14 October 2026 · Cloud & Hosting · 5 min read
Our Railway vs Render vs Fly.io calculator is one of the more-visited pages on this site, and a few days ago I found out why that mattered more than I'd assumed: it had real pricing bugs. Railway's per-second compute rate was off by 60x, Fly.io's RAM price was tagged per-megabyte instead of per-gigabyte (a roughly 1000x error), and neither Render's April bandwidth repricing nor Fly.io's 2026 free-tier changes for new accounts were reflected anywhere. All three are now corrected against each vendor's own current pricing page, verified October 10. Here's what that correction actually means in dollars, across three workloads I picked to span small, typical, and heavier usage.
One service, 1 vCPU running continuously, 1GB RAM, 20GB of outbound bandwidth a month -- the kind of thing a lot of people spin up to see if an idea has legs.
| Platform | Monthly cost | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Fly.io | $8.16 | Cheapest per-second rate, but zero free bandwidth for a new 2026 account |
| Render | $9.25 | $7 flat Starter plan + $3.25 bandwidth overage past the 5GB free allowance |
| Railway | $30.02 | $20.01 compute + $10.00 RAM, both metered to the second, no bandwidth overage yet |
Two services, 2GB RAM each workload combined, 720 vCPU-hours (one vCPU running around the clock for the month), 50GB of bandwidth.
| Platform | Monthly cost | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Fly.io | $14.76 | $1.76 compute + $12.01 RAM + $1.00 bandwidth (50GB × $0.02) |
| Render | $20.75 | $14 flat (2 services × $7) + $6.75 bandwidth overage |
| Railway | $40.02 | $20.01 compute + $20.01 RAM, still under the 100GB free bandwidth line |
Three services, 4 vCPUs running continuously combined, 8GB RAM, 300GB of bandwidth -- closer to a small production app with real traffic.
| Platform | Monthly cost | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Fly.io | $61.05 | $7.03 compute + $48.02 RAM + $6.00 bandwidth (300GB × $0.02) |
| Render | $65.25 | $21 flat (3 services × $7) + $44.25 bandwidth overage (295GB × $0.15) |
| Railway | $170.08 | $80.03 compute + $80.03 RAM + $10.00 bandwidth overage (200GB × $0.05) |
Fly.io wins on raw unit economics every single time I ran the numbers, and the gap widens with scale -- it's barely ahead of Render at the solo-project size and more than $4/mo cheaper by the heavier scenario, mostly because its RAM rate is roughly a third of Railway's. Railway is consistently the most expensive of the three because it charges the highest per-second rate for both compute and RAM, with no flat-rate ceiling the way Render has. Render sits in the middle in every scenario, and its appeal isn't the number itself -- it's that the number is a flat $7/service regardless of how efficiently your code runs, which matters if you'd rather budget in advance than get a usage-dependent bill.
This is the part that actually changes a decision, not just a bill. Fly.io built its reputation on a genuinely generous free allowance -- roughly 160GB/mo of bandwidth, among other things -- and that reputation still shows up constantly in forum threads and "best free hosting" lists. It no longer applies to anyone signing up today. That allowance is legacy-accounts-only, grandfathered in for organizations created before October 2024; a new account in 2026 gets a short trial and then pays from the first gigabyte. Meanwhile Render, after cutting its own free bandwidth 20x in the April 2026 repricing (100GB down to 5GB), is now the only one of the three that still gives a brand-new account an ongoing free tier at all -- 750 instance-hours a month, enough to run one service continuously for free. Railway never had an ongoing free tier in the way people mean it; it's a one-time $5 trial credit, and once that's spent, billing starts regardless of how light the usage is.
If I were starting something today with no revenue yet, I'd put it on Render for the free 750 hours and not think about billing until it matters. Once a project is actually running with any real traffic, the per-second platforms pull ahead, and between those two Fly.io's lower RAM rate makes it the one worth pricing first -- just budget for bandwidth and compute from day one, since the "it's free" assumption about Fly no longer holds for a new signup. Run your own numbers through the calculator rather than trusting any of these three scenarios directly; service count, RAM per service, and bandwidth are the three inputs that move the ranking the most.
New to usage-based hosting pricing? Start with the free API-cost guides.
Deploy it yourself: DigitalOcean — $200 free credit ↗ · Hostinger VPS ↗
Rates sourced directly from railway.com/pricing, render.com/pricing and docs.fly.io/about/pricing, verified 2026-10-10. Reference figures, not live quotes — exact usage patterns and region selection move the real bill; confirm current terms directly with each provider before budgeting.