---
title: "Railway vs Render vs Fly.io pricing in 2026: hobby plans, free tiers and Postgres | Pethost"
description: "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."
---

[Blog](https://pethost.dev/blog/) · Hosting comparisons

# 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.

**In short**

- **Plans:** Railway Hobby is $5 a month, a minimum that usage counts toward. Render Hobby is $0, with $7 for each 512 MB service. Fly.io has no plan fee.
- **Free tiers in 2026:** Railway gives $5 of credit for 30 days, then $1 of credit a month. Render's free web service spins down after 15 minutes, and its free Postgres expires after 30 days. Fly.io has no free tier, and neither has Pethost.
- **Postgres:** a metered service on Railway, from $6 a month on Render, from $38 managed on Fly.io, and one more container on a Pethost machine, with no price of its own.
- **Three 512 MB apps, a worker, a Postgres and 10 GB of traffic:** $23.15 on Railway before CPU, $34.75 on Render, $17.30 or $53.24 on Fly.io, €9.99 on Pethost Starter. Starter's 3 GB of memory alone would be $20.10 on Fly.io, $30 on Railway and $39 on Render.

## 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.

**Plans, free tiers, traffic and spending caps, October 2026**

| Host | Plan fee a month | A 512 MB service, always on | Free tier or trial | Outgoing traffic | Spending cap |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Pethost Starter | €9.99, nothing on top | In the price | None | Not metered | Nothing to cap |
| Railway Hobby | $5, which includes $5 of usage | $5.00, before CPU | $5 of credit for 30 days, then $1 of credit a month | $0.05 a GB | A hard limit, from $10 |
| Render Hobby | None on Hobby | $7.00 | A web service that spins down; a Postgres for 30 days | 5 GB, then $0.15 a GB | For build minutes; no other found |
| Fly.io | None | $3.69 in Ashburn | None: a trial of 2 hours of runtime or 7 days | $0.02 a GB in North America and Europe | None, and no billing alerts |

### 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](https://pethost.dev/blog/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](https://pethost.dev/blog/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](https://pethost.dev/blog/always-on-hosting-no-cold-starts/).

### 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](https://pethost.dev/blog/paas-without-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.

**Both workloads, per month, with the sums**

| Host | One app and a Postgres | Three apps, a worker, a Postgres, 10 GB of traffic |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Pethost Starter | €9.99, for a quarter of the machine's 3 GB | €9.99, for about 2.5 GB of its 3 GB |
| Railway Hobby | $5.00 + $2.50 + $0.15 = $7.65 | 4 × $5.00 + $2.50 + $0.15 + $0.50 = $23.15 |
| Render Hobby | $7 + $6 = $13.00 | 4 × $7 + $6 + $0.75 = $34.75 |
| Fly.io, Managed Postgres | $3.69 + $38.00 + $0.28 = $41.97 | 4 × $3.69 + $38.28 + $0.20 = $53.24 |
| Fly.io, your own Postgres | $3.69 + $2.19 + $0.15 = $6.03 | 4 × $3.69 + $2.34 + $0.20 = $17.30 |
| Heroku | $7 + $5 = $12.00 | 4 × $7 + $5 = $33.00 |

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](https://pethost.dev/blog/heroku-alternatives/).

**Three apps, a worker, a Postgres and 10 GB of traffic, 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 |
| Railway | $23.15 |
| Render | $34.75 |
| Fly.io, your own Postgres | $17.30 |
| Fly.io, Managed Postgres | $53.24 |
| Heroku | $33.00 |

**One app and a Postgres, per month, with the memory each price buys**

| Host, and the memory | Price a month |
| --- | --- |
| Pethost Starter: 3 GB | €9.99 |
| Railway: 0.75 GB | $7.65 |
| Render: 0.75 GB | $13.00 |
| Fly.io, own Postgres: 0.75 GB | $6.03 |
| Fly.io, managed: 1.5 GB | $41.97 |
| Heroku: a 0.5 GB dyno | $12.00 |

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](https://pethost.dev/blog/unlimited-projects-flat-monthly-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:

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

| Host | Price | How |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Pethost Starter | €9.99 | The whole machine, with 2 vCPU and 30 GB; traffic, backups and logs inside |
| Fly.io | $20.10 | Three 1 GB Machines in Ashburn, $23.19 in Frankfurt; volumes and a database on top |
| Railway | $30.00 | 3 GB at $10 a gigabyte; CPU, disk and traffic on top |
| Render | $39.00 | One 2 GB instance and two of 512 MB |
| Heroku | $42.00 | Six Basic dynos of 0.5 GB |

That is the best value of the four: €3.33 for a gigabyte of always-on memory, and €3.00 on [Grow](https://pethost.dev/#pricing): €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.

