PaaS Pricing Comparison 2026: What 10 Platforms Actually Cost

PaaS pricing pages are designed to make you click "Sign Up," not to tell you what you'll actually pay. Every platform uses a different billing model — per-seat, usage-based, credit-based, flat monthly, or cloud-direct. Comparing them requires normalizing to the same workload and the same month. This article prices the same stack on 10 platforms. All pricing verified March 2026.

#The five PaaS pricing models

These platforms don't charge the same way. The pricing model matters more than the sticker price because it determines how your bill grows.

Per-seat + usage. You pay a monthly fee per team member, plus metered compute and bandwidth. Railway and Vercel use this model. The problem: a 10-person team pays $200/month in seat fees before a single request hits your server.

Instance-based. You pick a fixed compute tier and pay a flat monthly rate per service. Render and DigitalOcean App Platform use this. Predictable, but you pay for the instance 24/7 whether traffic is at zero or at peak.

Pure usage-based. You pay per second of compute, per GB of storage, per GB of bandwidth. Fly.io uses this. Great for variable workloads, but your bill is unpredictable month to month.

Credit-based. You buy platform credits that get consumed by deploys, bandwidth, and compute. Netlify uses this model since September 2025. Simple in theory, opaque in practice — you need to calculate credit burn rates across multiple dimensions.

BYOC (cloud-direct). You pay the platform a management fee. Compute, databases, and storage are billed directly by your cloud provider at their standard rates. Porter, Flightcontrol, and AZIN use this model. Your cloud credits and committed-use discounts apply.

For a deeper look at how BYOC works and why it matters, see our guide to Bring Your Own Cloud.

#The benchmark workload

Every estimate in this article uses the same reference workload — the kind of stack that powers a typical early-stage SaaS product:

• Web service: 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, running 24/7
• Database: Managed PostgreSQL, production tier (~4 GB RAM, 50 GB storage)
• Traffic: Moderate — roughly 500K requests per month
• Team: 1 developer (seat fees noted separately for scaling)

The differences between platforms only show up at this level. Free tiers don't tell you anything useful about real-world costs.

#Platform-by-platform breakdown

All estimates are for the benchmark workload above.

Railway

Railway charges $20/seat/month on the Pro plan, which includes $20 in usage credits. After credits, compute costs $20/vCPU/month and $10/GB RAM/month. The Hobby plan is $5/month with $5 in credits.

Cost breakdown for our benchmark:

• Platform: $20/seat (Pro)
• Compute: 2 vCPU ($40) + 4 GB RAM ($40) = $80, minus $20 credit = $60
• Postgres: ~$15-25 depending on size
• Total: ~$70-90/month (1 developer)
• Each additional developer: +$20/seat (but gets $20 in usage credit)

Railway has the best developer experience among shared PaaS platforms — visual canvas, fast deploys, 1,800+ templates. But only 4 regions, and BYOC is gated behind Enterprise. See AZIN vs Railway or the Railway alternative page.

Render

Render uses instance-based pricing with a per-user platform fee. Professional plan costs $19/user/month and adds autoscaling and preview environments. Compute is priced per instance tier.

Cost breakdown for our benchmark:

• Platform: $19/user (Professional)
• Compute: Pro instance (2 vCPU, 4 GB) at $85/month
• Postgres: Pro at $55/month (4 GB RAM)
• Total: ~$130-150/month (1 developer)
• Each additional developer: +$19/user

Render is the cleanest "modern Heroku" replacement — SOC 2 Type II certified, zero-downtime deploys, solid free tier. But no BYOC at any tier, only 5 regions, and seat fees add up fast. See AZIN vs Render.

Heroku

Heroku is effectively a dead platform walking. Salesforce put it in sustain mode in February 2026 — no new features, just security patches.

The pricing reflects years of neglect. Standard-2X dynos give you 1 GB of RAM for $50/month. Want 2.5 GB and dedicated CPU? Jump to Performance-M at $250/month. There's nothing in between, which is why the estimate ranges from $100 to $300 depending on dyno type. Add $50/month for Standard Postgres and extra for monitoring, logging, and caching add-ons. No free tier since November 2022. No BYOC.

