The $5 Free Credit Is Gone: What It Really Costs to Evaluate a PaaS in 2026

Your first Fly.io invoice now arrives while you are still learning the pricing spreadsheet. For organizations created after October 7, 2024, there is no $5 monthly credit softening the first bill, no free allowance absorbing your beginner mistakes — just a trial measured in hours, then pay-from-dollar-one billing on a per-component meter you have not finished reading about. The question for 2026 is no longer "which PaaS has the best free tier" but something more practical: what does it actually cost to evaluate a PaaS now?

Short answer: on Fly.io, a realistic month of kicking tires runs from under a dollar for weekend tinkering to roughly $8 for an always-on app with a database. On Railway, the same evaluation is free until a one-time $5 credit runs out. On Render, it is free indefinitely if you can live with sleeping services. And on a box you own, it is a flat €3.79 with no billing relationship at all. The rest of this post shows the math behind each number so you can price your own evaluation before the invoice does it for you.

What actually changed on Fly.io​

Until late 2024, Fly.io's Hobby, Launch, and Scale plans all carried a $5-per-month free credit plus a free allowance: up to three shared-cpu-1x VMs with 256 MB of RAM, 3 GB of persistent volume storage, and a monthly egress allowance. That bundle was generous enough that a side project could run more or less forever without paying, and — just as important — it absorbed the cost of learning. Misconfigure an autoscaler, leave a volume attached, deploy to the wrong region: the credit ate it.

For every organization created after October 7, 2024, those plans are deprecated. New signups get a free trial of 2 VM hours or 7 days, whichever ends first, and then must put a valid card on file and pay from the first dollar of usage. Only accounts that predate the cutoff keep the old allowance, which is why pricing advice about Fly.io found in older tutorials ("just run it on the free allowance") is now wrong for every new evaluator.

Two smaller changes sharpen the point. Volume snapshots became billable in January 2026, so the backup story for any stateful evaluation now has a meter on it. And Fly.io's GPU Machines were deprecated entirely, unavailable after August 1, 2026 — if your evaluation includes GPU-backed inference, that door has closed and you are pricing CPU-only Machines.

What 30 days of kicking tires costs on each platform​

Here is the core comparison: the same evaluation workload — one small web service, shown with and without a small database — priced two ways. Weekend tinkering means roughly 40 active hours spread across evenings and weekends, machines stopped or idle in between. Always-on month means 720 hours, the service running continuously the way a staging environment does. "Small Postgres" is defined per platform in the next section, because it genuinely differs.

The single most important cell in that table is Fly.io's trial coverage: 2 VM hours of a shared-cpu-1x at roughly $1.94 per month works out to about half a cent of compute. The trial covers your first deploy, not your evaluation. And the 7-day clock runs whether you touch the dashboard or not — deploy on Friday, come back Monday, and three of your seven days are gone.

Railway's row needs one clarification: the $5 credit is one-time, not monthly. At hobby-scale burn (~$5/month of usage for a small app) it stretches to roughly a full month of evaluation. Push the workload harder — a worker, more RAM, real traffic — and burn rises toward $25–40/month territory, at which point the same $5 buys four to six days.

After the credit runs out, the Hobby plan's $5/month fee plus metered usage applies. The only free landing spot is a $1/month recurring credit on the Free plan — enough for a near-idle project, not a real workload.

Small Postgres is not the same thing on every platform​

Cost tables like the one above go wrong when "plus a database" quietly means four different products. Here is what the DB column actually contains on each row:

• Fly.io: self-hosted fly-postgres on a second shared VM. There is no managed Postgres; the community-maintained fly-postgres setup runs on Machines you pay for. A shared-cpu-1x with 1 GB of RAM plus a few GB of volume lands around $2–4/month marginal — which is why the "with DB" column roughly doubles the Fly.io total.
• Railway: metered containerized Postgres. Railway runs Postgres as a containerized service with usage-based billing and shipped an experimental high-availability add-on in March 2026. Convenient, but it burns credit at whatever your configured resources cost.
• Render: free Postgres with a 90-day expiry. Render's free tier includes a Postgres database, but the free database is retained for 90 days — fine for an evaluation, a trap for a side project you forget about. Paid managed Postgres with point-in-time recovery and replicas starts at the paid database plans.
• Hetzner box: Postgres on the same machine, $0 marginal. You install it next to your app. No meter, no expiry, no second bill — but also no managed backups or failover unless you build them.

If your evaluation question is "how does the platform's managed data story feel," only Railway and Render have one to evaluate. Fly.io's answer is honest self-hosting on their VMs, and the Hetzner row is honest self-hosting on yours.

