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

By the Pethost team · 26 September 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 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 every plan of the range is 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, 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