Benchmark total: ~$100-300/month

If you're still on Heroku, our guide to Heroku alternatives covers migration options.

Vercel

Vercel is optimized for frontend and edge workloads, not full-stack backends. Pro costs $20/seat/month plus usage overages across multiple dimensions.

Cost breakdown for our benchmark:

• Platform: $20/seat (Pro)
• Usage: Highly variable — $2/1M edge requests, $0.15/GB bandwidth, $0.128/hour active CPU
• The $20/month usage credit on Pro helps, but compute-heavy apps blow past it
• Total: ~$40-200+/month (1 developer, frontend-only)

Vercel's estimate is the hardest to pin down because of metered overages across 20+ billing dimensions. A frontend project with moderate traffic stays under $50/month. An SSR-heavy Next.js app can hit $200+ — documented cases exist of $700+ bills from traffic spikes. Vercel doesn't hard-stop on Pro; it charges overages. No backend services (databases, workers, cron jobs). HIPAA is $350/month extra. SAML SSO is $300/month. See AZIN vs Vercel or the Vercel alternative page for a full-stack comparison.

Fly.io

Fly.io uses pure usage-based pricing — billed per second, per GB, per IP address. No plan tiers for compute. Machine reservations offer 40% off with annual commitments.

Cost breakdown for our benchmark:

• Compute: performance-2x (2 vCPU, 4 GB) at ~$62/month running 24/7
• Postgres: Managed Postgres from $38/month (Basic, shared 1 GB) to $55+ for production
• IPv4: $2/month per dedicated address
• Bandwidth: $0.02/GB (North America/Europe)
• Total: ~$75-100/month

Fly.io's strength is global distribution across 18 regions with Firecracker micro-VMs. The trade-off: more operational complexity than Railway or Render, no built-in preview environments, and no load-based autoscaling.

DigitalOcean App Platform

The simplest pricing on this list. DigitalOcean App Platform charges flat monthly per component — no seat fees, no usage metering, no credits to track. Shared 2 vCPU / 4 GB runs $50/month. Postgres ranges from $15/month (Basic, 1 GB RAM) to $60/month (Production, 4 GB RAM).

Benchmark total: ~$65-125/month

The trade-off for that simplicity: less polished DX than Railway or Render, no BYOC, limited autoscaling, and only 8 regions.

Netlify

Netlify is frontend-only — JAMstack sites, serverless functions, form handling. Included here because it shows up in platform comparisons, but it can't run our benchmark workload. No backend services, no databases, no workers.

Since September 2025, Netlify uses credit-based pricing: $20/member/month on Pro gets you 3,000 credits consumed across deploys (15 each), bandwidth (10/GB), requests (3 per 10K), and compute (5 per GB-hour). A typical frontend project runs ~$20-40/month. The credit system adds real cognitive overhead — you're calculating burn rates across four dimensions to predict your bill. On the free plan, your site goes down when credits run out.

Coolify

The cheapest option on this list — if you're willing to be your own ops team. Coolify is open-source (Apache-2.0, 51,000+ GitHub stars) and self-hosted. You install it on your own servers and deploy via Docker. Coolify Cloud adds a managed layer at $5/month.

You provide the VPS: a Hetzner CX32 (4 vCPU, 8 GB) costs ~$7/month, a comparable DigitalOcean Droplet ~$24/month. Postgres runs on the same server — you manage it yourself.

Benchmark total: ~$5-30/month depending on server provider

The catch: you handle backups, security patches, scaling, and monitoring. No managed databases, no autoscaling, still in v4 beta.

Porter (BYOC)

Porter deploys into your own AWS, GCP, or Azure account via managed Kubernetes. Standard BYOC tier charges $13/vCPU/month and $6/GB RAM/month on top of your cloud bill.

Cost breakdown for our benchmark:

• Porter platform: ~$26 (2 vCPU) + $24 (4 GB) = $50/month in platform fees
• AWS infrastructure: ~$225/month minimum for EKS cluster (control plane + minimum node group)
• RDS Postgres, ElastiCache: ~$80-100/month
• Total: ~$300+/month

Porter's ~$225/month AWS infrastructure floor makes it cost-prohibitive for small workloads. You're paying for the EKS control plane ($73/month) plus minimum EC2 nodes before deploying anything. The model works at scale — above $1,000/month, the fixed cost becomes proportionally smaller.