**Request logs, in the price.** A project's ten busiest paths with their share, count and response times.

![A project's requests in the Pethost panel: its ten busiest paths, each with its share, its count and its response times, and the log of single requests under them.](https://pethost.dev/shots/traffic.webp)

## 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

### Pethost is the best pick for

- **Solo developers with several side projects**: the fourth app and the fifth add nothing to the bill
- **Anyone who wants to know the bill before the month starts**: nothing is metered
- **People who build with Claude Code, Codex or Cursor**: the agent deploys and reads logs through 13 MCP tools
- **Early startups with an app, a worker and a Postgres**: one fixed bill, with backups and request logs inside

### Look elsewhere if

- Your application needs several regions, autoscaling, or a managed Postgres with replicas: here one machine is the limit

## Questions

### Railway vs Render vs Fly.io vs Heroku: what does a small app cost on each in 2026?

Three always-on apps of 512 MB, a worker, a Postgres and 10 GB of traffic cost $23.15 a month on Railway before CPU, $34.75 on Render, $33.00 on Heroku, and $17.30 or $53.24 on Fly.io, with a Postgres you run yourself or its managed one. All five run on one Pethost machine of 3 GB for a flat €9.99 a month.

### How much is the Railway Hobby plan in 2026?

The Railway Hobby plan is $5 a month, a minimum that includes $5 of usage, billed at $10 a month for a gigabyte of memory and $20 for a vCPU.

### Do Railway, Render and Fly.io have a free tier in 2026?

Railway gives $5 of credit for 30 days, then $1 of credit a month, which does not keep a 512 MB service running. Render's free web service spins down after 15 minutes, and its free Postgres expires after 30 days. Fly.io has no free tier, and neither has Pethost: €9.99 a month rents a machine on which nothing sleeps.

### What is Render's starter pricing in 2026?

Render's smallest paid instance is $7 a month for 512 MB, and the Hobby workspace itself is $0.

### What is the smallest Fly.io Machine, and what does it cost?

The smallest Fly.io Machine is a shared-cpu-1x with 256 MB: $2.19 a month in Ashburn when it runs all month, and 3.8% to 15.4% more in Europe.

### What does managed Postgres cost on Railway, Render and Fly.io?

Render's managed Postgres starts at $6 a month for 256 MB, and Fly.io's at $38 for 1 GB with high availability. Railway lists no database price: a Postgres there is a service billed for what it uses. On Pethost it is a container in the project, with no price of its own, and not a managed database with replicas.

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](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: plans](https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/plans)
5. [Railway: free trial](https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/free-trial)
6. [Railway: pricing questions](https://docs.railway.com/reference/pricing/faqs)
7. [Railway: cost control](https://docs.railway.com/pricing/cost-control)
8. [Railway: backups](https://docs.railway.com/volumes/backups)
9. [Render: pricing](https://render.com/pricing)
10. [Render: free instances](https://render.com/docs/free)
11. [Render: build pipeline](https://render.com/docs/build-pipeline)
12. [Render: workspace plans](https://render.com/docs/new-workspace-plans)
13. [Render: updated workspace plans](https://render.com/changelog/updated-plans-for-render-workspaces)
14. [Fly.io: pricing](https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/)
15. [Fly.io: billing](https://docs.fly.io/about/billing.md)
16. [Fly.io: cost management](https://docs.fly.io/about/cost-management.md)
17. [Fly.io: free trial](https://docs.fly.io/about/free-trial.md)
18. [Fly.io: Managed Postgres](https://docs.fly.io/links/mpg.md)
19. [Fly.io: autostop and autostart](https://fly.io/docs/launch/autostop-autostart/)
20. [Heroku: pricing](https://www.heroku.com/pricing/)
21. [Heroku: an update](https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/)

## 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

- 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.
- 19 September 2026 [Coolify vs Dokploy vs CapRover vs Dokku vs Kamal in 2026: self-hosted PaaS compared](https://pethost.dev/blog/coolify-vs-dokploy-vs-caprover-vs-dokku/) Coolify, Dokploy, CapRover, Dokku and Kamal compared for 2026: free software on a server you keep. Pethost is that machine, looked after, for €9.99 a month.
- 15 September 2026 [Managed Docker Compose hosting in 2026: who deploys a compose.yaml with HTTPS, backups and logs](https://pethost.dev/blog/managed-docker-compose-hosting/) Most managed hosts convert a Docker Compose file or want their own format. Two run a compose.yaml as written: Pethost, from €9.99 a month, and Elestio.

[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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