# PaaS Pricing Comparison 2026: One App, Seven Platforms > One web app with Postgres, Redis and 100 GB of traffic, priced on Render, Heroku, Railway, Fly.io, DigitalOcean and Vercel, and where each bill grows. 1. [Home](/) 2. [Blog](/blog) 3. PaaS Pricing Comparison 2026: One App, Priced on Seven Platforms DeploymentSeptember 26, 202612 min read # PaaS Pricing Comparison 2026: One App, Priced on Seven Platforms The same small production app (a web service, Postgres, Redis and 100 GB of traffic) priced on Render, Heroku, Railway, Fly.io, DigitalOcean, Vercel and Runsite, for one developer and for a team of three. ## The short version For one small production app with Postgres, Redis and 100 GB of traffic, the monthly bill runs from about $15 on Heroku to about $43 on Fly.io before Redis, as of 26 September 2026\. Adding two teammates changes the order: Render adds a $25 workspace fee and Vercel charges $20 per deploying seat. Bandwidth and the database floor move the total more than the web service does. [Teo Marquardt](/about#author)· Facts last checked September 26, 2026 Most PaaS pricing comparisons put plan names side by side: Render's Starter next to Heroku's Basic next to Railway's Hobby. That tells you very little, because the plans are different units. One is a container size, one is a dyno tier, one is a minimum spend. What you actually want to know is what your app will cost, and the only way to get that is to pick an app and price it everywhere. So that is what this page does. Every figure comes from the provider's own pricing page or documentation, checked on 26 September 2026\. Prices for the US platforms are in dollars, as they publish them, and ours are in euros, as we publish them. Nothing is converted, because a converted price is a price nobody actually charges. ## The reference app Small, real and boring on purpose, because that's what most apps on these platforms look like: * One web service with about 0.5 vCPU and 512 MB of RAM, running all month. No sleeping. * One managed Postgres, the smallest paid plan that isn't a dev or trial database. * One Redis-compatible cache, around 256 MB. * 100 GB of outbound traffic a month. * Priced twice: for one developer, and for a team of three who all deploy. What it deliberately leaves out: background workers, cron jobs, object storage, build minutes and support plans. Each of those is its own line on every platform and would make the table unreadable. If your app has a worker, add another web-service line; it is priced the same way almost everywhere. Comparing a platform against a plain server instead of against another platform is a different question, answered in [VPS vs PaaS cost](/blog/vps-vs-paas-cost). ## PaaS pricing comparison 2026: the table | Platform | Web service | Postgres | Redis / Key Value | 100 GB egress | 1 developer | Team of 3 | | ------------------------- | ------------------------------ | -------------------------------------- | -------------------------------- | -------------------------- | ----------------- | ----------------------- | | Heroku | $7 (Basic, 512 MB) | $5 (Essential-0) | $3 (Mini, 25 MB) | No per-GB line | **$15** | **$15** | | Railway | ≈ $6 (usage) | ≈ $3 (usage, unmanaged) | ≈ $3 (usage) | $5 | **≈ $17** | **$20** (Pro minimum) | | DigitalOcean App Platform | $5 (1 vCPU, 512 MiB) | $15.15 (1 GiB) | $15 (Valkey, 1 GiB) | $1 (50 GiB included) | **$36** | **$36** | | Render | $7 (0.5 CPU, 512 MB) | $6 (256 MB) | $10 (256 MB) | $14.25 (5 GB included) | **$37** | **$59** (Pro workspace) | | Fly.io | $3.19 (shared, 512 MB) | $38.28 (Managed Postgres Basic + 1 GB) | Not included (Upstash extension) | $2 (Europe rate) | **≈ $43 + Redis** | **≈ $43 + Redis** | | Vercel | No long-running process | Marketplace partner | Marketplace partner | 1 TB included on Pro | Not comparable | $60 in seats alone | | Runsite | €5 (Starter, 0.5 vCPU, 512 MB) | €3 (Nano, 256 MB) | €5 (Starter, 256 MB) | Included (1 TB on Starter) | **€13** | **€13** | The reference app priced on each platform's public pricing page, 26 September 2026\. Totals rounded to the nearest dollar or euro. Railway is an estimate because it bills usage; the assumption is stated below. Heroku, DigitalOcean managed databases and Fly Managed Postgres were checked on their pricing and documentation pages the same day. Taxes excluded. Two things stand out before any caveats. Heroku is the cheapest line in dollars, and the gap between one developer and a team of three is zero on four of the seven platforms and large on the other three. Both are worth unpacking, because neither is what the plan names suggest. ## Render pricing: where the $7 goes [Render charges for three things](https://render.com/pricing): a workspace plan, metered features like bandwidth, and compute