Fly.io Started Charging for Traffic That Used to Be Free: What the Two New 2026 Meters Cost Against Flat Hetzner Bandwidth
Fly.io metered volume snapshots in January 2026 and Managed Postgres inter-region traffic in February. A worked line-item bill for a two-region app under the new meters against a flat Hetzner pair, plus the sensitivity cases — bigger data, heavier replication, costlier regions — where the meters multiply.
The Free Tier Is Dead (Except Twice): A September 2026 Audit of Where a Side Project Still Lives for $0
Only Render and PythonAnywhere still offer free-forever hosting in September 2026 — Railway and Fly.io are trial-credit-only and Heroku has been paid-only since 2022. A verdict table for all six providers plus worked per-project math showing why one €3.99 Hetzner box split across side projects beats every meter.
Railway Shipped a Free CDN, but Your Egress Bill Didn't Get the Memo
Railway launched a free Fastly-powered CDN in March 2026 — opt-in, off by default, with HTML always served from origin. A worked bill for 500 GB of monthly assets at 0%, 70%, and 90% edge-hit ratios against a flat Hetzner box, plus the SSR case where the CDN barely helps.
Render Repriced Twice in One Week: Why the Migration Question Is the Full Bill, Not the $7 Starting Price
Render logged price-point changes on August 22 and August 28, 2026. A line-by-line cost sheet for an always-on web service plus Postgres at 5, 25, and 100 GB of traffic against a flat Hetzner CX22 — and why per-service multiplication, bandwidth overage, and workspace fees move the bill more than the headline price.
When us-east-1 Goes Dark: What One AWS Region Under Your Whole Stack Really Costs
AWS us-east-1's 15-hour DynamoDB DNS outage in October 2025 broke Ring, Reddit and United check-in at once. A worksheet prices that failure for small, mid and large teams, maps how hosted PaaS silently inherits us-east-1, and compares the bill to a three-location Hetzner fleet under Cluster API.
Zero Egress, Metered State: What Cloudflare's January 2026 Durable Objects Bill Actually Costs Against a Flat Hetzner Box
Cloudflare's zero-egress promise still holds for R2 and CDN — but SQLite-backed Durable Objects started billing $1/M writes and $0.20/GB-month on January 7, 2026, with Workflows steps following August 10. A worked table prices small, medium and heavy stateful workloads against a €3.79 Hetzner CX22 with flat 20TB and local Postgres.
Fly.io's Two New 2026 Bills: What Private Networking and Snapshot Metering Actually Add Next to a Flat Hetzner Box
Fly.io started billing volume snapshots in January 2026 and MPG inter-region private networking in February 2026. A worked, line-by-line recompute shows the hobby app stays at $0 delta while a multi-region production stack adds $0.90–$9.20 a month, versus the same containers for €3.79 flat on Hetzner.
Kubernetes 1.36 Can Scale to Zero — But Not Like Render Does: What a Self-Hosted PaaS Still Has to Wire
Kubernetes 1.36 keeps HPA scale-to-zero in alpha, disabled by default and limited to External/Object metrics. A concrete walkthrough of what a Cluster API fleet still needs — KEDA HTTP add-on or Knative activator, external metrics, and probe math — to give tenants real scale-to-zero without renting Render's cold-start model.
Railway Prices Compute in Scientific Notation: What $0.000463 per vCPU-Second Actually Costs a Month
Railway's $0.000463/vCPU-minute is $20 per vCPU per month — but only if you catch the unit. A worked table converts Railway's per-second and per-minute rates to monthly costs for four real workloads, shows why legibility is its own billing risk, and prices the same stack on a flat Hetzner box.