Is Fly.io or Render cheaper in 2026?

Fly.io is cheaper in all 3 modelled workloads.

What is the difference in egress cost between Fly.io and Render?

Fly.io charges $0.020 per GB against Render's $0.150, roughly 7.5× cheaper. Egress usually dominates the bill once traffic is measured in terabytes.

Which has the better free tier, Fly.io or Render?

Render does — Free static sites and 750 instance hours per month. Fly.io bills from the first unit of usage.

What do these estimates not include?

Committed-use and reserved discounts, regional price variation, per-request API charges, support plans, and minimum retention periods. All of those move real invoices, sometimes by a lot. These figures compare published list prices for the same workload, which is the comparison the rate cards alone cannot give you.

Fly.io vs Render

Fly.io is cheaper across every workload modelled here.

List prices checked May 2026

Rate cards side by side

Only the axes at least one of them bills on. A dash means that provider does not charge for it.

Billing axis	Fly.io	Render	Difference
Entry plan	$3.19/mo	$7.00/mo	2.2× Fly.io
Data transfer out	$0.020/GB	$0.150/GB	7.5× Fly.io
Free tier	No	Yes	—

Source: Fly.io pricing (May 2026) · Render pricing (May 2026). Published list prices only — committed-use discounts, regional variation, and per-request charges are not included. Not yet independently re-checked against the vendor’s page.

Monthly cost for three real workloads

The rate cards applied to identical usage. This is where the winner changes.

Workload	Fly.io	Render	Cheaper
Side projectA personal site or small app with modest traffic, a few gigabytes of assets, and one small always-on process.	$5.19	$7.00	Fly.iosaves $1.81/mo (26%)
Growing SaaSA funded product serving a few thousand daily users, with an image-heavy frontend and two application servers.	$23	$142	Fly.iosaves $119/mo (84%)
Media-heavy siteA publisher or video product where delivery dominates the bill and compute is almost an afterthought.	$203	$1,492	Fly.iosaves $1,289/mo (86%)

Workload definitions are identical on every comparison page, so figures here can be read against any other pair in the same category.

What each one is for

Fly.io

by Fly.io

Containers run as Firecracker VMs across dozens of regions, billed per second, with the cheapest egress of any application platform by a wide margin.

Render

by Render

Predictable per-instance pricing with managed Postgres and cron jobs included in the platform, positioned as the modern replacement for Heroku.

Free tier: Free static sites and 750 instance hours per month

Common questions

Is Fly.io or Render cheaper in 2026?: Fly.io is cheaper in all 3 modelled workloads.
What is the difference in egress cost between Fly.io and Render?: Fly.io charges $0.020 per GB against Render's $0.150, roughly 7.5× cheaper. Egress usually dominates the bill once traffic is measured in terabytes.
Which has the better free tier, Fly.io or Render?: Render does — Free static sites and 750 instance hours per month. Fly.io bills from the first unit of usage.
What do these estimates not include?: Committed-use and reserved discounts, regional price variation, per-request API charges, support plans, and minimum retention periods. All of those move real invoices, sometimes by a lot. These figures compare published list prices for the same workload, which is the comparison the rate cards alone cannot give you.