The cheapest way to keep a small app always on and the easiest way to run it in several regions, billed per second with no platform fee, but there is no free tier for new accounts and it takes more setup than Render or Railway.
What it is
Fly.io runs Docker images as Machines, fast-booting VMs billed by the second while they run, in 18 regions across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, South America and Africa, with zero-downtime deploys, autoscaling that stops idle Machines, private networking between regions and volumes. Fly Sprites are hardware-isolated sandboxes for agents and untrusted code. There is no monthly platform fee: a shared-cpu-1x Machine with 256 MB costs $2.19 per 30 days in Ashburn or Secaucus, 512 MB $3.69 and 1 GB $6.70 (other regions cost more, for example $7.73 in Frankfurt and $8.50 in Singapore for 1 GB), and a performance-1x with 2 GB $33. Outbound data is $0.02 per GB in North America and Europe, $0.04 in Asia Pacific, Oceania and South America, and $0.12 in Africa and India; inbound is free. Managed Postgres runs from $38 a month (Basic, shared-2x, 1 GB) to $1,922 (Performance), with high availability and backups included, plus $0.28 per GB-month of storage. A dedicated IPv4 address is $2 a month, and paid support starts at $29 a month. New organizations get no free tier: a $1 trial credit for 7 days without a card, then a card is required, and personal-organization bills under $5 a month are waived. Checked on fly.io November 13, 2026.
Best for
- Always-on small apps and workers on the smallest possible bill
- Apps that need to run close to users in several regions
- Developers comfortable with Docker and a CLI
What we like
- Smallest always-on Machine is $2.19 a month, and bills under $5 are waived on personal accounts
- Run the same app in 18 regions with private networking between them
- Per-second billing with no platform fee; idle Machines can stop automatically
- Egress from $0.02 per GB in North America and Europe
What to watch
- No free tier for new accounts: only a $1, 7-day trial, then a card is required
- Managed Postgres starts at $38 a month, far above Railway's or Render's smallest databases
- More setup than Render or Railway: CLI-first, config in fly.toml, no built-in preview environments
- Prices differ by region, so multi-region bills take more estimating
Where Fly.io ranks
Alternatives and head-to-heads
Netlify
Cloudflare Workers
Render
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