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Railway vs Render vs Fly.io pricing in 2026: hobby plans, free tiers and Postgres

By the Pethost team · 3 October 2026 · Updated 5 October 2026 · 10 min read

You want to know what a small app with Postgres costs on Railway, Render or Fly.io before the first bill says so. In October 2026 Railway's Hobby plan is $5 a month, counted toward usage at $10 for a gigabyte of memory; Render's is $0, plus $7 for each 512 MB service; Fly.io has no plan and no free tier, and its smallest Machine, 256 MB, is $2.19. Three small apps, a bot and a Postgres come to $23.15 on Railway, $34.75 on Render and $17.30 to $53.24 on Fly.io, and all five run on one Pethost machine for a flat €9.99 a month.

Railway vs Render vs Fly.io pricing in 2026, plan by plan

Railway charges for what a service uses each second, Render for each instance by its size, Fly.io for each Machine while it runs. The first row is ours: a flat price for a machine.

Railway Hobby plan pricing: $5 of usage, then by the second

Hobby is “$5 minimum usage”, a minimum and not an extra: “If your resource usage is $3, your total bill for the cycle will be $5”. The meter runs by the second: memory at $0.00000386 a GB, CPU at $0.00000772 a vCPU. Over a month that is $10 for a gigabyte of memory and $20 for a vCPU; a gigabyte of volume is $0.15. Railway gives no estimate: “We are unable to give exact quotes or estimates”.

Among the three, Railway is built for an app that may outgrow one machine. See Railway alternatives.

Render pricing: a $0 workspace, and $7 for each service

The Hobby workspace is $0 for one person and up to 25 services. Each instance has its price, the same for web services and background workers: $7 a month for 512 MB and “Less than 1 CPU”, $25 for 2 GB and 1 CPU, $85 for 4 GB and 2 CPU.

Among the three, Render is built for a team's production app, with autoscaling and preview environments. Render alternatives adds the services up.

Fly.io pricing: no plan, and the smallest Machine is $2.19

Fly.io “bills for the resources you use, with no monthly platform fee”. A Machine is billed for its size and its running time, not for the CPU and memory it uses. In Ashburn, running all month, a shared-cpu-1x Machine is $2.19 with 256 MB, $3.69 with 512 MB and $6.70 with 1 GB. European regions are dearer, from 3.8% in Amsterdam to 15.4% in Frankfurt, where Fly's own example of the 1 GB Machine is $7.73.

Among the three, Fly.io is built for one app in several regions: it has 17.

Free tiers on Railway, Render and Fly.io: what stays free, and what sleeps

Railway's $1 of monthly credit does not keep a 512 MB service on: that memory alone is $5 a month. Render's free web service spins down after 15 minutes and takes “about one minute” to wake, a worker has no free instance, and the free Postgres has no backups. Fly.io: “Is there a free tier? No.”

Render's paid services do not sleep, and Railway's only where you turn Serverless on. On Fly.io fly launch writes min_machines_running = 0, so Machines stop when idle until you set it to 1. Pethost has no free tier, and nothing on its machines sleeps: see always-on hosting compared.

Spending caps and overage

Reaching Railway's hard limit means “all your workloads will be taken offline”. Fly.io has no cap: “If you go over, we'll bill you. We don't support billing alerts (yet), so budget accordingly.” On Pethost nothing is metered, so there is nothing to go over: PaaS with no usage-based billing compares more hosts.

Managed Postgres pricing on Railway, Render and Fly.io

• Railway lists no database price. A Postgres is a service like any other: 0.25 GB of memory held all month is $2.50, a 1 GB volume $0.15, and backups of the volume are billed by their size.
• Render's managed Postgres starts at $6 a month for 256 MB and 1 GB of storage, with point-in-time recovery of 3 days on Hobby.
• Fly.io's Managed Postgres starts at $38 a month for 1 GB, plus $0.28 for a gigabyte of storage, with high availability and backups. A Postgres you run yourself in a Machine is $2.19 for 256 MB and $0.15 for a gigabyte of volume.
• Pethost: a Postgres is one more service in the project, private to it and in the nightly backup, with no price of its own. It is not a managed database with replicas or point-in-time recovery.

What a small app with Postgres costs on each, with the arithmetic

Two workloads, the same on every host. One is an always-on web service of 512 MB with a Postgres. The other is what a person with side projects runs: three such services, a worker, a Postgres and 10 GB of outgoing traffic a month.

Railway's sums rest on our assumption: 0.5 GB of memory for each app and 0.25 GB for Postgres at $10 a gigabyte, a 1 GB volume, and the traffic. CPU is left out: each 0.1 vCPU a service uses adds $2 a month, which makes $11.65 and $33.15 with 0.1 vCPU on each. Fly.io's are Ashburn prices. Heroku, the usual fourth name in this comparison, is $7 for a Basic dyno of 0.5 GB and $5 for its smallest Postgres, and since February 2026 it is in sustaining engineering: see Heroku alternatives.

Each further 512 MB service adds $5 on Railway, $7 on Render and $3.69 on Fly.io. On Pethost it adds nothing while it fits: see unlimited projects for one flat fee.

The fourth option: what a flat €9.99 a month buys

All three sell the pieces. We rent out the whole machine: Starter is €9.99 a month without VAT for a virtual machine of your own, in the EU, with 2 vCPU, 3 GB of memory and 30 GB of SSD, for as many projects and databases as fit. The same 3 GB of always-on memory at each platform's own prices:

That is the best value of the four: €3.33 for a gigabyte of always-on memory, and €3.00 on Grow: €17.99 for 4 vCPU, 6 GB and 60 GB. And the work around an app is already done:

• 30 days of request logs
• 14 nights of encrypted backups, off the machine
• 13 MCP tools for your agent

Also in the price: HTTPS addresses and your own domains, a deploy on every push to GitHub, SSH into any container, and security updates that install themselves. On Render, request logs need the Pro workspace, $25 a month.

What about a VPS instead of Railway, Render or Fly.io?

Many guides answer this comparison with “rent a server”. Two things are worth knowing first. 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.

Who Pethost is for

Prices are what each vendor's own pages said on 5 October 2026, in the vendor's currency; ours are without VAT. The sums are ours.

1. Hetzner Cloud: Cost-Optimized plans
2. Hetzner: price adjustment
3. Railway: pricing
4. Railway: plans
5. Railway: free trial
6. Railway: pricing questions
7. Railway: cost control
8. Railway: backups
9. Render: pricing
10. Render: free instances
11. Render: build pipeline
12. Render: workspace plans
13. Render: updated workspace plans
14. Fly.io: pricing
15. Fly.io: billing
16. Fly.io: cost management
17. Fly.io: free trial
18. Fly.io: Managed Postgres
19. Fly.io: autostop and autostart
20. Heroku: pricing
21. Heroku: an update