Application platforms pricing compared
Managed hosting that builds and runs your application from a git push. You pay a seat or instance fee for the convenience, and then a bandwidth rate that is typically several times what a plain CDN would charge for the same gigabytes.
List prices checked
Rate cards
All 8 application platforms in the dataset, sorted by the axis this category is actually billed on.
Ranked by real monthly cost: Growing SaaS
A funded product serving a few thousand daily users, with an image-heavy frontend and two application servers. Each provider's own published rates, applied to identical usage.
| # | Service | Monthly | Breakdown |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vercel | $20 | Plan fee $20 · Data transfer out $0 |
| 2 | DigitalOcean App Platform | $23 | Plan fee $5.00 · Data transfer out $18 |
| 3 | Fly.io | $23 | Plan fee $3.19 · Data transfer out $20 |
| 4 | Koyeb | $36 | Plan fee $6.40 · Data transfer out $30 |
| 5 | Railway | $55 | Plan fee $5.00 · Data transfer out $50 |
| 6 | Render | $142 | Plan fee $7.00 · Data transfer out $135 |
| 7 | Heroku | — | No published rate for egress |
| 8 | Netlify | — | No published rate for egress |
Excludes committed-use discounts, regional variation, and per-request charges. Services that do not publish a rate for every axis this category bills on are listed last rather than shown as cheap.
Questions
- What is the cheapest application platform in 2026?
- For the "Growing SaaS" workload — a funded product serving a few thousand daily users, with an image-heavy frontend and two application servers. — Vercel comes out cheapest at $20 per month on published list prices. Ranked purely on the headline rate the order is different, which is why both tables are on this page.
- What is the real monthly cost once bandwidth overage is included, not just the advertised plan price?
- The second table answers it directly: it applies each provider's published rates to one identical workload and ranks by the resulting monthly bill. Change the workload and the ranking changes — that is the point, and it is why a single "best" list is usually wrong.
- Are these application platforms prices current?
- Each row is stamped with the month it was last checked against the provider's own pricing page, and every service page links straight to that page. Providers change list prices without notice, so treat these as a starting point and confirm before you commit.