Render Pricing in 2026: What a Web App, Worker and Postgres Actually Cost

Running a web service, a background worker, Postgres and Redis on Render costs about $38 a month for a small app, $197 for a medium one and $806 for a large one, using Render's own price list. The same four services on one rented Hetzner server cost $16, $28 and $45. Render's workspace fee is the small part. Compute is most of the bill, and from about 1 TB a month, bandwidth at $0.15 per GB becomes the second-biggest line.

Prices checked 2026-10-01 on render.com/pricing and Render's docs, linked next to each number. Render bills in USD, prorated to the second.

Render changed its pricing this year. Since 1 August 2026 every workspace is on the new plans: no more seat fees, less included bandwidth, and overage billed per GB instead of in 100 GB blocks (Render blog). Most guides still quote the old per-seat plans.

I'm biased. My first month on Laravel Cloud was about $600, and Railway was $500+ a month and climbing, mostly from a busy database. Today one dedicated server at €80 a month runs more than I ever ran there. So I'll show the maths, and you can check me.

What would your app cost on Render?

Pick the compute plan for each service, your database size, your monthly bandwidth and how many people deploy. One seat puts you on the free Hobby workspace; two or more puts you on Pro at $25. The server row picks the cheapest Hetzner server with at least the same RAM Render gives you, and a disk twice the size of your database.

How much is Render per month?

Render costs $0 to $499 a month for the workspace, plus compute for every service. Hobby is $0 for one person, Pro is $25 a month flat for any number of people, and Scale is $499. A paid web service starts at $7, Postgres at $6 and Key Value at $10. A real app with a worker and a database lands somewhere between $38 and a few hundred dollars.

Past the included amounts, every plan pays the same: $0.15 per GB of bandwidth, $5 per 1,000 build minutes and $0.25 per extra custom domain a month (pricing). Hobby is capped at 25 services. If a Pro or Scale workspace has no services and no activity in a month, Render waives that month's fee.

Pro adds full-stack preview environments, horizontal autoscaling, isolated environments and a 7-day Postgres recovery window instead of 3. Scale adds SAML SSO, SCIM, advanced roles, multiple workspaces and HIPAA workspaces, which cost a 20% compute premium.

How does Render pricing work?

Render charges for three things: a flat workspace plan, compute for each service, and metered extras like bandwidth, build minutes and disk. Compute is set per service and billed by the second, so a service you delete after a day costs a day. Every instance of a scaled service is billed at its full plan price. Your bill is the sum of all three.

That's Render's own description in the pricing FAQ. A few rules that change the total:

• Plans are per service. Unused RAM in your worker can't be lent to your database.
• Scaling multiplies. Two instances of a 2c-4g web service is two times $85 (compute plans).
• Bandwidth counts everything leaving Render. HTTP and WebSocket responses, calls your services make to outside APIs, and database query responses sent outside Render all count. Traffic between services on Render's private network in the same region doesn't (outbound bandwidth docs).
• No payment method, no overage. On a workspace without a card, Render spins your services down until next month when you run out of bandwidth.

Render also renamed its compute plans in August 2026. The old names still work, with the same specs and prices: Starter is now 0.5c-512mb, Standard is 1c-2g, Pro is 2c-4g, Pro Plus is 4c-8g (compute plans). If a guide says "Standard instance, $25", that's the 1c-2g plan.

What are the pricing plans for Render services?

Web services and background workers share one price list, from $7 for 0.5 CPU and 512 MB to $1,500 for 12 CPU and 96 GB. Postgres runs from $6 to $11,000 plus $0.30 per GB of storage. Key Value (Redis-compatible) runs from $10 for 256 MB to $750 for 50 GB. Web services, Postgres and Key Value have a free plan; background workers don't.

Web services and background workers (pricing, plan IDs):

Persistent disks for services are $0.25 per GB a month.

Render Postgres, compute only. Storage is extra at $0.30 per GB, set in 1 GB or multiples of 5 GB, and it can grow but never shrink (pricing, storage docs):

Paid databases get point-in-time recovery: 3 days on Hobby, 7 days on Pro and up (backups docs). That's a real feature you'd have to build yourself on a server.

Render Key Value (pricing):

Look at the 4 GB step: 2c-4g is $85 for a web service, while 1c-4g Postgres is $55. And 5 GB of Redis is $100. Memory is what you pay for on Render.

What does a web app, worker and Postgres cost on Render?

My small stack costs $38 a month on Hobby, the medium one $197 on Pro, and the large one $806 on Pro. Compute is 56 to 78% of each bill. The workspace fee is $0 or $25. Bandwidth is $7 on the small app and $296 on the large one, where it's the second-biggest line after compute.

The three stacks, all in one region:

• Small: one person. Smallest paid plan for everything, 5 GB of Postgres storage, 50 GB of bandwidth.
• Medium: a small team on Pro. 1c-2g web and worker, 4 GB Postgres with 20 GB of storage, 1 GB of Redis, 300 GB of bandwidth.
• Large: two 2c-4g web instances, a 2c-4g worker, 8 GB Postgres with 100 GB of storage, 5 GB of Redis, 2 TB of bandwidth.

Render's own guide quotes about $13 a month for a Starter web service and the smallest Postgres (Render article). Add the worker, Redis and bandwidth a real app has, and it nearly triples.

