Fly.io pricing in 2026: what does an app really cost?

TL;DR: Fly.io bills Machines per second, from $2.19 a month for the smallest one running all month in Ashburn (iad). A real app (a web Machine, a worker and Managed Postgres) costs about $48 a month small, $108 medium and $473 busy. The same three apps on a rented Hetzner server cost $7, $11 and $36. Managed Postgres is the biggest line at every size: the cheapest plan is $38 before storage.

• Pick Fly.io if your users are spread across continents and latency matters, or your app is stateless and can sleep most of the day.
• Pick Fly Managed Postgres if you want a highly available, backed-up database and $38 to $72 a month is fine for that.
• Pick your own server if your app lives in one region and runs a web process, a worker and Postgres all month.
• Pick Ployz, which I build, if you want that server with push-to-deploy, one-click Postgres and preview environments. It's free on your own servers.

Fly.io pricing is usage-based: you pay per second for each running Machine (a VM sized by CPU type and RAM), per GB for volumes and outbound traffic, and a fixed monthly price for each Managed Postgres cluster. There are no plans to pick and no free tier for new accounts.

A small web app with a worker and a database needs two small Machines and the Basic Postgres plan, about $48 a month. Postgres is $39 of that, so pick its plan first.

What would your app cost on Fly.io?

Pick the app closest to yours. The three presets are the example apps in the next section. Customize to set your own Machines, Postgres plan and traffic.

What does a web + worker + Postgres app cost on Fly.io?

About $48 a month small, $108 medium and $473 busy, in iad with pricing-page rates. Managed Postgres plus its storage is 82%, 72% and 66% of those bills. The Machines are cheap until you move to performance CPUs.

The three apps, all Machines running all month in iad with no paid support:

• Small: web and worker on shared-cpu-1x 512 MB each, Postgres Basic with 5 GB, 50 GB out.
• Medium: web on shared-cpu-2x 2 GB, worker on shared-cpu-1x 1 GB, Postgres Starter with 20 GB, 500 GB out.
• Busy: two web Machines on performance-1x 4 GB, worker on performance-1x 2 GB, Postgres Launch with 100 GB, 2 TB out.

The sizes are my assumptions, not measurements.

Add $29 to any column for email support. Running Postgres yourself on a 1 GB Machine with a 5 GB volume drops the small app to about $16, but then you're doing the database work, which is the case for a rented server anyway. PaaS pricing puts Fly next to Render, Railway and Heroku, and Railway pricing covers the per-minute model.

How much does a Fly Machine cost per month?

In Ashburn, a shared-cpu-1x Machine with 256 MB costs $2.19 a month if it runs all month, and every extra GB of RAM adds $6.00. Performance Machines start at $33.00 for 1 dedicated vCPU and 2 GB. Started Machines are billed by the second.

These are the presets and RAM steps from Fly's pricing page and resource pricing docs, which price compute for Ashburn (iad) over a 30-day month.

Why do some guides show lower Fly.io prices?

They use an older RAM rate. Until recently Fly's docs table charged $5.00 per GB of RAM a month, so a 1 GB shared-cpu-1x showed $5.70 instead of $6.70, and you'll still find those numbers in comparison sites. Today the pricing page, the resource pricing docs and the calculator all use $6.00 per GB, so budget with $6.00.

What do other regions cost?

Ashburn and Secaucus (ewr) are the cheapest. Other regions multiply vCPU and RAM prices (pricing page); volumes, snapshots and egress don't take the markup.

Do stopped Fly Machines cost money?

Yes, but very little. A stopped or suspended Machine costs $0.15 per GB of root filesystem per month, so a 1 GB image stopped all month is 15 cents. CPU and RAM stop billing the second the Machine stops. Volumes keep billing in full whether the Machine runs or not, and that's the line people forget.

Fly's billing docs give the example: three stopped Machines with 1 GB of rootfs each cost $0.45 for 30 days. Fly's proxy can stop Machines when traffic dies down and start them on the next request, so a staging app that sleeps most of the day can cost under $1.

Fly itself tells you not to budget around that: "We recommend budgeting for the 'always-on' cost" (cost management). Any stray request, bot or health checker wakes the Machine. For a production web service with steady traffic, assume it runs all month.

If your Machines do run all month, reservations are the real discount (reservation blocks):

The credit doesn't roll over, so buy only what you'll use.

What do Fly volumes and snapshots cost?

Volumes are $0.15 per GB per month of provisioned size, not used size, billed hourly. Since January 2026, snapshots cost $0.08 per GB per month after the first 10 GB, billed on data stored. New volumes take a daily snapshot and keep five.

Snapshots are incremental, so the bill follows how much data changes between days. Fly's example: a 10 GB volume holding 2 GB of data with five daily snapshots comes to about 2.5 GB of snapshot storage (billing docs), inside the free 10 GB.

A volume lives on one physical host. To survive a host failure with SQLite or uploads, you run a second Machine with its own volume and replicate, which doubles the line.

How much does Fly.io Managed Postgres cost?

Fly Managed Postgres starts at $38 a month for Basic (shared-2x, 1 GB RAM). Storage is $0.28 per GB used. Every plan includes high availability, automated backups and connection pooling, billed separately from your apps.

The gap between Starter and Launch is the trap. Once 2 GB of RAM isn't enough for your working set, the next step is 8 GB at almost four times the price. There's no 4 GB plan.

Fly's docs are open about what's missing. Under "What's not there yet" they list security patches and version upgrades, customer-facing alerting and database migration tools (MPG docs). Since February 2026, Managed Postgres traffic between regions on the private network is charged at the Machine rate, $0.006 per GB in North America and Europe. Same-region database traffic is free.

