev is flat per app: €2.50 a month for 1 GB, and each further app is one more plan. [Unlimited projects for one flat monthly fee](https://pethost.dev/blog/unlimited-projects-flat-monthly-fee/) compares what one price holds.

## What if I just rent a VPS? Its price is fixed too

It is, and two things are worth knowing. An agent on a bare server works as root over SSH, where one wrong command takes down the proxy or a database; on Pethost its shell is inside your containers, never on the machine. And a server is not sure to cost less: Hetzner, the one most guides name, raised its prices twice in 2026, and its cheap Cost-Optimized range has long been out of stock. Those servers are hardware it bought at good prices, before the RAM shortage, and on 5 October every plan of the range was marked “not available”. The 2 vCPU, 4 GB server it does sell, CPX22, is €19.49 a month, up from €7.99, before a panel, backup storage and your hours.

## What a predictable monthly price comes to for three apps, a worker and a Postgres

One workload on every host here: three always-on web services of 512 MB each, a worker, a Postgres and 10 GB of outgoing traffic a month. That is about 2.5 GB of Starter's 3 GB.

**Per month. Bars compare at €1 = $1.1204, the ECB's reference rate of 5 October 2026**

| Host | Price a month |
| --- | --- |
| Pethost Starter | €9.99 |
| Hostim.dev | €11.00 |
| Fly.io, your own Postgres | $17.30 |
| Railway | $23.15 |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | $27.00 |
| Sliplane | €28.80 |
| Heroku | $33.00 |
| Render | $34.75 |
| Fly.io, Managed Postgres | $53.24 |
| Google Cloud Run | $63.49 |

Railway's figure counts memory only, on our assumption of 0.5 GB a service: each 0.1 vCPU a service uses adds $2. Fly.io's are Ashburn prices, the lower one with a Postgres you run yourself: its managed one starts at $38. Cloud Run's is at us-central1 rates, with Cloud SQL. [Railway vs Render vs Fly.io pricing](https://pethost.dev/blog/railway-vs-render-vs-fly-io-pricing/) has the plans line by line.

Postgres on Pethost is a container in your project, in the nightly backup: not a managed database with replicas or point-in-time recovery, as several of those priced above are.

## What €9.99 a month buys when nothing is metered

Starter is 3 GB of memory that is always on. The same 3 GB at each platform's own plan prices, by our sums:

**3 GB of always-on memory, a month**

| Host | What makes 3 GB | A month |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Pethost Starter | The whole machine, with traffic, backups and logs | €9.99 |
| Fly.io | Three 1 GB Machines in Ashburn | $20.10 |
| Sliplane | Its 4 GB server, the first to hold 3 GB | €28.80 |
| Railway | Memory alone, before CPU and traffic | $30.00 |
| DigitalOcean App Platform | Three containers of 1 GiB | $30.00 |
| Render | One instance of 2 GB, two of 512 MB | $39.00 |
| Heroku | Six Basic dynos | $42.00 |

That is the best value for a fixed bill, and the work around the memory is done too. In the €9.99, without VAT:

- **€0** billed on top, in any month
- **30 days** of request logs
- **14 nights** of encrypted backups, off the machine
- **13** MCP tools for your agent

Also inside: HTTPS for every project, deploys from GitHub, SSH into any container. On Render, HTTP request logs need the Pro workspace, $25 a month more, and DigitalOcean's $7 database is not backed up by default. There is no free tier: €9.99 rents a real machine, so nothing sleeps. [See the plans](https://pethost.dev/#pricing).

## Who Pethost is for

### Pethost is the best pick for

- **Anyone who wants to know the bill before the month starts**: €9.99, whatever the traffic does
- **Solo developers with several side projects**: the next project is no new line while it fits
- **People who build with Claude Code, Codex or Cursor**: the agent deploys as often as it likes and cannot spend money
- **Early startups** that want one fixed bill to plan by

### Look elsewhere if

- Your application must grow past one machine during a spike, or run in several regions: here the machine is the limit

## Questions

### I'm afraid of surprise bills. Which PaaS has no usage-based billing, just a predictable price?

Pethost has no usage-based billing: €9.99 a month, without VAT, rents a machine of 2 vCPU, 3 GB and 30 GB, and nothing is metered or billed on top. When the machine is full an app slows down, and the bill stays the same.

### Does Railway have a hard usage limit, and does Fly.io have a spending cap?

Railway has a hard limit on every plan, of $10 or more: when usage reaches it, all workloads are taken offline. Fly.io has no spending cap and no billing alerts; a Machine left running has a fixed price, and traffic is $0.02 a GB.