for each service. Compute is a fixed instance type prorated to the second, and the one most people start on is $7/mo for 0.5 CPU and 512 MB. That's the number that shows up in searches for Render pricing, and it's accurate. It just isn't the bill. The bill adds the database and the cache as separate instances, $6 and $10 at the smallest paid sizes, and then bandwidth. The free Hobby workspace includes 5 GB a month and charges $0.15 per GB after that, so 100 GB of traffic costs $14.25, which is twice the web service. Add a second person and you move to the Pro workspace at $25/mo, which raises the included bandwidth to 25 GB and adds seats, previews and autoscaling. That step is where Render's total jumps from $37 to $59 for the same app. ### Render Postgres pricing Paid Postgres starts at $6/mo for 0.1 CPU and 256 MB with 1 GB of storage included, then $19/mo for 1 GB of RAM. Extra storage is $0.30 per GB. Point-in-time recovery covers 3 days on Hobby and 7 on Pro. The free Postgres expires after 30 days, which is why it isn't in the table; the details are in [Render alternatives](/blog/render-alternatives). ## Heroku: cheapest on paper, frozen in place [Heroku's published prices](https://www.heroku.com/pricing/) are $7/mo for a Basic dyno with 512 MB, $5/mo for Heroku Postgres Essential-0 (1 GB of storage, 20 connections) and $3/mo for the Mini Key-Value Store. Fifteen dollars for the whole reference app, with no per-seat line on the pricing page. Three caveats before that number wins anything. The Mini cache is 25 MB, a tenth of what the other rows price, and the next size up is $15\. Essential Postgres plans [don't support fork and follow](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-plans), so there are no replicas, and they come with a 99.5% expected uptime. And the dyno most teams actually run production on is Standard-1X at $25/mo, which is where Heroku's production features start. At Standard-1X with Essential-1 ($9) and Premium-0 Key-Value ($15), the same app is $49. Then there is the question that has nothing to do with price. Salesforce moved Heroku into [sustaining engineering in February 2026](https://siliconangle.com/2026/02/06/salesforce-stop-selling-enterprise-heroku-subscriptions-scale-back-upgrades/) and stopped selling new Enterprise contracts. The prices haven't changed and there is no end-of-life date, but a platform that is no longer getting new features is a different purchase from one that is. If you are already on it and planning the move, [migrating off Heroku Postgres](/blog/migrate-from-heroku) is the part that needs a plan. ### Heroku pricing calculator, done by hand Heroku bills dynos and add-ons by the second up to the monthly cap, so a dyno that runs all month costs its listed price and one you scale down halfway costs half. Multiply the dyno price by the number of dynos for each process type, add each add-on at its plan price, and that's the bill. The trap is the process count: a Procfile with `web` and `worker` lines is two dynos, and a worker on Basic is another $7. ## Railway: an estimate, not a price [Railway bills what you use](https://railway.com/pricing), by the second: $0.00000386 per GB of RAM per second and $0.00000772 per vCPU per second, which works out to about $10 per GB of RAM and $20 per vCPU over a 30-day month. Egress is $0.05 per GB. The Hobby plan is a $5 minimum that includes $5 of usage, and Pro is a $20 minimum that includes $20 of usage and unlimited seats. Hobby is a single-developer workspace, which is why the team column jumps to Pro. The ≈ $17 in the table assumes the three services hold about 1 GB of RAM between them all month and average a tenth of a vCPU of real CPU work, plus 100 GB of egress. A busier app costs more and a quieter one less, which is the whole point of usage billing and also why nobody can quote you a Railway price in advance. One more thing the number hides: Railway's Postgres and Redis are [deployed from templates and are unmanaged](https://docs.railway.com/databases), so backups and recovery are yours, and that makes the database line hard to compare with a managed one. How that billing shape fails, and in which direction, is covered in [Render vs Railway](/blog/render-vs-railway). ## Fly io vs Render vs Railway These three get compared together more than any others, and on this app they come out in an unexpected order. Fly.io has the cheapest compute in the table, [$3.19/mo for a shared-CPU Machine with 512 MB](https://fly.io/docs/about/pricing/), and European egress at $0.02 per GB. It also has the most expensive database: Managed Postgres starts at $38/mo for the Basic plan, plus $0.28 per GB of storage. Fly doesn't run its own Redis; it offers Upstash as an extension, billed separately. So Fly is the cheapest