The cheap alternative is the old unmanaged Fly Postgres: a regular Machine plus a volume that you run yourself. Fly says a single-node dev cluster costs about $2 a month and a three-node production cluster $82 to $164 (resource pricing). It's now marked unsupported. At that point you're running your own database on someone else's VM, and a rented server does the same for less. For a managed alternative, Supabase pricing covers the most common one.

How much does Fly.io charge for bandwidth and IPv4?

Outbound traffic is $0.02 per GB in North America and Europe. Inbound is free. Every app gets a shared IPv4 and IPv6 for free; a dedicated IPv4 is $2 a month.

A terabyte out costs $20 on Fly, against Vercel's $0.15 per GB. Bandwidth is rarely the line that hurts. The dedicated IPv4 is easy to forget: Fly's own guide warns that with "deploy previews per branch, this can sneak up on you" (cost management).

What do Fly support plans cost?

Community support on the forum is free. Paid email support starts at $29 a month (pricing page, resource pricing docs):

Fly's calculator lists Premium at $149, but both other pages say $199, so I'd expect $199. Managed Postgres customers get the support portal for database issues without a paid plan (support docs). I think $29 for Standard is steep for a solo developer: it's more than many small apps' whole Machine bill.

Is there still a Fly.io free tier?

No. "There is no 'free account/free tier' on Fly.io" (cost management). New accounts get a free trial of 2 Machine-hours or 7 days, whichever ends first, and trial Machines stop after 5 minutes. The trial allows up to 10 Machines, 20 GB of volumes, 2 vCPUs and 4 GB per Machine, with no dedicated IPv4 and no performance CPUs. Adding a card ends it.

The old free allowance survives only for Hobby, Launch and Scale organizations on plans bought before 7 October 2024: 3 shared-cpu-1x 256 MB Machines, 3 GB of volumes and 100 GB of outbound traffic in North America and Europe (discontinued plans). A guide promising three free VMs describes that, and it isn't available to new accounts. Fly doesn't offer billing alerts yet, per the same cost page.

Is Fly.io cheaper than your own server?

No. The same three apps cost $7, $11 and $36 a month on Hetzner, with Ployz free on top, custom domains included. That's 7x cheaper than Fly at the small size, 10x at medium and 13x busy. The difference is mostly Postgres: Fly charges $38 to $282 for it, and on a server Postgres shares the machine.

Hetzner prices are after its 15 June 2026 adjustment, before VAT, with 20 TB of traffic included in Germany and Finland. On 8 October 2026 Hetzner's CX page marked the whole line as currently unavailable, so you may have to wait for stock. Netcup is the provider I'd look at first in Europe, and it has a datacenter in Manassas, Virginia, close to Fly's iad.

The busy app needs about 18 GB of RAM (8 GB for the two web processes, 2 GB for the worker, 8 GB for Postgres), so it gets a 32 GB CX53 with room left over. Its 2 TB of traffic is a tenth of the included 20 TB. RAM is where Fly's bill climbs: $6 per GB a month on Fly, against about $1.25 per GB on a Hetzner CX33 that also includes CPU and disk.

What the Fly price buys that the server price doesn't:

Where Ployz fits

Ployz runs this kind of stack on servers you rent. Install it with one command:

ployz up --server root@your-server

• Push to deploy: connect a GitHub repo and Ployz builds on your server, with no Dockerfile needed for most languages.
• Zero-downtime deploys once you set a health check: the new version must answer before the old one stops.
• One-click Postgres and Redis, with the app connecting through a reference like ${{ postgres.DATABASE_URL }}.
• A preview environment for every pull request, on the same server.
• More servers with one command, joined over an encrypted network, with up to 50 replicas per service.
• Database backups and moves: Ployz keeps a mirror of the database's volume on another of your servers and syncs it when you ask. If a server dies, restore from the mirror, or move the database there with seconds of downtime.

What it doesn't do: run in several regions the way Fly does.

It's free on your own servers, custom domains included. Start free.

FAQ

Is Fly.io worth it?

For apps that run in several regions, or small stateless apps that sleep most of the day, yes: a $2 to $7 Machine is hard to beat. For a single-region app with a database, I think it's poor value, because Managed Postgres starts at $38 and jumps from $72 to $282. Railway vs Render covers the two platforms people most often weigh it against.

What's the cheapest way to run Postgres on Fly.io?

The unsupported, unmanaged Fly Postgres on a Machine and a volume, from about $2 a month for a dev cluster. Managed Postgres starts at $38.

Why is my Fly.io bill higher than a guide said?

Probably RAM. Fly now charges $6.00 per GB a month on its pricing page, docs and calculator, and older guides use $5.00. Volumes, Managed Postgres storage and dedicated IPv4s are the other lines people miss.

How I checked

I checked prices on 2026-10-08 on Fly's pricing page, resource pricing docs and Managed Postgres docs, linked next to each number. Fly bills in USD before tax. Machine prices are for Ashburn (iad) over 30 days: $2.19 per shared vCPU with 256 MB, $33.00 per performance vCPU with 2 GB, and $6.00 for each GB of RAM above that, from the per-second rates in the docs. The calculator assumes no volumes and Postgres data of 5, 20, 100 and 300 GB on the Basic, Starter, Launch and Scale plans. Past one CX53, the calculator adds more CX53s; a dedicated server is cheaper at that size.

I've paid for convenience before: my first month on Laravel Cloud was about $600, and Railway ran $500+ a month. Today one €80 dedicated server runs more than I ever ran there, so I lean toward renting a server. I also build Ployz, so weigh the "Where Ployz fits" section with that in mind.

Run your web, worker and Postgres on a server you rent with Ployz, free: get started.