What will your app cost to host?

Describe the app once and see the monthly bill on seven platforms, from usage-billed PaaS to a server you run yourself. Every price comes from the provider's own pricing page.

prices checked 29 September 2026 · USD, without VAT

RAM; 5 or 50 GB storage
persistent volume
matters for Railway
matters for Railway, Fly.io

Cheapest: Hetzner Cloud, $23.59/mo

Cheapest managed platform: DO App Platform, $25.15. Monthly estimates in USD without VAT, prices checked 29 September 2026.

Provider and breakdownMonthly
Hetzner Cloudcheapestself-managed
CPX22 (2 vCPU, 4 GB) $22.99 · IPv4 address $0.60
EU locations. The cheaper CX and CAX plans are sold out for now.
$23.59
DigitalOcean Dropletself-managed
Basic $24 (2 vCPU, 4 GB) $24
Powered-off Droplets are still billed.
$24
DigitalOcean App Platform
1 × Shared 1 vCPU / 1 GiB fixed $10 · Postgres 1 GiB, 10 GiB $15.15
Transfer allowance comes with each container, pooled per team.
$25.15
Railway
App $15 · Postgres (1 GB RAM, 5 GB) $12.75 · Egress $5 · Included usage (Hobby) −$5 · Hobby plan $5
Billed on actual CPU and memory use; sleeping services cost nothing. Postgres is billed like any other service.
$32.75
Fly.io
1 × shared-cpu-1x 1GB $6.70 · Postgres Basic (1 GB) $39.40 · Egress $2
Prices from 1 October 2026. No free allowance. Shared CPUs burst above a small baseline.
$48.10
Heroku
1 × Standard-2X $50 · Postgres Essential-1 (10 GB) $9
In sustaining engineering since February 2026. Heroku doesn't state vCPUs: shared dynos are counted as up to 1, Performance dynos as dedicated.
$59
Render
1 × 1c-2g $25 · Postgres 0.5c-1g $20.20 · Egress $14.25
Hobby workspace: one seat, 5 GB of bandwidth included. Free instances sleep after 15 minutes idle.
$59.45

Estimates, not quotes: check the provider's calculator before you commit. Shared vCPUs aren't equal across providers, and usage-billed platforms depend on how busy your app really is.

How the estimate works

The providers bill in three different ways, and the calculator follows each one's own rules.

  • Usage-billed (Railway). You pay for the CPU time and memory the app actually uses, per second. The calculator multiplies your vCPUs by the average load, adds memory, and subtracts the usage that the $5 Hobby plan includes. A quiet app costs far less than its size suggests; a busy one can cost more than a fixed instance. Postgres runs as an ordinary service; we assume it holds its full memory and uses 0.1 vCPU (small) or 0.25 vCPU (larger) on average.
  • Machines billed while running (Fly.io). A fixed price per machine size, charged per second while it runs, so fewer running hours means a smaller bill. Managed Postgres is a separate monthly plan.
  • Fixed instances (Render, Heroku, DigitalOcean App Platform). A monthly price per instance size, whatever the load. The calculator picks the smallest size with at least your vCPUs and memory; Heroku sells dynos by memory, so it is matched on memory only.
  • A server you run yourself (DigitalOcean Droplet, Hetzner Cloud). One virtual server holds all app instances and the database, plus 0.25 GB of memory for the system. It is by far the cheapest per gigabyte, but updates, backups, monitoring and database care are yours.

Bandwidth follows each provider's allowance: Render's Hobby workspace includes 5 GB, DigitalOcean containers and Droplets bring their own allowance, Hetzner includes 20 TB in Europe, and Railway and Fly.io charge from the first gigabyte.

Migration watch

Price changes and platform news from the last year that are worth planning around.

Fly.io raises memory prices by about 20 %: the smallest shared machine goes from $1.94 to $2.19 a month. CPU prices stay the same. The calculator already uses the new prices. Fly.io
Render replaced per-seat workspace plans with flat Pro ($25) and Scale ($499) plans for all customers, cut the included bandwidth and now bills overage per gigabyte. Render changelog
Hetzner raised cloud prices for new orders a second time this year; CPX22 in Europe went from €7.99 to €19.49 a month. The cheaper CX and CAX plans are currently shown as unavailable. Hetzner
Hetzner raised prices for new and existing servers, announced on 23 February. Hetzner
Heroku moved to "sustaining engineering" and stopped selling new Enterprise contracts; it says prices are not changing. Heroku blog
DigitalOcean Droplets moved to per-second billing, still capped at 672 hours a month. DigitalOcean blog
Railway brought back a free plan with $1 of usage a month, limited to small services. Railway blog

Common questions

Which platform is cheapest for a small app?

It depends on the shape of the app, which is why the calculator exists. A single small container without a database is cheapest on a machine-priced or fixed-instance platform. Add Postgres and a self-managed server wins on price, while the managed platforms charge more for the convenience. An app that runs only part of the day, or sits mostly idle, is where per-second billing pays off: Railway and Fly.io charge only while it runs, and Railway also by the actual load. Try the presets above.

Does Railway's $5 Hobby plan include usage?

Yes. The $5 fee includes $5 of usage, so you only pay extra beyond that. Pro works the same way at $20.

Why is bandwidth so expensive on Render?

Since Render's 2026 plan change (new workspaces from April, all of them from August) the Hobby workspace includes 5 GB of bandwidth a month and charges $0.15 per GB after that; Pro includes 25 GB. For a site that serves a lot of traffic, put static files behind a CDN or pick a provider with a larger allowance.

What does "self-managed" mean?

You rent a bare virtual server and run everything on it: the operating system, the web server, TLS certificates, the database and its backups. It costs a fraction of a managed platform, but the work and the 3 a.m. outages are yours.

Are the prices with VAT?

No. Providers add VAT or sales tax on the invoice where it applies, for example for consumers in the EU.

Why is a provider missing a price?

When a workload doesn't fit any size we have confirmed for that provider, or it has no managed database of that size in our table, the row says so instead of guessing.

Sources

Prices were read from these pages on 29 September 2026.