How do Render, Railway and Fly.io price a small app?
All three run a web service and a Postgres database from a Git repository or a container image, and all three have a region in the EU. They differ in what the bill is made of. Render sells fixed-size instances at a monthly price. Railway charges for the CPU, memory, disk and traffic you actually use, above a monthly minimum. Fly.io charges per second for the machines, volumes and traffic you run, with no plan at all.
Every figure below comes from the provider’s own pricing or documentation page, linked under Sources, and was checked on 28 September 2026. Prices are in the currency each provider publishes, before tax.
| Render | Railway | Fly.io | Codara Cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Fixed price per instance and database, on a workspace plan (Hobby $0, Pro $25/month) | $5 Hobby or $20 Pro minimum that includes the same amount of usage, then metered | Pay per second for Machines, volumes and traffic; no plan fee | Fixed monthly plan per organization, shared by all its projects |
| Small web service | Starter $7/month (512 MB, 0.5 CPU) | Metered: RAM $10/GB-month, CPU $20/vCPU-month | shared-cpu-1x 256 MB about $2.24/month in Frankfurt | Included: Starter €5/month shares 0.5 vCPU and 512 MiB |
| Postgres | From $6/month (256 MB) | Database template billed as metered usage; you manage backups | Managed Postgres from $38/month | Included in the plan (PostgreSQL 14–16) |
| EU region | Frankfurt | EU West, Amsterdam | Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, Frankfurt | Helsinki (the only region today) |
| Traffic | 5 GB on Hobby, 25 GB on Pro, then $0.15/GB | Egress $0.05/GB | $0.02/GB to the internet in Europe | Included under fair use, never billed as overage |
| Spending limit | Only for build minutes; no cap on compute or bandwidth | Hard usage limit from $10; workloads go offline when it is reached | None; free allowances do not cap the bill | The plan is the limit: work past it is refused, not billed |
| Free option | Free web services sleep after 15 minutes; free Postgres expires after 30 days | One-off $5 trial credit for up to 30 days, then $1 of credit a month | Trial of 2 machine-hours or 7 days, whichever comes first | Beta by invitation; the first month free (3 with Discord) |
What does one web service with Postgres cost on each?
Take one always-on web service with about 512 MB of memory, a small Postgres database and modest traffic, all in Europe.
Render: $7 for the Starter web service plus $6 for the smallest Postgres, about $13 a month on the free Hobby workspace, plus $0.15 per GB beyond 5 GB of bandwidth. The price does not change with CPU use, which is what makes it predictable.
Railway: at least $5 on Hobby, which covers $5 of usage. Memory alone for 0.5 GB running all month is about $5 at list rates, so CPU, the database and egress come on top. The total depends on real usage, which is why we give no single figure. A hard limit keeps it from running away, at the cost of taking the app offline.
Fly.io: a 256 MB Machine is about $2.24 a month in Frankfurt, and a 512 MB one costs more. Managed Postgres starts at $38 a month; running Postgres yourself on a Machine with a volume costs less but is yours to operate. There is no spending cap or billing alert yet, so watch usage yourself.
Codara Cloud: €5 a month on Starter if the web service and one shared Postgres database fit Starter’s shared 0.5 vCPU and 512 MiB; that database reserves all 10 GiB of Starter storage. With more headroom it is €20 on Standard. Traffic is included and neither price grows with usage.
Which one should you choose?
Pick the pricing model that matches how your app behaves, then check that the region and the database setup are right for you.
- Render is best for a conventional app where you want to know the price of each piece in advance, and you are happy with Frankfurt as the EU region.
- Railway is best for apps with low or spiky usage, where paying for what you use beats a fixed instance, and for teams who like its project canvas. Set the hard limit.
- Fly.io is best when you need several regions close to users, or machines that stop when idle. It rewards careful sizing and is the hardest of the three to budget.
- Codara Cloud is best when you run several small apps and databases and want them on one fixed bill, hosted in the EU, and a beta with one region (Helsinki) fits your needs.
Where does Codara Cloud fit?
Codara Cloud is managed app hosting from Codara Solutions SL in Madrid. It runs web services, APIs, managed Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, Redis and MongoDB, and cron jobs on Hetzner Cloud in Helsinki, and it stores apps, databases and backups in the EU. You pay a fixed plan, from €5 to €100 a month before tax, and every project in the organization shares its capacity.
Know the limits. It runs in one region today, it is in beta by invitation, and plan capacity is finite: at a limit you reduce the workload or choose a larger plan. If you need regions outside Europe, open sign-up today or very large services, Render, Railway or Fly.io will suit you better.
| Plan | Price / month | Service ceiling | Shared runtime | Persistent storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | €5 | 10 | 0.5 vCPU / 512 MiB RAM | Up to 10 GiB persistent storage |
| Standard | €20 | 50 | 1 vCPU / 2 GiB RAM | Up to 20 GiB persistent storage |
| Pro | €50 | 100 | 2 vCPU / 4 GiB RAM | Up to 50 GiB persistent storage |
| Scale | €100 | 250 | 6 vCPU / 12 GiB RAM | Up to 150 GiB persistent storage |
Questions
- Which is cheapest for a small app in Europe?
- For a web service alone, Fly.io’s smallest Machine is the cheapest at about $2.24 a month in Frankfurt, but managed Postgres there starts at $38. With a database, Render’s $7 plus $6 is about $13, Railway depends on usage from $5, and Codara Cloud is €5 on Starter if the app and database fit its capacity.
- Can I cap my bill on Render, Railway or Fly.io?
- Railway has a hard usage limit from $10 that takes workloads offline when reached. Render’s spend limit covers build minutes only. Fly.io has no spending cap. On Codara Cloud the plan price is the cap: work past a limit is refused, not billed.
- Do all three have a region in the EU?
- Yes. Render has Frankfurt, Railway has EU West in Amsterdam, and Fly.io has Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris and Frankfurt. Codara Cloud runs in Helsinki.
- Is fixed pricing always better?
- No. An app that is idle most of the day can cost less on a usage-billed platform. Fixed pricing is better when you want the bill to be the same every month, or when several always-on apps would each add their own usage.
Sources
Other providers’ figures were checked on their own pricing and documentation pages on 28 September 2026. Prices change, so check them before you decide.
- Render pricing ↗render.com/pricing
- Render free instances ↗render.com/docs/free
- Render regions ↗render.com/docs/regions
- Render build pipeline spend limits ↗render.com/docs/build-pipeline
- Railway pricing ↗railway.com/pricing
- Railway plans ↗docs.railway.com/pricing/plans
- Railway cost control ↗docs.railway.com/pricing/cost-control
- Railway free trial ↗docs.railway.com/pricing/free-trial
- Railway deployment regions ↗docs.railway.com/reference/deployment-regions
- Fly.io resource pricing ↗docs.fly.io/about/pricing/
- Fly.io cost management ↗docs.fly.io/about/cost-management/
- Fly.io free trial ↗docs.fly.io/about/free-trial/
- Fly.io Managed Postgres ↗docs.fly.io/mpg/
- Fly.io regions ↗docs.fly.io/reference/regions/