of the three for an app without a database and the most expensive for one with a managed database. Render is the predictable one: fixed instances, so the bill is known in advance, with bandwidth as the line to watch. Railway is the cheapest of the three for an app that idles and the hardest to predict for one that doesn't. All three are US companies. None of them offers an answer to the question of whose law governs your data just by choosing a European region, which is covered in [EU vs US hosting](/blog/eu-vs-us-hosting). ## Vercel: why it isn't in the total Vercel is in most PaaS pricing comparisons and doesn't fit this one. It runs your code as functions and serves static output from a CDN; there is no process of yours that stays running, and Postgres and Redis come from marketplace partners billed on their own terms. The [Pro plan](https://vercel.com/docs/plans/pro-plan) is a $20/mo platform fee with one deploying seat and $20 of usage credit, then $20/mo for each additional seat that deploys. Viewer seats are free. For a team of three that's $60 a month before the backend is hosted anywhere. What a full-stack app needs beyond a frontend platform is worked through in [Vercel alternatives](/blog/vercel-alternatives). ## DigitalOcean App Platform pricing [App Platform](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/app-platform) is cheap for the container, $5/mo for a shared vCPU with 512 MiB and 50 GiB of transfer, with extra transfer at $0.02 per GiB. The databases are where the total comes from: [managed PostgreSQL](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/managed-databases) starts at $15.15/mo and managed Valkey at $15/mo, each with 1 GiB of RAM, which is more than the other rows price but also the smallest size DigitalOcean sells. There is a $7 development database, and it is explicitly for development. Team members don't cost anything extra. ## Where the bill grows that the pricing page doesn't show Put the rows side by side and the web service turns out to be the least interesting line on every platform. The totals are driven by four other things, and each platform has a different one. * Bandwidth. Render's $0.15 per GB beyond the included allowance costs more than the web service at 100 GB, and grows linearly with traffic. Railway charges $0.05, Fly.io $0.02 in Europe. Heroku, DigitalOcean up to the allowance, and Runsite don't put a per-GB line on this app. What egress pricing does to storage-heavy apps is covered in [S3 egress fees](/blog/s3-egress-fees). * Seats. Render's step from Hobby to the $25 Pro workspace and Vercel's $20 per deploying seat are the only reason the team column differs from the solo column. Heroku, DigitalOcean, Fly.io and Runsite don't charge for people. * The database floor. The smallest managed Postgres ranges from $5 on Heroku to $38 on Fly.io. On a small app the database decides the ranking more than anything else. * The production-features jump. Heroku's cheap Basic dyno and Render's Hobby workspace are real products, but several features teams expect in production (horizontal scaling, previews, longer recovery windows) sit a tier up, and that tier costs three or four times as much. Price the workload, not the plan name Before comparing, pull the actual CPU, memory and bandwidth your app used last month from whatever metrics you have. Price that on each platform, one line per service, and add seats if more than one person deploys. That total is comparable. The plan names never are. ## Cheapest PaaS is the wrong question The cheapest PaaS in this table depends on which column you read. Heroku wins the dollar total with a 25 MB cache and a platform in maintenance mode. Railway wins for an app that is mostly idle and loses for one that isn't. Fly.io wins on compute and egress and loses on the database. A comparison that crowns one of them without saying for which app is choosing the column that suits its conclusion. The more useful question is which line on your bill will grow as the app grows. For an app that serves a lot of traffic, it's bandwidth. For a team that is hiring, it's seats. For anything with real data, it's the database. Pick the platform whose cheap line is your expensive one. ## How Runsite handles it The reference app on Runsite is a Starter [web service](/services/web-services) at €5/mo (0.5 vCPU, 512 MB, 1 TB of bandwidth), a Nano [PostgreSQL](/services/postgresql) at €3/mo (0.1 vCPU, 256 MB, 1 GB of storage, daily backups) and a Starter [Redis](/services/redis) at €5/mo (256 MB, with persistence and failover on every plan). That's €13 a month, and it stays €13 for a team of three because there are no seat fees and no per-GB bandwidth line on these plans. Everything is billed by the hour from a prepaid balance, so a service you