Flightcontrol (BYOC)

Flightcontrol deploys into your AWS account via ECS, RDS, and standard AWS services. No Kubernetes. Flat platform fee tiers: Free ($0, 1 user), Starter ($97/month, 5 services), Business ($397/month, 10 services, preview environments).

Cost breakdown for our benchmark:

• Platform: $97/month (Starter, assuming under 5 services)
• AWS compute: ECS Fargate (~$40-60/month for 2 vCPU, 4 GB)
• RDS Postgres: ~$50-80/month
• Total: ~$150-200/month

Flightcontrol has a free tier for solo developers — rare for BYOC platforms. But preview environments are gated behind the $397/month Business plan. AWS-only, no GCP or Azure support.

AZIN (BYOC)

AZIN deploys to your Google Cloud account via GKE Autopilot. You pay a platform fee plus your GCP costs billed directly by Google. No compute markup.

Cost breakdown for our benchmark:

• Platform: AZIN platform fee
• GKE Autopilot: First cluster management fee covered by GCP's $74.40/month free credit. You pay for pod resources — ~$65/month for 2 vCPU, 4 GB running 24/7
• Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL): ~$75/month (db-custom-2-8192)
• Memorystore (Redis): ~$35/month (1 GB Basic)
• Total: Platform fee + ~$175/month in GCP costs

The key difference: no compute markup. The ~$175/month in GCP costs is what Google charges directly — the same price you'd pay running GKE Autopilot without AZIN. Cloud credits from Google for Startups apply directly to this bill. Committed-use discounts can reduce compute costs by 20-57%. GCP BYOC is live today. AWS and Azure support are on our roadmap.

#The hidden costs nobody tells you about

Per-seat scaling. Railway ($20/seat), Vercel ($20/seat), and Render ($19/user) charge per team member. A 10-person team pays $190-$200/month in seat fees alone — before any compute. BYOC platforms don't charge per seat for cloud resources.

Compliance add-ons. Vercel charges $350/month for HIPAA and $300/month for SAML SSO. Fly.io charges $99/month for compliance. Railway gates HIPAA at $1,000+/month on Enterprise. On BYOC, compliance controls are inherent to your cloud account.

Egress and bandwidth. Vercel charges $0.15/GB after 1 TB. Fly.io charges $0.02-$0.12/GB depending on region. Railway charges $0.05/GB. These compound for API-heavy workloads.

Overage surprises. Vercel Pro doesn't hard-stop when you exceed limits — documented cases of $700+ bills from traffic spikes. Netlify's free plan suspends your site when credits run out. Different failure modes, both painful.

#When each model wins

Usage-based (Fly.io, Railway) works for variable traffic and periods of low activity — you pay less when nobody's using your app. The risk is symmetrical: spikes in traffic mean spikes in your bill.

Instance-based (Render, DigitalOcean) gives you a number you can put in a spreadsheet and forget about. Steady workloads, predictable budgets. You pay the same whether traffic is zero or at peak.

Credit-based (Netlify) only makes sense for frontend projects. Even then, the credit math adds overhead that flat pricing doesn't.

Self-hosted (Coolify) is the right call when you have DevOps capacity and tight budgets. Be honest about the trade-off: your engineering time costs more per hour than the savings.

BYOC (AZIN, Porter, Flightcontrol) starts winning above $300/month in compute. Cloud-direct pricing, reserved-instance discounts, and startup credits compound — at scale, it's not close.

For more on the differences between cloud models, see our IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS guide.

#The BYOC crossover point

Below $300/month, the convenience of Railway or Render outweighs the price premium — just pick one and ship. Between $300 and $500/month, the math starts shifting. Above $500/month, BYOC pulls ahead decisively: GCP committed-use discounts alone save 20-57% on compute, and at $2,000/month teams typically cut costs 30-50% versus shared PaaS.

Startup credits amplify this gap. Google for Startups provides up to $200,000 in GCP credits. AWS Activate offers up to $100,000. On shared PaaS, these credits are useless — you can't apply them to someone else's infrastructure. On BYOC, they directly reduce your bill. See our guide to Google Cloud credits for startups.