### Does Render charge bandwidth overage in 2026?

Yes: $0.15 for each gigabyte over the 5 GB a month of the Hobby workspace, or the 25 GB of Pro. Instances have a fixed price, $7 a month for 512 MB: 3 GB of memory is $39.

### What does DigitalOcean App Platform charge per GB of bandwidth overage?

$0.02 for each GiB past the allowance, which is 50 GiB with a $5 container and is pooled across the team. A billing alert sends an email; we found no hard cap.

### Is a Heroku dyno a flat monthly price, and is there bandwidth overage?

A Basic dyno is $7 a month for 0.5 GB, always on, billed by its running time: 3 GB is six dynos, $42. Heroku does not bill traffic: it sets a soft limit of 2 TB a month for an app.

Read from each vendor's own pricing page and documentation on 5 October 2026. Prices are in each vendor's currency; ours are without VAT.

1. [Hetzner Cloud: Cost-Optimized plans](https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/cost-optimized)
2. [Hetzner: price adjustment](https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment/)
3. [Railway: pricing](https://railway.com/pricing)
4. [Railway: cost control](https://docs.railway.com/pricing/cost-control.md)
5. [Render: pricing](https://render.com/pricing)
6. [Render: outbound bandwidth](https://render.com/docs/outbound-bandwidth)
7. [Render: the plans of April 2026](https://render.com/changelog/updated-plans-for-render-workspaces)
8. [Fly.io: pricing](https://docs.fly.io/about/pricing)
9. [Fly.io: cost management](https://docs.fly.io/about/cost-management.md)
10. [Fly.io: billing](https://docs.fly.io/about/billing.md)
11. [Heroku: pricing](https://www.heroku.com/pricing/)
12. [Heroku: usage and billing](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/usage-and-billing)
13. [Heroku: limits](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/limits)
14. [Heroku: an update](https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/)
15. [DigitalOcean App Platform: pricing](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/app-platform)
16. [DigitalOcean App Platform: billing](https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/details/pricing/)
17. [DigitalOcean App Platform: limits](https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/details/limits/)
18. [Google Cloud Run: pricing](https://cloud.google.com/run/pricing)
19. [Google Cloud: network pricing](https://cloud.google.com/vpc/network-pricing)
20. [Google Cloud: budgets](https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets)
21. [Vercel: pricing](https://vercel.com/pricing)
22. [Netlify: pricing](https://www.netlify.com/pricing/)
23. [Sliplane: pricing](https://sliplane.io/pricing)
24. [Sliplane: fair use](https://sliplane.io/fair-use)
25. [Hostim.dev: pricing](https://hostim.dev/pricing/)

## Put your projects online today

A machine of your own, as many projects as fit, one flat price. Nothing metered, nothing billed on top.

[Host all your projects for €9.99/mo](https://console.pethost.dev/)

## Keep reading

- 5 October 2026 [Best hosting for side projects in 2026: a PaaS, a VPS, or a small cloud of your own](https://pethost.dev/blog/best-hosting-for-side-projects/) The best hosting for side projects in 2026 is one machine at a flat price: three apps, a bot and a Postgres are €9.99 a month on Pethost, $34.75 on Render.
- 3 October 2026 [Railway vs Render vs Fly.io pricing in 2026: hobby plans, free tiers and Postgres](https://pethost.dev/blog/railway-vs-render-vs-fly-io-pricing/) Three small apps, a worker and a Postgres cost $23.15 on Railway, $34.75 on Render and $17.30 to $53.24 on Fly.io in 2026, and a flat €9.99 on Pethost.
- 29 September 2026 [Coolify Cloud vs Dokploy Cloud in 2026: pricing, what they manage, and fully managed alternatives](https://pethost.dev/blog/coolify-cloud-vs-dokploy-cloud/) Coolify Cloud ($5 a month) and Dokploy Cloud ($4.50 a server) host only the panel: the server stays yours. Pethost looks after the machine too: €9.99 a month.
- 23 September 2026 [PaaS isolation in 2026: shared containers, microVMs, or a virtual machine of your own](https://pethost.dev/blog/paas-on-your-own-vm/) Render and Heroku run apps in shared-kernel containers, Fly.io and Koyeb in microVMs. Pethost rents you a virtual machine of your own for €9.99 a month.

[All articles](https://pethost.dev/blog/) · [About Pethost](https://pethost.dev/about/) · [Pricing](https://pethost.dev/#pricing)

Pethost · Stephan Gomer · NIP 1133096755

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