stop halfway through the month costs half. Every plan and its hourly rate is on the [pricing page](/pricing). The limits, so the comparison stays fair. There is one region, in Germany, so an app with users in Singapore will serve them from Europe. The Nano web plan (€3/mo) sleeps after 14 days without traffic; Starter and above don't. Runsite is operated by an individual developer rather than a company, which matters if a procurement review needs an EU company registration number. What you get for that is data that stays in the EU, a signed [data processing agreement](/blog/what-is-a-data-processing-agreement-dpa) with every account, and a bill in euros that you can predict before the month starts. New accounts get €5 of credit. ## The short version For a small production app with Postgres, Redis and 100 GB of traffic, the published prices on 26 September 2026 give about $15 on Heroku, about $17 on Railway (an estimate), $36 on DigitalOcean App Platform, $37 on Render and about $43 plus Redis on Fly.io. Vercel doesn't host this app on its own. Runsite is €13\. For a team of three, Render rises to $59 and Railway to its $20 minimum, and the rest don't change. The web service is rarely what makes one platform expensive. Bandwidth, seats and the smallest managed database are. Price your own app's usage on each platform, one line per service, and check which of those three lines will grow with you. Related service ## Web Services on Runsite Deploy from a single git push and keep active apps warm — no cold starts, hosted entirely in the EU with a signed GDPR DPA on every plan. [Explore Web Services](/services/web-services) [Back to all articles](/blog) FAQ ## Frequently Asked Questions Common questions about this service. ### How much is Render per month? It depends on how many services you run and how much traffic they serve. As of 26 September 2026, Render charges a workspace fee ($0 on Hobby for one person, $25/mo on Pro for teams) plus compute for each service. The common starting web service is $7/mo for 0.5 CPU and 512 MB, the smallest paid Postgres is $6/mo, and the smallest paid Key Value is $10/mo. Bandwidth beyond the included 5 GB (Hobby) or 25 GB (Pro) is $0.15 per GB. A small app with a web service, Postgres, a cache and 100 GB of traffic comes to about $37/mo for one developer and about $59/mo for a team on Pro. ### Is Heroku still free? No. Heroku ended its free dynos, free Postgres and free Redis in November 2022\. The cheapest options now are Eco dynos at $5/mo for a shared pool of hours and Basic dynos at $7/mo, with Heroku Postgres Essential-0 at $5/mo and the Mini Key-Value Store at $3/mo. Since February 2026 Heroku has been in sustaining engineering under Salesforce: existing customers can keep using and renewing it at the same prices, but no new features are being built and Enterprise contracts are no longer sold to new customers. ### What is the cheapest PaaS? It depends on the app. For a small production app with a web service, Postgres, a cache and 100 GB of traffic, Heroku has the lowest dollar total at about $15/mo as of 26 September 2026, but with a 25 MB cache and on a platform in sustaining engineering. Railway can be cheaper for an app that is idle most of the time, because it bills only the CPU and memory used, and more expensive for a busy one. Fly.io has the cheapest compute and the most expensive managed Postgres. The honest way to find the cheapest option is to price your own app's usage on each platform, including bandwidth, seats and the database, rather than comparing plan names. ### Is Railway cheaper than Render? For an app that idles, usually yes. For an app that runs busy all day, often not. Railway bills RAM and CPU by the second at roughly $10 per GB and $20 per vCPU per month, plus $0.05 per GB of egress, with a $5 minimum on Hobby. Render charges a fixed $7/mo for a 0.5 CPU, 512 MB instance whether it is busy or not, plus $0.15 per GB of bandwidth beyond the included allowance. For the small reference app in this article, Railway comes to about $17/mo and Render to about $37/mo, most of the difference being Render's bandwidth charge. Railway's databases are unmanaged templates, though, so the comparison is not quite like for like. Keep reading ## Related articles [Deployment14 min readVPS vs PaaS Cost: What a €5 Server Actually Costs YouThe price gap between a raw VPS and a managed platform is smaller than the pricing pages suggest. This itemises both sides: the hidden line items, the jobs, and who the processor is.Aug 19, 2026Read](/blog/vps-vs-paas-cost)[Deployment12 min readRender vs Railway: Pricing, Free Tiers, and the Question Neither AnswersEvery comparison argues per-second billing against fixed instances. 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