Dora NodaFlavio Copes spent mid-September 2026 doing what nobody else bothers to do: he opened every major hosting provider's pricing page and docs on the same day, September 16, and wrote down exactly what $0 buys you. His side-by-side audit covers Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, Deno, DigitalOcean, Render, Railway, Fly.io, Heroku, Laravel Cloud, the big three clouds, and the VPS crowd. The whole thing is worth reading, but one sentence is the entire story for anyone running a service that must stay up:
For anything that must stay awake, nobody gives you that for free in September 2026. The floor is Fly at about $2, Vultr at $3.50, DigitalOcean at $4, and Heroku Eco or Railway Hobby at $5.
That is the paid floor, checked a week before publication and priced from the providers' own pages. Here it is as a table, with the two entries the audit names elsewhere — Render's paid tiers and the Hetzner box this post prices everything against — added so the comparison is complete:
| Provider | Cheapest way to stay up | $/mo (approx) | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fly.io | shared-cpu-1x, 256 MB, always on | ~$2 | Tiny; RAM price rises Oct 1, 2026 |
| Vultr | 1 vCPU / 1 GB VPS with IPv4 | $3.50 | Unmanaged box, you run the OS |
| DigitalOcean | $4 Droplet, 1 vCPU / 512 MiB | $4 | Unmanaged box, 500 GiB transfer |
| Hetzner Cloud | CAX11/CX22, 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 40 GB | ~€4 | Unmanaged box, 20 TB transfer |
| Heroku Eco | 1,000 dyno-hour pool, 512 MB | $5 | Sleeps after 30 min idle; personal only |
| Railway Hobby | $5 plan with $5 usage included | $5 | Usage-metered; overage bills on top |
| Render Starter | Web service that never sleeps | $7 | Per service; Postgres is separate |
Two things jump out before we even get to the analysis. First, the "free tier" conversation in 2026 is really a "$2 to $7" conversation the moment sleep is not acceptable. Second, the cheapest managed options and the cheapest box-you-own options now live in the same single-digit price band — which makes the math interesting, because a €4 box holds a whole fleet while a $5 plan holds roughly one small service.
What each floor dollar actually buys
The headline prices hide very different products. Start at the bottom.
Fly.io (~$2) is the cheapest managed runtime that stays awake, full stop. A shared-cpu-1x machine with 256 MB costs $1.94 a month running 24/7 — rising to about $2.19 on October 1, 2026, when Fly raises RAM from $5 to $6 per GB-month — with egress at $0.02 per GB in North America and Europe. Billing is per second, so spiky workloads pay less than the sticker price. But note what disappeared: Fly.io used to include a monthly free allowance and no longer does. What remains is a trial — 2 hours of total machine runtime or 7 days, whichever comes first — after which every organization needs a card on file. And the realistic minimum is higher than $2 once you add a dedicated IPv4 ($2/month, often needed in practice) and volume storage ($0.15/GB-month).
Vultr ($3.50) and DigitalOcean ($4) are not PaaS at all — they are raw VPS, and the audit lists them in the paid-floor sentence anyway, which tells you something about how thin the managed free tier has become. Vultr starts at $2.50 for an IPv6-only 512 MB server, $3.50 with IPv4, $5 for 1 GB of RAM. DigitalOcean Droplets start at $4 for 1 vCPU, 512 MiB, and 500 GiB of transfer. Neither sleeps, neither has a free tier, and both bill from the first hour — a powered-off Droplet keeps billing until you destroy it. You get a kernel and root; everything above that is your job.
Heroku Eco ($5) is the weakest $5 on the list, honestly labeled. It is a pool of 1,000 dyno hours shared by every Eco dyno on the account, 512 MB each — and Eco dynos still sleep after 30 minutes without traffic. When the pool runs out, everything sleeps for the rest of the month and you cannot buy more hours. It is personal-accounts-only, and dynos that actually stay on start at Basic's $7. Good for people who already know the workflow, as the audit puts it; everyone else gets more for $5 elsewhere.
Railway Hobby ($5) is the most misunderstood $5 because it is two things at once: a $5 monthly minimum that converts into $5 of usage credit, metered at $10 per GB of RAM per month, $20 per vCPU per month, and $0.05 per GB of egress. Before Hobby there is a 30-day trial with a one-time $5 credit, then a Free plan with $1 of credit a month and no rollover — at $10 per GB-month, that $1 keeps roughly 100 MB of RAM alive for a month, which the audit notes covers a cron job and little else. Hobby is always-on and the developer experience is genuinely good, but the meter runs per second per service, so "starts at $5" and "costs $5" are different statements the moment you run more than one thing.
Render Starter ($7) is the most expensive floor and the simplest bill: a flat per-service price that never sleeps, no meter. Render's free tier remains the most generous among container platforms — 512 MB, a 750-instance-hour monthly pool — but free services spin down after 15 minutes idle with a ~1-minute cold start, and the docs say plainly not to use them for production. The step from free to Starter is the step from "demo you show once" to "service that answers."
The database is where the free tier actually ends
Compute gets the attention, but storage is the binding constraint. The audit's database paragraph deserves quoting in full:
For a database, the free options are thin. Render's Postgres expires in 30 days and Deno KV gives you 1 GiB. The cheapest managed Postgres here is $5 to $6 a month at Heroku or Render.
