Cheapest application hosting platforms

Managed platforms ranked by entry plan. Compare the bandwidth column carefully: overage rates across this category vary by more than 25x, and that is where the unexpected invoices come from.

List prices checked

All 8, ranked

#NameProviderEntry planNotes
1Fly.ioFly.io$3.19/moContainers run as Firecracker VMs across dozens of regions, billed per second, with the cheapest egress of any application platform by a wide margin.
2RailwayRailway$5.00/mo$5 of usage included on the Hobby plan
3HerokuHeroku$5.00/moNone; the free dyno tier ended in November 2022
4DigitalOcean App PlatformDigitalOcean$5.00/moThree free static sites
5KoyebKoyeb$6.40/moOne free instance with limited resources
6RenderRender$7.00/moFree static sites and 750 instance hours per month
7NetlifyNetlify$9.00/moFree plan with a 300 credit monthly limit
8VercelVercel$20.00/moHobby plan with 100 GB of transfer per month

Source: Fly.io (May 2026) · Railway (May 2026) · Heroku (May 2026) · DigitalOcean (May 2026) · Koyeb (May 2026) · Render (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.

Questions

What is the cheapest application hosting platforms in 2026?
Fly.io from Fly.io tops this ranking at $3.19/mo. The full table below shows all 8 entries with the same measure applied to each.
How is this ranking calculated?
Managed platforms ranked by entry plan. Compare the bandwidth column carefully: overage rates across this category vary by more than 25x, and that is where the unexpected invoices come from. Every figure is the provider's own published list price, linked in the source column and stamped with the month it was checked.
Why is the cheapest option not always the right one?
Because a single axis never captures the whole bill. A provider with the lowest storage rate may have the highest egress rate; a model with the cheapest input tokens may be the most expensive for agentic work. The comparison pages model both sides against identical workloads, which is the check worth doing before switching.

Other rankings