The spreadsheet problem: a worked first invoice​

Ask developers what Fly.io pricing feels like and the recurring answer is that it "requires a spreadsheet." Compute, volumes, egress, and IP addresses are all separate line items, and they combine in ways that are not obvious until the first invoice. The old $5 credit used to absorb exactly this confusion — your first month of misunderstanding cost nothing. Now the misunderstanding has a price, so here is that invoice in advance, worked for the always-on small app without a database:

• 1× shared-cpu-1x, 256 MB, running 720h: ~$1.94
• 1 GB persistent volume: ~$0.15/month
• Egress within the included allowance: $0 (watch this line if your app serves real traffic or large responses — it is the line that surprises people)
• One IPv4 address: $0 (first one per organization is included; additional IPs are $2/month each)
• Total: ~$2.10, before you add the database VM that takes it to ~$4.50+

Two dollars is not a scary number. What is scary is discovering the line items one at a time: the volume you forgot to delete after destroying the app, the snapshot that started billing in January, the second IP from an experiment. Each is small; the lesson they teach is that on Fly.io you must manage the meter, and the meter starts running the moment the 2-hour trial ends. Budget an hour to read the pricing page the way you would read a contract, because that is what it now is from day one.

The other two evaluation paths, honestly​

Railway: a genuinely free month, then a decision. The one-time $5 credit with no card required is the closest thing left to the old Heroku-era "just try it" — at hobby burn it covers roughly 30 days of real usage, enough to deploy, iterate, break things, and form an opinion.

The honest limits: the credit is finite and visible in the dashboard, so you watch it drain. Custom domains need a paid plan. And when the credit runs out, the evaluation ends with a pay-or-leave decision rather than fading into a free tier.

Render: free indefinitely, if you accept the sleep. Render is the only one of the three with an ongoing free option in 2026, and for evaluation purposes the deal is remarkable: $0 for a web service plus a 90-day Postgres.

The honest limits are the ones everyone cites because everyone hits them: free web services spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity, the first request after spin-down takes 30–60 seconds, and the free database evaporates after 90 days. If you are evaluating deploy-from-git developer experience, none of that matters. If you are evaluating how your app behaves under real traffic patterns, the sleep cycle corrupts every measurement.

Note what neither Railway nor Render asks of you during evaluation: neither requires learning a billing spreadsheet before the first deploy. Railway shows one draining credit balance; Render shows $0. That simplicity is part of what you are evaluating, and it is the dimension where Fly.io's trial asks the most of a newcomer.

The self-hosted baseline: a flat €3.79 and no billing relationship​

Hetzner's current cheapest cloud VMs — the CX22 (x86) and CAX11 (ARM) — cost €3.79 per month for 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM, 40 GB of SSD, and 20 TB of traffic. The older rule of thumb said €5–10 for an evaluation box; live pricing has drifted below that band, and the next size up still sits inside it. Either way, the shape of the deal is what matters: flat, prepaid, and workload-indifferent. Tinker for 40 hours or run always-on with Postgres, Redis, and three side projects — the invoice is identical.

"Abandon without a billing relationship" is the underappreciated half of that deal. Evaluating a metered PaaS means opening an account, attaching a card, learning what each knob costs, and remembering to delete every metered resource when you are done. Evaluating on a cheap box means one VM you can destroy in one click, with no per-component meter to audit afterward. The honest cost is your time: you are the platform team, so compare the €3.79 against the value of the hours you spend on TLS, deploys, and Postgres backups.

For a team whose eventual question is "should we self-host production," this baseline is also the most representative evaluation of all — you are testing the actual economics of ownership, not a trial shaped by someone else's funnel.

Which evaluation path fits your question​

The post-free-credit landscape is not worse, exactly — it is itemized. Match the trial to the question you are actually trying to answer:

• Testing global edge deployment or scale-to-zero? That is Fly.io's home turf — 18 regions and Machines that wake on request, usually within a second or two. Budget ~$5 and a careful reading of the pricing page; the trial will not cover it.
• Testing git-push developer experience? Railway's $5 credit buys a real month of pushing and iterating with no card; Render's free tier buys unlimited time if you tolerate the sleep.
• Testing whether you even need a PaaS? A €3.79 box answers the ownership-economics question directly, and whatever you learn transfers to any self-hosted platform later.

The era when every platform paid you $5 a month to learn it is over — Heroku's shift to sustaining engineering in early 2026 closed that chapter for good. What replaced it is a menu of trials with very different shapes, and the teams that evaluate well in 2026 will be the ones that read the shape before they start the clock.

Sources: Fly.io free trial docs, Fly.io pricing, Techsy: Railway vs Render vs Fly.io (July 2026), The Register on Railway's trial tiers (June 2025), Render free tier docs.

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