Unpack that. Render's free Postgres is 1 GB, one per workspace, and it expires 30 days after creation with a 14-day grace period to upgrade — after that the data is gone. It is a trial wearing a free-tier costume, and every deployment guide written against Render in 2026 routes around it (usually to Supabase or Neon for demos, or straight to paid Postgres). Deno KV's 1 GiB free tier, with a million reads and half a million writes a month, is the only free database-ish offer in the entire audit — and it is a key-value store on Deno's runtime, not Postgres.
So any always-on fleet with a relational database starts with a $5–6/month Postgres line item (Heroku Mini at $5 for 1 GB, Render Basic at $6) before the first app server is priced. That single line item is larger than the cheapest compute floor. Anyone comparing "$2 Fly vs $5 Railway" without pricing the database is comparing the garnish and skipping the main course.
The worked example: two services plus Postgres, four ways
Promises are cheap, so here is the concrete version for a typical small fleet: two small always-on services plus one always-on Postgres, priced four ways from the audit's numbers.
Railway Hobby: roughly $10–15/month. The $5 plan covers the first $5 of usage. Two always-on services at ~512 MB each consume on the order of $5/month in RAM apiece before CPU and egress, and the Postgres container meters the same way — so a realistic three-container fleet lands meaningfully above the included credit. The exact number depends on actual CPU burn and egress ($0.05/GB), which is both the attraction (idle services cost little) and the risk (a memory leak bills instead of crashing into a tier ceiling).
Render: $20/month. Two Starter web services at $7 each plus Basic Postgres at $6. No meter, no surprises, no bulk discount either — the per-service flat price is simple to budget and punishing to scale sideways. This is the number to beat.
Fly.io plus Postgres: roughly $8–12/month. Two 256 MB machines at ~$2 each, plus a small Postgres machine with a volume in the $4–7 range, plus $2 for a dedicated IPv4 if the app needs one. Per-second billing and $0.02/GB egress keep it the cheapest managed shape — at the cost of Fly's operational surface: you own the Postgres machine's backups, failover story, and version upgrades in a way Render and Railway customers do not.
One Hetzner Cloud box: roughly €4/month. A CAX11 (ARM) or CX22 (x86) instance — 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM, 40 GB of NVMe, 20 TB of included transfer — runs all three workloads at once with headroom left over, for about the price of one Railway Hobby plan. There is no per-service meter, no sleep timer, no 30-day database expiry, and no egress anxiety at these traffic levels. The delta against Render's $20 is roughly 5x; against Railway's realistic $10–15 it is roughly 3x.
That delta is the whole argument for owning the machine — but price the other side honestly too. The €4 box ships without managed Postgres backups, without zero-downtime deploys, without log retention, and without anyone to page except you. The managed premium buys operations labor, not compute. Teams that price the box and forget the labor commonly rediscover it at 3 a.m.
Why "free tier" now means "trial credit"
Step back and look at the pattern across the audit. Railway: 30-day trial, then $1/month. Fly.io: 7 days or 2 machine-hours, then pay-as-you-go. Render Postgres: 30 days, then upgrade or deletion. AWS: $100 signup credits on a plan that closes after 6 months. Google Cloud: $300 over 90 days, then the trial account closes. Azure: $200 within 30 days. Netlify: 300 credits a month where a single production deploy costs 15. The industry has converged on time-boxed credit, not capacity-boxed free-forever — free compute that never expires and never sleeps no longer exists at any provider in the audit.
There is exactly one carve-out with real capacity behind it, and it comes with a fence: Vercel Hobby — 100 GB of transfer, a million edge requests, a million function invocations, 4 CPU hours a month — restricted, in Vercel's own words, to "non-commercial, personal use only." A blog with ads or a client site belongs on Pro at $20/month. It is generous and genuine within its fence, and the fence is the point: the moment the project makes money, the free tier politely shows you the door.
Sensitivity check, because a single worked example can mislead. The box wins biggest for steady-state, always-on fleets with predictable traffic — the metered platforms claw back the advantage when workloads are spiky or sleepable (Fly's per-second billing, Deno's scale-to-zero, Cloudflare's 100k free Worker requests a day), when egress dominates (Railway's $0.05/GB vs 20 TB included on Hetzner cuts the other way at real traffic), and when the team's scarcest resource is ops hours rather than dollars. Run your own fleet's numbers; the audit gives you every input.
The honest price of up
Copes ends with his own setup, and it is the right conclusion: his static site sits on Cloudflare's free plan and costs nothing, while the two services that need a process that never sleeps and a disk that keeps its data live on DigitalOcean Droplets he pays for every month. "The moment a project needs to stay up or keep data past 30 days, $4 to $7 a month is the honest price, and I'd rather pay it than fight a free plan's limits."
That is the September 2026 equilibrium in one paragraph. Static and serverless stay free within generous caps. Everything with a heartbeat starts at $2–7 per unit on someone else's platform, $5–6 of it potentially just the database — or roughly €4 flat for a whole box that holds the entire fleet. The free tier did not die; it narrowed to exactly the workloads that cost providers nearly nothing, and everything else got an honest meter. Budget accordingly.
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