Would Scale help the large app with its 1 TB of included bandwidth? No. Scale costs $474 more than Pro, and the extra 975 GB it includes is worth $146 at $0.15 per GB. So Scale never pays for itself on bandwidth alone; you buy it for SSO, compliance or multiple workspaces.

Seats don't change any of this. Under the old plans, every extra teammate added a fee. Now Pro is $25 for 2 people or 20. That's a fair change, and one Vercel hasn't made: Vercel Pro is $20 per deploying seat.

What does Render charge for bandwidth?

Render includes 5 GB of outbound bandwidth a month on Hobby, 25 GB on Pro and 1 TB on Scale. Past that, every GB costs $0.15 over the public internet and $0.03 over a private link. Since the 2026 change it's billed per GB rather than in 100 GB blocks, but Hobby and Pro include less than before. Unused bandwidth doesn't roll over.

25 GB is about 25,000 page views at 1 MB each. Render's reason: "included bandwidth was subsidized by seat fees" (Render blog). It warned that customers with few seats and high bandwidth may pay more.

For scale: a Hetzner cloud server in the EU includes at least 20 TB of traffic a month (Hetzner). 20 TB on Render Pro would be about $3,000 in overage.

Is Render free?

Partly. The Hobby workspace is $0, and web services, Postgres and Key Value each have a free plan. But free web services spin down after 15 minutes without traffic and take about a minute to wake up, free Postgres expires after 30 days, and free Key Value loses its data on restart. Render itself says not to use free instances in production.

The details, all from Render's free docs:

The 30-day Postgres expiry is the one that catches people: after a month, a free project with a database costs $6-plus a month or loses its data.

Is Render better than AWS?

For a small team that doesn't want to run infrastructure, I think Render is the better deal than building the same thing on AWS yourself, because you skip load balancers, IAM and deploy pipelines. But you pay for it. If you're willing to run a machine yourself, a rented server is cheaper than both: $28 against Render's $197 for my medium stack.

I haven't priced AWS line by line here, and I won't quote AWS numbers I haven't checked against AWS's own pages. Render's price list does show what you're paying for: $85 a month for 2 CPU and 4 GB on a web service, where a Hetzner CX23 with 2 vCPU and 4 GB is $6.49 (Hetzner price list). Those vCPUs are shared, so it's not a perfect match, but the gap is more than 10x.

Is Render cheaper than running your own server?

No. The same stacks cost $16, $28 and $45 a month on one Hetzner server with the same RAM, including $9 for custom domains on Ployz Cloud. That's 2.4x cheaper than Render for the small app, 7x for the medium and 18x for the large. You give up managed Postgres with point-in-time recovery, autoscaling and someone else's on-call.

Hetzner prices are from the 15 June 2026 adjustment, Germany and Finland, before VAT.

I matched RAM because that's what Render prices by, and it's generous to Render: on one server, all four services share the memory. The large app's 2 TB is a tenth of the server's included 20 TB.

Netcup is the other provider I'd look at, and often the better deal: its VPS 500 (2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 64 GB SSD, traffic included) is €8.26 a month incl. VAT on a 12-month term, and the VPS 1000 (4 vCPU, 8 GB, 128 GB) is €14.50, with datacenters in Europe and Manassas in the US (netcup VPS plans).

What the server price doesn't include, so you can weigh it honestly:

• No managed Postgres. Render gives you point-in-time recovery and logical backups. On your own server, backups are yours: a nightly pg_dump to object storage, tested restores. The Supabase pricing article walks through it.
• No autoscaling. A launch that brings 50x traffic hits the server's ceiling. On Render Pro, the bill goes up instead.
• Upkeep is yours. OS updates and the 3 a.m. outage are your job.

I build Ployz, which runs this setup on a server you rent: push to GitHub, it builds on your server, deploys with zero downtime once you set a health check and gives every pull request a preview environment. One-click Postgres and Redis run next to your app, but they're regular containers with a volume, not managed databases, and Ployz doesn't back them up. It's free on your own servers.

What are the downsides of Render?

The main ones are memory pricing, bandwidth and per-service plans. RAM is expensive: 4 GB is $85 on a web service and 5 GB of Redis is $100. Pro includes only 25 GB of bandwidth. And each service holds its own plan, so four small services cost four minimums. The free tier spins down and its database expires.

Other limits worth knowing, from the pricing page: Hobby is one seat and 25 services, logs are kept 7 days on Hobby and 14 on Pro, dedicated outbound IPs are $100 a month per IP set on Pro, and changing the plan of Postgres, Key Value or a service with a disk means brief downtime (compute plans).

For how Render compares with the others on the same app, see Railway pricing and the PaaS pricing overview.

Render or your own server?

Pick Render if you're one person with a small app, you want managed Postgres with point-in-time recovery without thinking about it, or you have a team that needs SSO and compliance reports. At $38 for a small stack, Render is a fair price for not running anything. The free seat policy makes it better for teams than Vercel.

Pick your own server if your app needs more than a few GB of RAM, you serve more than a few hundred GB a month, or you run Redis and a worker next to the database. A $28 server covers what costs $197 on Render, and a $45 one covers $806. You take on backups, OS updates and the ceiling of one machine in exchange.

Ployz deploys your app, worker, Postgres and Redis to a server you rent, with preview environments and zero-downtime deploys, and it's free on your own servers.